Professional Growth is to Experience While Promotion is to Ability
[00:00:00] When considering new opportunities, how can I find out which opportunities exist for professional growth and promotion within a law firm?
You have to look around and get a sense of what's going on at the firm many times talking and looking at people on LinkedIn.
But I've worked during the past and talking to them, or it can be okay. Asking about the number of people that have been promoted, a partnership also getting a sense of whether or not you feel like your ability, your contribution is going to be recognized there, how seriously, many times the law firm takes interviewing you and all that sort of thing.
So professional growth and promotion mean different things. I would submit to you, especially as a young attorney that your main goal should be experience meaning the more experience you get, that's your professional growth, getting exposed to different types of work getting input from different attorneys about the quality of your work.
Getting to work on big matters, small matters, whatever it is are going to really lead to your professional growth and make you a better attorney. I can tell you that, if you go to a place like I don't know, Sullivan and Cromwell, or really good firms or Wachtell they're not going [00:01:00] to spend a lot of time sending you on to retreats and things for professional growth.
You're going to get incredible experience right there. I remember when I was at a clerkship and when I went into my second summer, I was working at a big New York law firm and I had a judicial clerkship and they were like, if you're going to decide you want to work at it from which I don't think I would've gotten a job at, 'cause I wasn't a summer associate there, but they said, if you are working in a firm like English, no reason to clerkship.
The experience you get a craft can be far better than you'd ever get a clerkship, other firms maybe it's okay. So you know the quality of the firm is going to make a difference. Promotion is often. A coup is a question of how mature the firm is or how mature the offices.
Professional growth, you'll get at a good firm that has a lot of work. I would ask, do they have a lot of work. A lot of work and if they do if yes that's Will's professional growth. And then the other thing that I would say is promotion for promotion I would, that's often going to be quality of the quality of the maturity of the term mature or [00:02:00] mature, less mature, better meaning an age or age of office meaning new branch offices are good sometimes. And could also be the amount of work or work out system.
Those are, lots of work. The other thing for promotion is your ability.
So I was speaking at a partner from a great firm in LA Sheppard, Mullin called me not too long ago. And you said, one of the things that makes our firm specialists, we actually teach our associates how to go out and bring in business, whereas other places, they just want them to work hard and that sort of thing.
I thought that was pretty cool. I like Sheppard Mullin. It's a great firm. And they do that. They'll teach you how to bring in clients, but other firms won't care. Some firms, it's often easier to bring in clients in smaller to mid size firms.
You didn't know conflicts. The larger firms, maybe easier to bring in big times more complex.
So you have that.
