The Skills Coach: Are you a passenger in your own career?

By Lori Berman

Most lawyers (and people in general) know the feeling: Your career seems to be happening to you. The partner you’re assigned to, the matters that land on your desk, whether someone senior decides to invest in you – it can feel as though the decisions shaping your career are outside your control.

Some of that is real. But it’s not the whole story.

Over more than 20 years working with lawyers – first at large law firms and now leading training for a company that places early-career lawyers – I’ve seen a consistent pattern. That pattern also emerged in the research Heather Bock, Juliet Aiken, and I conducted for our book, Accelerating Lawyer Success: How to Make Partner, Stay Healthy, and Flourish in a Law Firm. The most successful and satisfied lawyers tend to see themselves as active agents in their careers. They act like masters of their own fate.

That mindset shows up in very practical ways. Here are three habits that can help you take greater ownership of where your career goes.

1. Replace passive thinking with ownership

A partner once told me that the associates who eventually made partner were already acting like partners in how they owned their work … long before anyone gave them the title.

What does that mean? On a day-to-day basis, it’s about taking responsibility for the work and the client outcomes: anticipating issues, asking thoughtful questions, coming up with possible solutions (not just problems), and initiating the next step rather than finishing your work and passively waiting to be told what to do. Over time, that way of working changes how more senior lawyers and clients experience you: As someone thoughtful, proactive, and reliable – exactly the kind of lawyer people trust with their most important challenges. 

To do that, change your thinking by changing your language. Passive thinking can sound harmless, but it stymies action:

• “I’ll wait and see what happens.”
• “No one told me to do it.”

Instead, ask yourself, “If I left my job tomorrow and a superstar lawyer took over, what would that person do differently?” Then do it.

2. Invest in your career, not just your work

One clear finding in our research: Lawyers who made partner were more likely to invest strategically in their careers – not just in the work in front of them – than those who didn’t.

That means asking questions most lawyers never think to ask, such as:

• What skills do I want to build this year? Seek out the resources, training, people, or assignments that will help you develop them.
• Which assignments will stretch me? Ask for those kinds of opportunities.
• Who knows my work and my goals? Build relationships with those people and create opportunities for them to see your work.
• Who can give me honest, developmental feedback? Ask them for it.

Sometimes, that also means being tenacious. For example, one of our young attorneys told me about how she was given an assignment and made a judgment call on how to approach it – one that differed from what the assigning partner had in mind. He wasn’t pleased, and the work from him started to dry up.

A lot of people would have read that as the verdict: This partner doesn’t want to work with me, better to move on. She didn’t. Instead, she went to the other attorneys who worked alongside him and made sure she was the one they turned to. Her work on those matters was consistently strong, and the partner noticed. Before long, he was coming to her directly again, and their working relationship was stronger than it had been before. She learned from the misstep and didn’t allow one difficult interaction to define her reputation or close off the relationship permanently.

That’s what investing in your career looks like: Staying tenacious and coming back from a setback. It means asking what other doors you need to open rather than waiting for someone to come to your door. It means moving forward deliberately, rather than by inertia.

3. Be intentional about relationships

Careers don’t advance in isolation. Yet many lawyers, especially early on, focus so heavily on billable work that they neglect relationships until they “have more time.”

The lawyers who flourish don’t wait. They build relationships steadily and authentically: Checking in with colleagues, seeking guidance, offering help, and showing interest in others’ lives both professionally and personally.

This isn’t about keeping score or being friendly out of obligation. It’s about genuinely knowing who you can help and who can help you – and acting on both. The goal is to be known and trusted as someone who is engaged and invested. That reputation, built over time, opens doors that excellent work alone cannot.

One of our most successful alumnae put her finger on something many people miss. At first, she assumed that doing strong work would naturally get noticed – that the work would speak for itself. But being good at your job and being known for being good at your job are two different things, and the second one doesn’t happen by accident. As she said, “It takes actual face time – showing up, being seen, making sure the right people have a reason to think of you. You need visibility.” And visibility is most persuasive when it is linked to contribution, not simply presence: Showing up prepared, sharing useful information, volunteering, staying connected after an assignment, and helping others. That’s not self-promotion; it’s ownership of your visibility.

The bottom line

Law firm careers will never be fully predictable; luck will always play a role. But you have more influence than it may sometimes seem. The lawyers who flourish are not necessarily the smartest in the room or the luckiest. They are the ones who take ownership – of their thinking, their choices, and their development. You may not control everything, but you can decide whether you are a passenger in your career or the one turning the wheel.

 

Lori Berman, Ph.D., is an organizational psychologist and Vice President of Learning at Legal Innovators, a talent management solution for law firms and corporate legal departments. She is co-author of Accelerating Lawyer Success: How to Make Partner, Stay Healthy, and Flourish in a Law Firm. Reach her at [email protected].