Description
Knowing What You Want Helps You Find a Law Firm that Fits
[00:00:00] How do you know if moving to a non law firm is going to help or hurt in a legal career? The big thing about you, you don't know there's a couple there and I would spend a lot of time reading various articles and so forth that I've written.
We'll answer in those articles, but the big thing is, in terms of the best way to tell if a law firm is going to help or hurt your legal career is to always ask yourself what you want. So if what you want is just, it depends on the, all the facts that you have, the money you want to make, long-term opportunities, opportunity practice area, long opportunities to partner, easy to make partner or not. Your practice area, all those sorts of things.
What you're asking is a very thoughtful question. There are tons of articles about this on BCG and different law firms have different things. But the biggest thing that I would map is there's one article on BCG called that I wrote, called, "find your tribe" or something.
And I really recommend reading that article. And the [00:01:00] reason I liked that article for you is because I think that the most important thing, to help your career is to be with the people that are most likely to help you with the most.
I'll tell you one kind of funny story Not too long ago. I was in two different business networking groups. I was in one or joining two different business networking groups. One was a bunch of people with fairly small, not businesses that were trying to scale them up.
And the other was, people with huge businesses that had started big businesses and sold them. And when I say huge, I don't mean huge, but 50 million, a hundred million dollar, $200 million companies with stuff. And I gave a presentation, a short one to someone in a small one for smaller businesses.
And when I gave the presentation, I talked about how some things, like I told you earlier, like I didn't have a COO chief operating officer. I was making a lot of bad decisions and I was basically being very vulnerable. And I was new to the groups.
They knew [00:02:00] nothing about the size of the company that I ran, which is maybe 150 person company. It's not a small company. And , but they just assumed that I was like this kind of guy that, was basically working on my own based on the way I presented my problem.
After the meeting, the the person that was charged that I had a call with her not too long after that. And she said you're just not a good fit for this group. Your business is way too small. I'm going to recommend, you talk to someone else. I thought that was very strange because there were people that were like, literally maybe owning like a couple of Franchises and not auto franchise, but auto repair places and stuff.
And I would teach this and I was like, all right, whatever you say, man. So then she referred me to someone else and I talked to this person and the guy couldn't believe it. He was like, what the hell like, I work with people that are just trying to start companies. I don't know why she would have possibly refer them to you, but she actually kicked me out of her group because she thought based on what I said, that I wasn't a good fit.
And then a couple of weeks later, I went into another business group and this was, for the huge companies. And they love me [00:03:00] and they thought I was amazing and I presented the same sort of problem. So the point is that. I was in the wrong tribe. And so that those people didn't really at the first one, didn't recognize my strengths.
Whereas the second one I did and which I thought was very interesting and that made me feel like I was with a much better group of people and that I had a lot more to contribute. So, I think that if you want to be happy you need to be with a group of people that are more like you, that are gonna see and appreciate your strengths.
It's just how it is. And so if you move to a law firm where there's more people like you, where there are more people likely to appreciate your strengths, it may be a much better law firm or may not be, but someplace that thinks you're going to do well, and appreciate you're going to be much better.
