Your Future as a Lawyer: One BIG Reason You Should Romanticize the Law

I try really hard to make Legal Shoe's advice open to all types of entrepreneurs, but since law is my frame of reference, I find it pretty hard not to worry about the next generation of lawyerpreneurs. They are in for an uphill climb - that's the reality.

A propos of nothing, these thoughts occurred to me while I was writing a review of Private Lives, which for Pittsburgh area readers, is playing at the O'Reilly Theatre through June 24. It's a comedy about softening hard edges, attraction, domestic strife, and it struck me as a metaphor for my 50-year love affair with the law.

Don't forget that you can soften the hard edges of your legal career by remembering why the law seemed attractive to you in the first place.

But here is one reason. Lawrence Lessing's graduation speech and John Marshall Law School in Atlanta. It's your assigned reading for today.

Everyone is a little high after they finish any arduous graduate program. So it's easy to be filled with starry-eyed wonder that Lessing, a prominent Harvard Law professor, would encourage young graduates to hang up their own shingle without any business accumen or training. Practice for the people! Redefine what law means in the United States! Your children and your children's children will rise up and call you blessed.

There is ONE reason you should let this vision influence your thoughts about practicing law.

It softens the hard edges. Let me say that again:

IT SOFTENS THE HARD EDGES.

A law practice, or any entrepreneurial venture, has a lot of hard edges: clients don't pay on time if at all, it's touch to keep a consistent pipeline of clients coming through the door, and you may feel the incredible burden of losing more fights than you win.

But you also have an incredible chance to leave the lives of the people around you better, whether it's your family, your clients, or the people you meet while you're trying to hawk your wares.

So this Monday, two weeks into a jobless summer, or even two weeks into your dream job, take ownership of your decision to become a lawyer. Take ownership of your decision to be an entrepreneur. Get the help you need to make it happen. Or as Lessing says:

… as you begin your career as a lawyer, as you begin to dig yourself out of the financial hole that you are in, as you enter a field too many think is just corrupt, don't think just about your families and the pride they can't hide today.

…

Leave it better, lawyers, than we lawyers who have educated you have given it to you. Leave it in a place that your mother and your daughter, your father and your son, can respect. Not corrupt, but true. Not just rich, but just.

Is there any other reason to be a lawyer?

12 predictions about your career in Law

I'm in Philadelphia. This week, Drexel and Penn graduated another crop of law students. They were bright-eyed and confident in their future careers, believing that they were going to really enjoy that summer clerkship at Walmart.

I didn't get invited to speak. Here is the speech I would have given.

Congratulations, all of you. You're justifiably proud of yourselves. Some of you graduated Summa Cum Laude. Others graduated Magna Cum Laude or even Cum Laude. Most of you, like me, graduated Thank You Lawd. All of you stand on the brink of the best of times and the worst of times.. You are facing a different world, and I'm going to show you 12 ways your future career is going to be different from mine. If you apply the ideas today, you will still be practicing law in 10 years. If not, the Four Horsemen of the apocalypse will ride you down. Here they are, without explanation or fluff.

1. You will be competing with a global workforce.
2. Your target demographic has changed A LOT.
3. Self-help Clients will shop for services, not lawyers.
4. Clients will want the lowest price, which means firms will "unbundle” their professional offerings, and outsource as much as possible. Many already do. See The modern bankruptcy practice.
5. Lawyers will have to learn how to commoditize some of their offerings. There clients will look for a package before they ask for a bespoke service.Lawyers will run to the Cloud for data sharing, collaboration, and the competition for attention there will be fierce.
6. The most successful lawyers will have to be entrepreneurial, which means they’ll be marketing their “product” not themselves. There is material for a week's worth of blogs in this statement.
7. Guidance from professional disciplinary bodies will become increasingly confused as the ways that lawyers solicit clients proliferate quickly.
8. Lawyers will be increasingly required to promote themselves and market their own practices, whether they’re in a firm or not.
9. The debacle at Dewey Leboeuf teaches us that the model for gigantic law firms is dead, and probably should never have existed in the first place. That is not to say that the model for a global law firm is dead. You just don't need to be Dewey Leboeuf to be one.
10. Lawyers will stop selling their time and will sell their knowledge instead. The billable hour, like the gigantic law firm, is dead.
11. The best lawyers will operate an enterprise that includes a sophisticated marketing plan promoting a unique product.
12. The Lawyer who does something different will succeed. Don’t follow the lemmings over the cliff.

These predictions are not meant to depress. What I want you to do with this is go forth. Be Creative. Change the World. Do it Differently. You can. You have to.

Thanks, and good luck!

7 things Lawyers should do to set goals and keep them - My Fifty by 50 Reboot

It's Monday. Usually it's my day to "reboot," which is tough for a barefoot barrister. Nevertheless, the office is cleaned out from a month of neglect, the week is new, taxes are at least to the accountant, so I can lean back a little and try to figure out what happened to March and what will happen in April.

This is a good idea for any practitioner. When I was deep in the bowels of Big Law, I would close my door Monday morning and do the same thing. Usually closed my eyes and wondered what I was doing in the bowels of a big firm instead of pulling weeds in New Hampshire. But gradually problems would present themselves, thoughts and solutions would form, and I could be effective for at least some of the week.

Every coach and mentor worth their speaking fee tells you to have goals. Long term goals, short term goals, and goals for the in between, whenever that is. They have to be S.M.A.R.T. or whatever, and you have to have tasks and plans to follow through on them.

Athena popped out of Zeus's head, a fully formed goddess.
This will not happen with your goals.

I hate 'em. HATE. THEM. I hate them because you can go through life setting goals and beating yourself up for not meeting them. I hate them because people expect their goals to spring out of their heads like Athena -- fully formed and doable. That is not going to happen.

There's a lot of planning, learning and underpinning beneath a decent set of goals. Instead, I set initiatives. These are just goals tied to a purpose. Business have "initiatives" all the time, generally after some manager has read "From Good to Great" by Jim Collins, which I also don't like. So instead of setting goals for the week, think about your obligations as initiatives.

Here are some quick tips to making initiatives I've found valuable. They are based on ideas from my friend and coach, Yoshi Ariizumi.

1. Understand and own each problem underlying your initiative. Part of ownership is determining whether the problem is worth solving, and whether becoming embroiled in it is in line with your values. Believe me, if a goal is not deeply aligned with your core values, you won't be interested at all in meeting it. Determine what pieces of the problem belong to you. Ask what challenges the problem brings to you to be solved. More fundamentally and Zen-like, ask yourself what you bring to the problem or the question that needs to be answered. Ohm.
2. A corollary to Ownership is ACCOUNTABILITY. Find someone to work with you who will keep you on track and advise you when you hit a bump in your desire to own and solve the problem. Usually these people are called coaches. They just aren't for rich golfers and football teams, so find one. A friend will sometimes work, but at times being kept on task by a friend can really strain the relationship. Get a third party who will facilitate your thinking and work with you in the learning experience. Pay this person. It's a business expense anyway.
3. Assess what resources you have around you to help you solve the problem. These local resources can be indispensable, especially when they have skills you don't. Sometimes they cost money, or sometimes they could be a quick jog down the hall or a phone call away. Know what you need before you go looking around.
4. Be totally engaged in the "practice" or the set of activities needed to accomplish the initiative. This is the learning process everyone goes through when they successfully achieve a goal. Practice is messy. Practice is chaotic, non-linear, and dynamic. Accordingly, your practice will have stops and starts and cycles. That's why a facilitator can help you assess your learning. Let's use a really good example. Tiger Woods, the best golfer ever, has had a bad run of it lately. He cheats on his beautiful Swedish wife, wrecks his car, and goes nearly 3 years without a win. The streak was compounded because other golfers were learning to swing like him, and learning his game.  He was also physically depleted, returning from Achilles tendon and knee surgery.
5. Keep at it. But now, most golf experts are calling for a Tiger victory at the Master's Tournament this month. Why? Tiger has become totally engaged in the practice of winning. Not that he wasn't engaged before, he just wasn't TOTALLY engaged. He got distracted, and had to go back to the lab to rework his formula. Now, he has a great new caddie and several coaches who facilitate his learning. He has assessed his failures with his facilitators and learned from them. He's focused again: after his first win in 924 days, he said: "It was just a matter of staying the course and staying patient, keep working on fine tuning what we are doing and, well, here we are."
6. PREPARE-ACT-REFLECT.  You can't just wander through an initiative without a plan. Your initiative is no good if you don't prepare yourself for phases of learning. Your preparation is no good if you don't act on it. You can't learn anything if you don't take time and reflect on the results of your actions. Be ready to do it over, and over.  At Bay Hill, Tiger's first victory since his collapse, he was constantly reassessing his game, fine-tuning and adjusting with his physical condition and conditions on the course.
7. RECORD-REVIEW-REFLECT. You can bet Tiger's team was keeping immaculate records of his swing, his stringer, and everything else in his toolbox by every means possible. I'm willing to bet Tiger spends as much time staring at video of himself playing, and taking mental and physical notes on his playing. I'm willing to bet he thinks hard about the things he did right, but more especially how he could have prevented the things that went wrong.

So what, you ask, does the title mean? That's my initiative. There are some things I wanted to do for each of my core values before I turned 50.  There aren't 50 actual things - they all have something to do with the number 50. As I confidently stare 51 in the face, I'm not even remotely close to achieving ONE of them. But I'm still focused on the initiative. 

And the journey, well, that's been the fun of it. It's been a richly chaotic learning experience, and I've met some amazing characters along the way. Sort of like travelling my own Route 66 or something. 

And it's better that staring at a long sheet of goals I haven't met, mocking me each time I open my journal to the first day of January.

Now, what's YOUR initiative? 

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© Tamar J Cerafici, The Barefoot Barrister™ 412-467-6141