Climbing the Ladder: It’s a growing process

By Marina Santini
Reed Smith

During the first years of practice, advice on how to become a successful member of your firm (and of the profession) comes at you fast and furious.

Everyone has a lesson, a tip, a war story. Figuring out how to weed through all that advice to arrive at a formula that works for us individually becomes a challenge in and of itself. As one of the partners at my firm likes to put it, ”You don’t even know what you don’t know.”

I won’t bore you with every detail of every time this has turned out to be true — suffice it to say that, at least at the beginning of your career, it will turn out to be true about practically every assignment.

Halfway into my first week at work, I got my first assignment. At some point during my second or third year of law school, I decided that I wanted to be a securities litigator. When my first assignment was to work on an appellate brief in a 15-year-old securities fraud action, I was thrilled.

I spent most of my first week (and weekend) as a working attorney poring over more than a decade’s worth of pleadings, briefs, and deposition transcripts, and slowly becoming more and more overwhelmed. Here I was, knee-deep in files, only hours into my first case, and I had no idea what I was doing. Seriously, what did I know about securities law? And, for that matter, what did I know about how to be an attorney?

I confessed my concern to the other associate on the case, who assured me that it was hardly unique. Of course, I made it through those first few days and we wound up filing what I thought was an excellent brief. Afterward, I realized that there was so much for me to learn from the experience.

Even though I’ve always considered myself to be fairly self-confident, I had definitively been intimidated by the ”newness” of what I was doing. How to avoid that in the future?

Additionally, what did I know about being an attorney? Of course, there can’t be a single answer that works for everyone. Part of what I realized from that first experience is that I was very uncomfortable with feeling that I ”didn’t know what I didn’t know.”

I knew that part of developing more confidence would have to include some time devoted to building substantive knowledge, in addition to what I would learn through case assignments, in the areas of the law in which I wanted to practice.

Young attorneys rarely read advance sheets or journals. This is a waste of countless opportunities, not only to build your base of knowledge in any number of areas, but also to have important interactions with your colleagues.

For instance, if you read something particularly relevant, you can pass it along to others in your department or bring it up at a meeting. As you work to carve out your particular role within your firm, such interactions can be crucial.

They can turn into opportunities to work with key partners on articles or CLE presentations, which, in turn, will likely turn into opportunities to work on cases with those partners. It’ll take years to truly develop an expertise in any particular area, but you can begin to build it almost immediately.

Another crucial part of developing as a young attorney is identifying where your strengths and weaknesses lie, and then seeking assignments that highlight your assets and help you improve in weaker areas.

There’s no single blueprint for success, and developing a little self-awareness will go a long way toward figuring out what works for you. You can go through this exercise formally or informally.

At my firm, for instance, the annual attorney review process includes a self-evaluation, where we are asked to assess ourselves in a variety of areas, including legal ability, billable and non-billable contributions to the firm, and personal qualities.

Aside from being a great opportunity to toot your own horn, the self-evaluation can be an invaluable career development tool.

But whether you do it as part of a firm evaluation process or on your own, the real trick is being honest enough to identify weaknesses in yourself and then figuring out what to do with what you learn.

If, for example, you think that you are particularly organized or a good manager, look for opportunities to manage cases, or even particular aspects of cases, so that this quality can shine. (I’ve found that electronic discovery can be a particularly good area for young attorneys to gain great experience and exposure.)

If, conversely, you think you need work on your interactions with opposing counsel, seek out assignments that will afford you opportunities to go to court or to otherwise interact, and watch others interact, with opposing counsel. (Again, electronic discovery can give you an in here since many partners will be happy to turn this area of responsibility over to even a very junior associate.)

Above all, the process of growing to be a successful associate and to be sought after within your firm will be ongoing. Take time every few months to take stock of how far you’ve progressed and where you’d like to be in another few months.

Often, setting distant goals can be easier than setting short-term ones, but it is the process of setting, and meeting, those more immediate goals that will help you achieve those long-term ones.