No matter how demanding your obligations in the office, both billable and non-billable, it is essential that you protect your own future by building a strategic professional network. In a down economy, and a profession undergoing potentially radical change, all law firm associates (including those claiming imminent “exit strategies”) must find the fastest possible track to productivity, expertise and business generation. Getting a job, keeping it and finding the next one all require a record of excellence and and a healthy network of personal and professional contacts.

So focus on the basics:

It’s your life, and your responsibility. Don’t expect your law firm to take care of you, or even to offer you adequate legal or practical business training. Ask for it. Go get it.

If your only goals are to make your hours, and your bonus, you’ll fail. In fact, even if you put your heart and soul into being an excellent lawyer, yet ignore your peers and community, you could still find yourself dependent upon others for work and for business----and therefore at risk.

Target the fundamentals:

The development of a distinguished reputation as lawyer and human being, and

The seeding of a varied network of talented, and ambitious, people in the community as an ongoing source of advisors, allies and superior information, as well as direct referrals, new business and job opportunities.

Too much? We can all agree that time is short. Almost all your time is spoken for. And you are under constant pressure to produce high quality work product. You want, you need, “a life”.

Accurate. Nonetheless, it is essential that you do more--much more--than put your head down and churn out the best work possible. This is true whether or not you intend to stay at your firm, or even in the law, for more than a few years--long enough to pay off your student loans, wait around for a boyfriend or girlfriend to finish school or get sufficient training in your chosen specialty.

Time spent developing good marketing habits, and a broad and coherent business network, is a direct investment in your future. That it may be non-billable is irrelevant. Marketing is all about relationships--not brochures and elevator pitches. Every lawyer, no matter her experience or personal style, can develop business generation skills--with informal or formal coaching, institutional encouragement and practice.

Make no mistake about it. Your friends and classmates in the business community are already on message. The MBAs in fact, are among many who have received sophisticated training in network building and business generation, and are not at all embarrassed, nor prohibitively intimidated, by the task.

The longer you avoid attending to your professional network, and developing other practical business skills, the further behind you will fall and the less satisfying and engaging will be your career.

Take charge of your future as a professional. Be proactive, be disciplined, be creative. Have a (real) life.

Neither networking nor business generation is rocket science, but it does require interpersonal and communications skills you may not have had to deploy while in law school, even college.
You’ll have to get used to, and get over, feeling “awkward”, as my daughters put it.

© 2010 Elizabeth Munnell & Associates. All Rights Reserved