James Pritchard

How often do you hear successful people say they wish they’d known at the start of their career what they know now? How they would love to be able to sit down with their younger self and teach them what they learned over the years. If only they could perform that time-travel trick, how much smoother their career path would have been.

We speak every day to careers advisers and partners at the top of the legal profession. Here are 10 of the best tips they have for newly qualifieds and junior lawyers at the start of their career:

1. Go to your boss with a solution, not a problem

At its most basic level, a lawyer’s job is to solve their clients’ problems. The higher you rise in the profession, the tougher the problems become. Most partners have additional, non-client problems to deal with too, usually in relation to the running of the firm. The last thing a partner wants to do is solve your problems as well as their own. They want to see that you have the ability, tenacity and initiative to work things out for yourself. At the very least, they expect you to attempt to find the solution to the issue at hand.

2. Keep on learning

After years of school, university and law college, it is easy to lapse into the mindset that your days of studying are behind you. This would be a mistake. The best lawyers are the ones who never stop learning, whether from their own experience, their colleagues or anyone else they come into contact with. This requires an enquiring mind and a dose of humility. As the saying goes: “True humility is staying teachable, regardless of how much you already know.”

3. Admit your mistakes and learn from them

Every lawyer has had that heart-stopping moment when they realise they’ve made a terrible error. It may be more than a little tempting to pretend it hasn’t happened and hope it will go away, but whatever you do, resist. It’s how you deal with life’s challenges that reveals your true character. Own up, face the music and take responsibility. And whatever you do, learn your lesson and don’t make the same mistake again.

4. Understand your strengths and weaknesses

No one is good at everything, and you are no different. The chances are that you are excellent at some things, average at a few and less competent at others. The best organisations employ people with complementary skill sets. Start by recognising and cultivating your particular talents as this is where you can shine. You can always get help from other people on things you are weak at, so be honest with yourself about what these are.

5. Learn to delegate

Delegation is one of the hardest skills for a junior lawyer to master. People resist delegating for several reasons. One is the embarrassment that you are asking someone else, possibly someone older than you, to do something for you. You may fear you are going to be perceived as too high and mighty for the task at hand.

Or, you may think it is easier to do the job yourself as you know it will get done properly and more quickly than if you have to explain it to someone else and wait for them to do it.

The truth is that as you rise higher in the profession, your time becomes more valuable. You should aim to spend it doing work that makes the most of your skills and experience and delegating the rest.

6. Professional reputation

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” – Warren Buffet. That says it all.

7. Find a mentor… and be a mentor

If your firm offers a structured mentoring programme, by all means, use it. But many mentoring relationships are informal and evolve naturally. Find someone you admire and whose advice you value, and ask them if they would be willing to share their knowledge and experience to help your career. Clarify what you expect from the mentoring and make sure you keep them updated about your progress, especially if they give you specific advice.

Also, be willing to mentor someone more junior than you. Not only will it improve your leadership skills, you are likely to be energised by their energy and enthusiasm.

8. Stay in the loop, but avoid the gossip

If you want to be trusted and respected at all levels of the firm, avoid being a gossip. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have your ear to the ground so that you know what is going on around you. But gossiping about other people will almost inevitably backfire on you, however much you think you can trust the people you are sharing it with.

9. Cultivate contacts outside work

As you rise through the firm, you will be expected to contribute much more than chargeable hours. The ability to bring in clients will set you apart from your peers, so get out there and network and start building your contacts list now.

10. Strive for work/life balance

There’s a lot of talk about how firms need to ensure their staff have the right work/life balance, but this responsibility starts with you. Get enough exercise, go for a walk and some fresh air during the working day, keep up your hobbies and make sure you take all your holidays. Work hard, but set your own boundaries and stick to them.

How should you tell your training firm you are leaving? Who should you notify and when? We’re frequently asked these questions by NQs who have secured a new role on qualification and decided to leave.

Here’s a typical NQ scenario.

You’re about to qualify and have been offered a position as an associate at a firm other than your training firm. You want to accept.

Your training firm hasn’t yet notified you if they want to keep you on even though your qualification date is rapidly approaching. This has been a source of frustration for some months and has been a topic of endless discussion with your fellow trainees.

Part of you wants to tell your firm as soon as possible that you are leaving. But you feel guilty in a way, as if you are letting them down. You feel especially bad for one or two partners who have mentored you during your training contract.

Another part of you is annoyed that you are being taken for granted. If your existing firm has no qualms about waiting until the last minute to let you know, why should you not do the same to them?

Who should you tell, what should you say and when?

Before you do anything…

First of all, don’t say anything until you have a signed contract from your new firm. An offer is not enough, even if you have confirmed your acceptance. Sign on the dotted line before you do anything.

Also, if your training firm has paid your LPC fees or helped in another way towards your qualification, check that they are not entitled to claw money back if you leave upon qualification.

Now take a step back

You can do a lot worse at this stage than heed words of the famous Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, Marcus Aurelius: “If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.”

In brief, do and say the right thing. Remember, you are at the start of a career that you hope will be long and rewarding. Your reputation counts for a lot in law and once lost can be difficult to regain.

In practical terms, this means acting with responsibility and dignity.

So, tell your training partner and HR face-to-face as soon as possible. Be honest about your reasons. If it’s because you were fed up waiting to hear if you were being kept on, tell them. If it is to go to a more prestigious firm or do different work, explain this.

Don’t be under the illusion you are letting anyone down. Law firms are hard-nosed and commercial. People come and go for all sorts of reasons. They may be sorry to lose you (or at least say they are) but in all honesty they probably have far bigger concerns to worry about.

Whatever you do, don’t fall into the trap of thinking you are somehow getting your own back by waiting until they tell you if you are being kept on before informing them that you are leaving. This does you no favours and isn’t fair on other trainees. It will come across as petty.

There’s a comment in a post on one of the legal news websites where the person commenting (named ‘Anon’, not surprisingly) recounts a tale of revenge from when they qualified. Anon explains how their training firm had a practice of not telling trainees if they were being kept on until after they qualified. Anon secured an NQ role before qualification and to give them a taste of their own medicine, didn’t notify the firm they were leaving.  Anon simply failed to turn up for work the day they qualified on the basis that their contract had expired. Here’s the kicker though. Anon had arranged a mediation with a client in another city for the day they qualified. No one from the firm attended the mediation (which the client went ahead with anyway) and the client later sued the firm for negligence. 

This may have made Anon feel good and is an excellent story, but at what cost? No doubt the firm was arrogant and unprofessional, but it reflects equally poorly on Anon. If it didn’t, they would not have been reticent to put their name to the comment rather than remain anonymous. 

You should aim to keep on good terms with the firm and the people who work there as you never know what is around the corner. You may end up working with some of the same people again either because you later join the same firm or as a result of a merger. You might deal with them on the other side of a transaction, or they may become in house counsel for one of your clients. You could even end up going back to the firm later in your career.

In a nutshell, be diplomatic. And in being diplomatic, take heed of the wise words of Winston Churchill: “Diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions.”

In a sector where it’s easy to be pigeonholed at a very early stage in one’s career, what can junior lawyers do to keep their options open? We asked legal careers coach Paula McMullan to offer some pearls of wisdom.

With 25 years’ experience as both a lawyer and a coach, (most recently as Head of Recruitment at Slaughter and May and as the internal careers coach at Allen & Overy LLP), Paula now helps dissatisfied lawyers find balance and fulfilment in their career.

Congratulations! You’ve survived your training contract, successfully navigated qualification and your legal career is laid out ahead of you like the Yellow Brick Road. So far, so good.

Now what?

I speak to a lot of mid-level and senior associates who get to 5 or 6 PQE and suddenly realise that their work/life balance isn’t great, and that they’ve fallen out of love with the law, or with the type of law they’re now practising. Maybe they’ve become too specialised, or they’re not getting involved in the type of work they’re really interested in. Or perhaps they’ve already decided that partnership is akin to being the little man in the booth pretending to be the Wizard of Oz.

Often more experienced lawyers find they have painted themselves into a corner and that it’s not as easy to transfer to an in-house role or another firm as they had imagined.

One thing is for sure…the future is uncertain. Whatever plans we may make now, it’s wise to build options for ourselves so that we’re well equipped to deal with change when it comes.

Before you get too far down the line with your legal career, here are three ways to give yourself more professional flexibility.

1. Develop your skills and knowledge with future roles in mind

When I ask lawyers what makes them unique and what they have to offer an employer, many find it difficult to talk about themselves. They give me underwhelming, generic answers, and they clearly have no idea of their value to a business or their ‘unique selling point’. If they can’t articulate this, what hope do they have of persuading a new employer?

It is therefore vital to develop your business skillset with one eye on future roles. For example, if you want to work in-house, what skills will you need to persuade a corporate to hire you out of private practice? How can you develop these while you are still working for a firm?

There are also a lot of flexible working opportunities for lawyers nowadays with outfits offering work on a contract basis. Does your specialism lend itself to working in this way? What skills and attributes do you have/want to develop that will enable you to flourish in that professional environment?

Lawyers tend to be quite detail-focused and they talk about their assets in isolation. Think, for example, about how your ability to analyse complex legal problems will benefit a corporate employer and put your skill into their context. How about saying you are used to assessing risks and advising on appropriate strategies to further your client’s business interests?

And be aware of the opportunities that may or may not be available to you once you are a few years into your legal career. What roles will a 4 PQE pensions lawyer or debt capital market specialist be suitable for?

A top tip from a recruitment consultant: if you’re thinking of a change in career direction, employers will want to see a commitment to that career change. So, if you want to move into learning and development, start designing and delivering seminars, read about learning strategies, find a mentor in L&D.

First steps? Find out what skills and experience will set you apart from the competition when you decide to go for another role. Work out who can help with finding out and then ask them!

2. Develop a sustainable approach to money

It can come as quite a shock to learn just how much of a drop in salary you may need to take to land your dream job outside private practice, or at least a stepping-stone role. The golden handcuffs that restrict many lawyers can seem unbreakable, so you need to change your approach to managing your financial resources.

It’s vital to work out your priorities – what’s most important to you right now? Maybe you are saving to buy your first property and you feel you need to keep going in your private practice role until that’s taken care of. Fair enough. But it’s also important to consider the downside of that strategy. What will the impact be on your mental health? Are you becoming even more specialised? If you get a large mortgage, will this compel you to keep your earnings at their current level?

Consider now the impact of different financial scenarios and develop a plan for tackling them. I knew when I was posted to Singapore, my ex-pat package would only last for a couple of years, so I lived on the same amount as I had in London and put the rest into my pension. When it came to leave, the resulting drop in salary wasn’t a shock. I didn’t need to recalibrate my lifestyle in line with my lower income.

First steps? Devise a sustainable financial plan. Talk to an independent financial adviser who can advise you on different ways to safeguard your assets and how to plan for a secure financial future while keeping your professional options open.

3. Separate your identity from your job

Have you noticed how, when asked what they do for a living, people often simply say “I’m a lawyer/doctor/architect/designer”? Our belief that “I am” a lawyer can get in the way if we become dissatisfied with our legal career because we can internalise that feeling as dissatisfaction with ourselves and our choices. This, in turn, can make it difficult to imagine ourselves as being able to do anything else, or being worthy of someone taking a chance on us.

Limiting beliefs like this can be quite deeply ingrained. You may have wanted to be a lawyer from an early age, maybe you have relatives who are successful lawyers and therefore feel that you should be too, or perhaps simply being surrounded by other lawyers day-in and day-out reinforces this belief. It served you well once because it got you to where you are today, but if you are no longer wedded to your career in its current form, then believing “I am a lawyer” can hold you back from realising your potential.

Think more in terms of what you do and the benefits you bring to your employer and your clients. Turn “I am a finance lawyer” into: “I help tech start-ups open up opportunities to develop by guiding them through successful negotiations with investors”.

First steps? Start noticing how you think about yourself professionally. How do you introduce yourself and talk about what you do? How can you reframe who you are into what you do?

As you’re reading this, you may think that none of this applies to you because you’re enjoying having reached qualification after so much study and hard work, and you’re looking forward to the challenge of growing into a great technical lawyer. But this brings us back to the start – the future is uncertain so why not make sure you are ready for it?