Raise Your Hand

The summer is not a time to hide in your office.

Succeeding in law school is often directly correlated to how hard you work. As a result, many law students and junior lawyers bring that approach—hard work above all—to their summer associate positions. And don’t get me wrong, the most important thing you can do to prove yourself in a summer job is to do great work (see “Avoid the Quantity Trap” from last week).

But—and its a big one—you can’t succeed in a summer position just by sitting in your office! You need to get out and experience the job and most importantly when given a chance to do something you have to raise your hand.

Raising your hand gets you into the, to quote Hamilton, “room where it happens.” And these are the rooms where you want to be professionally to gain experience. Then once you are there stay engaged, offer to help, and most of all learn from the experiences.

And I’ll take this one step further.

Raise your hand before you are even asked. Reach out to someone at the firm or organization you are working in and say "I am not sure if you are working on [X experience/case] right now but I wanted to let you know that if you do, I'd love to help out."

This simple move changed my own legal career. Many years ago I was assigned to a case that--if I am being honest--I wasn't particularly interested in. It gave me some good substantive experience and I worked with good people but it wasn't an area of law I found interesting and the team was so large it was hard to take ownership of the work.

Then I got a call from the work coordinator asking if I could help on a small, one-off assignment with a partner I had never met. I had the bandwidth so I said yes. Maybe I didn't have much of a choice.

And it was the best thing that could have happened in that moment. The partner on that case was awesome and he asked me to communicate directly with the client--something I hadn't had a chance to do previously. That case took a grand total of 2.5 hours of my time.I drafted a short letter and the potential opposing partner wrote back agreeing to what we asked. That could have been the end of my work with that client and that partner. But something inside me said: "don't let this opportunity pass you by." A week later I wrote an e-mail to the partner I had done the one-off assignment for and said: "Great working with you and [Client]. Let me know if anything else comes up and I'd love to work together." I raised my hand.

He wrote back minutes later saying that actually the same client had just called him about a potential new case and he hadn't yet staffed it. Without my e-mail he probably never would have thought of me.

I was staffed on a case that day (and then others in the years that followed) that became my almost full-time job. From this partner and client, I learned a ton about litigation and got writing experiences which led me to get a chance teaching writing as an adjunct which is now my full-time job.

To be clear, this doesn't mean you should volunteer for everything. Quite the opposite. Be strategic. But at the same time really use the summer to explore—and the only way to fully explore is to volunteer to go on the journey.

Talk soon,

Jonah