Lessons in Entrepreneurship I Wish I Knew as a First Year Associate
Build a Team
As a first-year associate, you are at the bottom of the totem pole. Not only does everyone delegate to you, but you often feel you have no control over your schedule, let alone hiring and staffing decisions.
As an entrepreneur, you learn that delegation is first a mindset, and then specific action items and individual delegates. You must prioritize building a team to support you and treat it just as importantly as finishing the never-ending urgent tasks in front of you. You must learn to not only ask for help that you need, but to empower your team to think of ways to help you.
Practical Tips for Associates:
Sit down with your legal assistant today and ask him or her the following questions:
What do you do for your other attorneys?
What are you good at?
What do you like and dislike doing?
What would you like to do more of?
How do you prefer to receive your assignments from me?
Use your secretary as your point person to coordinate work with document processing, office services, and other firm resources.
If you work for a small firm or are a solo practitioner who doesn’t have the funds to hire full-time help, consider using virtual assistants as well as technology to automate your administrative work.
Every time you handle a task, ask yourself if you would delegate it if you could and to whom. As soon as your firm involves you in interviewing potential candidates for the next summer class or laterals, approach it like a business person who is building a support team. In other words, don’t look just for personality but for intelligence, work ethic, leadership, and other value added to your team.
Focus on What’s Working
As a lawyer, you learn to think of every argument you can make and every point the other side may raise. You analyze both sides, test your theories with a mock jury, and worry about all the things that can go wrong. It’s a fantastic analytical skill that will serve your clients. Unfortunately, you may also bring this new skill into managing your schedule and personal life, which can create indecisiveness and a feeling of helplessness when you face dozens of tasks and conflicting responsibilities.
As an entrepreneur, you listen to the market and try to identify the action items that have the potential to yield the most results. Whether you measure the results by revenue or impact is your prerogative, but those high-potential tasks are where you learn to put the most effort. The same goes for relationships. You quickly learn to focus your efforts on clients with whom you have a great rapport and who treat you with gratitude and respect. In a nutshell, you learn to celebrate and focus on what’s working instead of constantly worrying about what may go wrong.
Practical Tips for Associates:
At the same time each week, sit down for 15 minutes and ask yourself what you have achieved during the week that you are really proud of. There is so much to learn and so many opportunities to feel inadequate as a junior associate, so it’s imperative that you also focus on what is also working well and re-calibrate your confidence when needed.
Identify two attorneys at the firm you admire and would like to emulate. Maybe they’re an expert in their field, have a great book of business, or they seem to know how to prioritize their family life despite their busy schedule. Learn what they choose to focus on and what they don’t sweat as much. Try to work with them as much as you can and/or ask them if they will be your mentor.
Put your energy more into what’s working – contacts who really advocate for you, strengths your are identifying – rather than your deficiencies.
Learn From & Then Forgive Your Mistakes
As lawyers, you have an ethical duty of competence to your clients, a
responsibility to bring excellence to every detail of the case or matter that comes
before you and to avoid mistakes. Let’s face it, mistakes are also just simply embarrassing when you have so many internal eyes on you as a first-year associate.
This feeling is amplified because you have been brilliant all your life, performing at a stellar level in college and law school, and now you are faced with a sharp learning curve and sometimes not as much guidance as you’d like.
As an entrepreneur, you are taught not only to accept your mistakes, but that they are an important and essential part of achieving tremendous success. In other words, you may strike out several times before you hit a home run!
Practical Tips for Associates:
Accept mistakes as a crucial and inevitable part of success. Instead of worrying about them, put all your focus into not repeating the same mistake.
Never hide your mistake. If you can’t fix it on your own, speak to your supervising attorney, preferably with one or more proposals on how to fix it. No matter how egregious the mistake feels to you, it’s very likely that your supervising attorney has come across it directly or indirectly before and knows how to fix it.
Once you have dealt with your mistake by either fixing it, proposing a solution to fix it to your supervising attorney, or simply admitting it when the former two options are not available, give yourself a limited amount of time (e.g., one hour or half a day) to be upset and think of ways to not repeat the mistake. After this time is up, do not stress about it anymore. This includes thinking about it as well as talking about it numerous times with others. Turn off the negative inner chatter and remember that some of the most brilliant lawyers have made horrendous mistakes in the past.
Stabilize the Chaos
Nothing provides better structure than school and many first-year associates have little if any work experience before they start practice. This means that up until this point, you may not have had much practice in structuring your own life. You had a set schedule for when you had to attend class during the semester. Whether you are a morning person or a night owl, you blocked out times to study and do homework. You took a vacation during spring or summer break, hopefully hit the gym sometimes, and otherwise had a regular daily and weekly schedule.
Once you start your practice, structure becomes minimal, and for biglaw attorneys, especially those on major corporate deals, it may become almost non-existent. This can be quite unsettling when you arrive in the morning with a to-do list and a big smile on your face, only to have your entire day destroyed by an emergency on a matter or by that one partner who never plans things in advance.
As an entrepreneur, the only constant is change. A product becomes obsolete, your star employee leaves, an important client retires, a fantastic but urgent business opportunity suddenly pops up, and many more such winds blow that require you to adjust your sails. This teaches you very quickly to look at the unpredictability differently – as exciting instead of mundane, as opportunity instead of inconvenience.
Practical Tips for Associates:
Accept the possibility of sudden change in your work schedule as inevitable or better yet embrace its potential for opportunity.
Adopt routines and create systems to deal with personal obligations that may get disrupted by work.
Automate and delegate personal tasks. For example, experiment with grocery delivery, meal delivery, laundry services, or even hiring a personal assistant through the freelance marketplaces available these days.
When a new assignment or change derails your to-do list for the day, review your list and identify the one thing that you must absolutely take care of to save your peace of mind. You’ll realize that most of the things on your list can wait until tomorrow.
Take advantage of unexpected calm on your cases and deals by making spontaneous plans with family and friends. Instead of worrying about when work will pick up again, focus on handling those health and personal obligations you’ve been putting off because of your busy schedule.
Stop thinking about it and just start
It can be overwhelming to be an associate with tons of work, training, and other professional and personal obligations coming your way all the time. You may find yourself thinking about the book you’ve always wanted to write, the marathon for which you’d love to train, learning a new language, taking advantage of a pro bono opportunity, attending a continuing education seminar, hiring a career coach and otherwise taking advantage of opportunities to improve your skills or legal knowledge.
As an entrepreneur, time is also incredibly limited. Your work follows you, literally and mentally, everywhere you go. At the beginning, there may be no other person on your team that can handle the work. Business people, however, are taught the importance of pausing in the midst of all the urgent tasks that hit them to think about strategic planning and long-term goals. For example, they block out time to write business plans or attend company retreats. This pause may feel like a delay in finishing important tasks but often results in creative and strategic solutions that propel the company forward.
Practical Tips for Associates:
Just take the first step – e.g., say yes to the pro bono project even if you think you don’t have the time, buy the domain name for the non-profit you want to start, register for the training seminar, make an appointment with the physical trainer or career coach. Time has a way of expanding and making itself available when you start moving.
Carve out a manageable amount of time – 10 minutes a day or 1 hour a week – and dedicate it to the long-term projects that matter to you instead of urgent tasks attacking you from all angles. Protect that time like a lioness protects her cubs.
At the end of each quarter, do an assessment of your level of personal and professional happiness and write down concrete action plans for improvement for the next three months.
Continue Learning & Investing in Yourself
Between the billable work, pro bono matters, recruiting events, and meetings, you often feel like there’s not enough time for sleep and exercise, let alone learning and continued growth. When it’s time for meeting Continuing Legal Education (CLE) credits, convenience often trumps interest and professional development needs for attorneys. They (half) watch a video or attend the most convenient seminar instead of truly digging into what makes sense for their careers.
Entrepreneurs are no less busy than junior associates. In addition to overseeing basic business operations to provide a product or service, they often manage a small or large team and have to focus on different fundraising efforts at very busy times. Most successful entrepreneurs, however, set aside a fraction of every day to read, learn, write, meditate, or otherwise improve themselves and their craft.
Practical Tips for Associates:
Continued Learning: Create a list of things – personal and professional – that you would like to learn about, and jot down ideas and methods of learning best suited and most enjoyable for your personality. For example, do you enjoy listening to podcasts or taking online courses? Do you prefer to read a book? Work one on one with a career coach? Attend conferences?
Physical wellness: adopt an exercise routine by experimenting with physical trainers, taking group classes, using a fitness app (aaptive is a personal favorite), or training for an athletic event like a marathon.
Emotional wellness: our childhood and past experiences often leave remnants of coping and defense mechanisms that we carry with us into our professional lives. Consider going to a highly qualified therapist to sort through any issues and make sure you are not bringing them unconsciously to your professional life by, for example, letting them negatively impact the way in which you process feedback or relate to your coworkers or boss, both of which can have a crucial impact on career success and satisfaction.
Mindfulness: The majority of successful people practice some form of mediation or mindfulness every day. There are a number of apps that can help you start on your own. My personal favorite is Calm because Tamara Levitt’s voice sounds like she’s smiling and immediately puts me in the present moment.
Professional Development: There are tons of areas in which you can continue learning, explore interests, sharpen skills, and expand your toolset as an attorney. I recommend creating a personal curriculum that encompasses:
Core legal knowledge and skills, to learn new substantive areas of law, stay informed of the latest developments in an area of law, or further improve writing, depositions, negotiation and other relevant skills
Firm operations and economics
Industry expertise related to an area of interest to you or your clients’ business
Personal finance
Leadership and management
Communication skills including how to handle difficult conversations
Non-legal interests including languages, hobbies, art, or anything else that will keep the joy of lifetime learning ignited within you
As Warren Buffet noted, “ultimately, there's one investment that supersedes all others: Invest in yourself …Nobody can take away what you've got in yourself, and everybody has potential they haven't used yet.”
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