Crafting Your Legal Brand: Strategies for Career Success

Description

• Key Insights: Harrison emphasizes the importance of establishing a distinctive personal brand in the legal profession.
• Challenges Addressed: The struggle with defiant self-promotion and how to build a brand under legal pressure.
• Crucial Element: The most significant component of a successful brand is defining what you do and, equally importantly, what you don't do.
• Strategic Approach: Specializing in a specific practice area enhances marketability. Harrison provides examples such as education, special needs, or mesothelioma cases.
• Brand Development: Focusing on one thing allows continuous improvement and expertise, attracting clients seeking specialized services.
• Practical Advice: Actively engage in writing, speaking, and utilizing social media to showcase expertise in the chosen practice area.
• Career Success Tip: Be visible and consistently associated with the chosen practice through strategic promotion efforts.
• Brand Promotion Strategies: Consider working for someone else initially, then transition to self-promotion. Choose between a broad corporate generalist or a specialized attorney focusing on specific transactions.
• Key Takeaway: Defining your brand by specializing in one practice area and actively promoting it is crucial for success in the legal profession.

Transcript:

Okay. And I appreciate all these questions, by the way. And these are excellent questions. And if there are any questions that you have that you can think of related to this or anything else in your career, I think that it's helpful to ask that for other people as well. Okay. Establishing a personal brand seems crucial, but I've struggled with defiant promoting.

How can I approach building a distinctive brand with legal pressure? And what role does it play in treating my career like a small business? Great question. Okay. So brand the brand. The first thing you need to understand is that the most critical component of your brand, a brand, is what you do what you do and do not do.

So that's the most important. So meaning, what do you do? Do you do mergers and acquisitions? Do you do employment defense? What do you do? What do you do? And I think that's a fascinating question. What is it that you do if you go to BCG and you want to search for jobs? I am still trying to figure out how this works.

I'm upset that this website is not working, but you have all these practice areas. Look at all these practice areas. There's an incredible number of practice areas. You have all these different things. You have antitrust general litigation, corporate antitrust, and under corporate. You have all of these different things.

You've got M and a contract line compliance under data privacy. You have transactions under education. You have all these different things. So, the smartest thing you can do is establish a brand doing one thing. If you had education, school district and school boards, if you had education, special needs like it's exciting.

So, when I look at these practice areas, I look at the percentages of people getting interviews, which is the highest number of interviews. Versus submissions are with education and special needs. I don't know why, but certain things are more marketable than others. And so that's important for you to understand.

For example, why are certain practices here more marketable than others? And so what people do that's smart is they can drill into something specific and are much better prepared to do things in the market. Even with family law, it's exciting. So you have adoption law and divorce law and all these sorts of things.

So that's in general. So there's just different things. So what do you do? It's what you do and what you don't do. You're better off doing something like, I don't know, labor employment; I guess it would be plaintiffs for plaintiffs, then doing litigation. And that's what's workers. So you're better off having a brand that stands for something, the one thing, and then you also, and once you have that brand, people will look for you.

So, in the example that I give, and there are many of them, sometimes people will be looking for a specific type of attorney. So you want to be that attorney. So watch this right now. I shouldn't do this to this poor person, but meth, even if I'm doing this right. So what is it? Meth, I don't even know how to spell it.

Meth, yes, this is right here. So watch this; someone just spent 50 for this. When I clicked on it, I thought this was an example of an attorney doing something in a specified practice area. These attorneys make incredible amounts of money doing these lawsuits because it's 30 billion available on these trust funds.

Most cases settle between one and 2 million. It's just wild. But the point is that you pick some practice area and stand for something. And by standing for something, you will continually get better and better at it, attracting people to it. So what, when you say, is what you do and what you don't do.

So, throughout my career, I have learned new stuff daily. Every day, I'll learn 50 things. I'll learn 50 things about placing people in law firms. I'll learn about what's this, what's that, what's this. And I wouldn't learn that if I did permanent law firm placements. What does that mean?

That means I could only permanently place people in law firms and do contract placements. I could do in-house placements. I could place attorneys or people in companies that weren't attorneys. I could do all sorts of things, but I do one thing and learn about it. And because I know about it.

And I keep getting better at it, and that's basically why my brand is doing one thing, and I don't do other things. So, your brand has to be about getting good at one thing and whatever that is. It could be mesothelioma, or it could be defending or filing suits. This is on behalf of Dockers. It could be doing corporate law, or it could be doing project finance.

It could be specializing in Southeast Asia for all these different things and project finance. So everyone that's very good and gets ahead in the legal profession, most people have a brand, and it struggles, doesn't struggle, I'm sorry, it's defined by doing one thing and not doing others. And that's the biggest secret because if you think about it, I give this example a lot, but think about whether you were injured or sick.

And you had a brain tumor, or you had a, I don't know, something growing on your heart or something. You would look for someone who was an expert on brain tumors. You would look for someone that did a specific type of thing. I met this guy. I thought it was disgusting, but there's this attorney, law, and doctor I went to college with.

He was in, I knew him, and he specialized in, specializes in doing. Some infrequent, complex operations for dying children get flown all over the world, like where there are wealthy people, like the Saudi Arabian things, recharge 300 000 for this operation or whatever. And it's probably not cool.

But anyway, the point is that you specialize. And so everyone that's specialized in something.

So I run a national recruiting firm, and we study all these different markets. If I ran and were a recruiter and a law firm recruiter sitting in Charleston, South Carolina, and there are only 20 firms, I would probably know everyone in those firms very well. I would have a better sense of there, and I might be. Frankly, I'm not saying this as any insult to myself, but If someone is an expert in a tiny market and it's all they do and talk to people all day there, they may have a brand of being local and knowing more people and all that sort of thing.

So, my only point is that you need to define yourself by a practice area. And once you define yourself by a practice area, that's the most important thing you can do. Because someone who goes to the semester sees me on the law firm site, a client doesn't care where the attorney went to school.

They don't care about what they did or where they went. What they're, they don't care about anything. The only thing they care about is that the person can do that work. Now, big companies want to have certain things going on in their background. Like they want to have, wow, this guy's bringing in a lot of money.

But they want to have certain types of attorneys working on their matters. So, if you're doing commercial litigation, large companies will want certain types of people. But the biggest thing to understand. Your practice area is having and defining yourself by a practice area. Once you define yourself in a practice area, define yourself based on a practice area, then you want to, and then you need to be seen doing that practice area about that practice area.

So that means you need to write, you need to talk, you need social media posts, you need to do all these sorts of things to get out there. And then you can also get experience working for someone else, whatever you want to do, man. The point is that you need to be seen and to promote it, you need to be seen.

So you need to do one thing, and the better you do that one thing, the more you're seen, the better off you'll be. And I could say this to you in a million different ways, but you have to define your brand pretty much by doing one thing. And then you have to decide how you're going to promote yourself.

Are you going to just go to work for someone else and say, Hey, I do corporate general work, or are you going to decide like the attorney I told you earlier in this presentation that makes 7 million a year guaranteed that you're going to represent? Will you decide to work for a company of a certain size doing a specific type of transaction?

So that's the most important advice given to you related to this.