Developing Your Legal Career

There are two keys to developing your

legal career

: First you need to improve your skills, attributes, and abilities and align them with your career objectives, and second, you need to find the niche where you feel comfortable. Money, work-life balance, and every other thing that influences your career choice keeps changing throughout your career as do you. You need to adjust your skills and objectives continually to keep in harmony with changing circumstances if you are to develop the legal career which meets your goals.

While living through your career, you need to remain alert that lawyers often fail to perceive stages of burnout and how and why their work and growth is being affected. Whether you like the particular kind of legal work or environment, or not, would materially affect the chances of your success. So you need to be aware of the four progressive

signs of burnout

– mild dissatisfaction, increasing fatigue, thoughts of quitting, and resigning without any alternative plans in place.


When you think of developing your career as a lawyer it is with the thought of realizing ‘success.’ But have you ever thought of what ‘success’ means? Have you ever ‘written down’ your career objectives, and where you want to be according to a time-frame? Industry reports say that ‘written goals’ were the keys to the success of the top 3% income earners among lawyers.

The fronts where you need to have things well-defined to achieve success include:
 

• Writing down a concise and clear career plan that remains flexible
• Workplace stress management
• Time management
• Communication skills
• Entrepreneurial mindset
• Changing and adapting the definition of ‘success’ to reflect reality
• Building a solid professional network and put in to place strategic alliances

To develop yourself as a good and successful lawyer you need to align your personal values and objectives with your professional needs and career objectives. Your competencies must match your professional needs. Your career objectives should be defined and oriented to your professional purpose. You need to keep improving.

While knowing the law and procedures matters at the basic level because they are essential and integral to the career of a lawyer, the things that make you different from others and help to achieve success in a legal career are better skills and attributes in the fronts where you need to improve yourself.

To become an effective lawyer, you need to cultivate effective habits. Quite often people jump into a legal career without fully evaluating the pros and cons, or being in a position to evaluate them, and become lawyers with a vague notion of high income and prestige. The high income and prestige is there, but for the selected percentage who can make it up the rungs of the career ladder.

The first thing is not to be disheartened. Everything is temporary and if you find yourself in a position where your career objectives seem distant, it is not an uncommon situation. As Henry David Thoreau said once, “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost. That is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.”

Determination and perspiration can overcome all obstacles in your career path.