The Seasons of a Lawyer's Career

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Each person who enters a law practice has the opportunity to grow, learn, develop and contribute to others. It is a path of growth that has established seasons every bit as different and as full as the seasons of the year. By the time the seasons are traversed, a lawyer has the opportunity to develop and make the most of each season. Of course, at any given time, you focus on who you are and what you're doing, not on what you were and what you will be. But in a small firm or large one, developing a career requires planning to set overall goals and specific strategies. Once you view a legal career as a series of business and professional development seasons, career growth is no longer unstructured – it becomes a process of understanding what you ought to do in each season. Assessing the typical attributes of successive seasons can help any lawyer better understand the productive strategies and the traps to avoid.

Spring: Careers Take Root

Few young associates are equipped to handle the business side of a legal practice. They enter law school with an undergraduate degree in the liberal arts or technical skill. Law school curricula have little business focus, and legal educators view the law as a profession, which means that they consider any business training to be trade-oriented and inappropriate for law schools. The result, too often, is that young lawyers do not understand the operation of the firm as a business (budget, collections, profit, loss), the firm's billing structure, the firm's and their own profitability, and the importance of clients and their own businesses. The first thing that lawyers in the spring of their careers must aspire to is becoming sensitive to the financial needs and operation of their firms, and their role in contributing to the firm's financial performance through the traditional key measures of realization, utilization, leverage and collections.

Relationships are equally important in career establishment. Developing a good working relationship with the firm's senior administrators is a good practical step, as administrators who are familiar with the firm's financial information and marketing can help associates truly grasp the essentials of business competency. A mentoring relationship with a senior partner can be helpful, but is also cause for wariness: the senior person in a mentoring relationship holds the power to retard or advance the junior person's career. The uncertainty of relying on mentors is just one reason why associates in the spring of their careers should begin as early as possible to build relationships with potential clients apart from the work that partners assign to them.

Targeting prospects who can provide desirable work that fits the firm's capabilities shows that the associate thinks like a partner and is qualified to become one at the next career stage. This reinforces the fact that the biggest trap in a career's spring is failure to take charge of career development. The associate's combination of skill and attitude must demonstrate potential for career growth. Having a negative attitude in a system where associates who do not show partnership potential are "culled" from the firm is not a strategy for success.

Summer: Careers Grow Fastest

Summer is the career stage in which pre-partner associates and early level partners should see their careers grow the fastest. Reaching this point can involve psychological and social cost (such as the sacrifice of marriages and family time). But most human beings are optimists, and most lawyers traditionally have believed the sacrifices are worth it. However, the financial turmoil that law firms, along with the rest of the economy, have experienced in the last several years raises questions about the conventional wisdom that every lawyer should want to become a partner. The responsibility of ownership is not an easy way of life, and it is even harder in times of economic stress. Making a successful transition from spring to summer in a career recognizes these challenges, and requires demonstrating the traits of a successful entrepreneur: motivation, acceptance of risk, resiliency and commitment.

Building a partner-level book of business is crucial, but it is equally important to remember that building relationships with potential clients is a marathon, not a sprint. Measure marketing efforts over time by specific number of contacts made, clients added and billable time gained, without setting yourself up for failure with unreasonable revenue expectations. Once your target clients are defined and you know where they are, marketing becomes an issue of creativity, time availability and resources.

A final caution is that in career summer, some lawyers wonder whether the grass would be greener elsewhere, either by going to another firm or by starting a practice of their own. Such a change should not be taken lightly, and should involve weighing three fundamentals:

Collegiality: Do you like the people you work with?
Economics: Are you earning enough money to make staying worthwhile?
Values: Does the firm's approach to compensation, business development and practice growth agree with the future that you want for yourself?

Answering these questions, far more than issues of economics, will determine a lawyer's success in the summer of a career. Take them carefully, one at a time.

Autumn: Careers Reach Maturity

In career autumn, mid-level partners and firm leaders see their hard work ripen as they often take roles to direct the firm's future. That takes mastering leadership skills, especially the art of delegation, while mentoring young lawyers who will shape the firm's future. Delegation is the principle by which a successful lawyer thrives. Lawyers who delegate can focus more on the work they like to do – whether it's meeting with clients or writing briefs. It does not mean giving up responsibility, it means taking an active role to ensure that others can do the tasks they are assigned. Striking the right balance so that others can handle the details is essential for focusing on the big picture that career maturity offers. It is also essential to carrying out the responsibility that firms expect of more senior lawyers: mentoring younger associates to help integrate them into the life of the firm and the profession.

Partners by definition have accepted leadership responsibility in their firms, the responsibility that comes from being the firm's owners. That is more than just an equity contribution and the opportunity to share in a bonus pool. It manifests itself in a true leadership commitment for personal efforts to make the firm's situation better, to make an affirmative contribution to be financially responsible, to support a workplace where everyone is committed to clients and respects one another. Leadership expressed as a sense of personal ownership means contributing to the law firm as a whole in a businesslike way, being open and honest about what a firm needs to achieve, having no personal agendas, and supporting achievement of firm-wide goals. Such leadership is essential to inspiring the confidence of colleagues and clients and avoiding obsolescence in career autumn, the kind that leads to forced retirement or de-equitization.

Winter: Careers Become Transitions

Lawyers are not immortal. Older lawyers who continue to apply the client service lessons learned throughout the spring, summer and autumn of their careers, and who keep up with evolving professional rules and trends through continuing legal education, should not automatically feel that reaching a particular age requires them to retire. However, at some point every lawyer must confront the issue of transitioning the practice to others. The short-sighted viewpoint is that planning to do so is more bother than it is worth, and that the better course is to stay in practice and "die with your boots on." The better choice is a transformation and transition to enjoying a practice's rewards. In a larger firm that may mean assuming "special counsel" or "emeritus partner," as client responsibilities transfer to others. In smaller firms either the sale of a practice or transition to a younger successor is often the best option.

Ultimately, however, the most important issues to be met by a lawyer in career winter involve self-assessment. What are your personal goals for life in this season? Can they be achieved without leaving the practice of law? If not, what personal objectives should you set for a new life outside of legal practice? Leaving a career as a lawyer by retiring is an emotional process. You must want to do so, and a successful transition will require all the traits that defined your success as a lawyer: motivation, acceptance of risk, resiliency and commitment. Each person's approach is unique, and can change over time. Making a decision does not have to mean that you've burned bridges to your past life, or that more change cannot occur in the future.

Lawyers typically think they know what needs to be done and can do it if they just work hard enough and fast enough. That's asking too much of anyone, and trying to apply that to deciding your future all at once often produces self-defeating fear and paralysis. A thousand-mile journey is nothing more than a series of steps; take them one at a time. Assess the reality of your financial resources and your physical health. Assuming you've made all the appropriate plans and preparations, from lining up a successor to crafting an effective estate plan, only you can decide how to make your transition. The approach is certainly different for every individual; but you won't define it until you ask yourself the right questions. Winter is the transition season to new life. With the proper preparation, you can spend that life enjoying the fruits of your labor as you choose. After winter, spring comes again, with new promise for those who are ready.