Description
Spending More Time at The Office Improves Career Advancement
[00:00:00] What are some of the more common issues that you see with juniors who have not received adequate training due to working from home?
Are there any tips you can offer to help mitigate the lack of good training?
Do you think that associate's just started in '19', '20' and '21' classes will be tagged as "those classes" that haven't developed properly due to working from home? If so, how might it affect those classes' ability to make partner and what can be done to mitigate this?
Okay. The big thing is this whole movement where the people that are working at home want to continue working at home. I've seen this in my company, all these people working at home, during the pandemic, may have come into offices you find out that they're not working.
It's disturbing. They're not working as hard. It's not only not developing your skills, but they're not working. And then, there's software, you can make people put on their computers and you can see that they're working and so forth but the point is, the training that you get inside of a law firm is important. I think that the face to face networking and information you get doing that and calls and other things is very important. So I [00:01:00] do believe that you need to do what you can to interact with people in your firm.
Firms give you the option of working at home or in the office. I think it's better to be seen in the office as much as that sucks compared to how you may have learned to work. Because I think that partners like having people around that they can walk up to and talk to and give work to.
They like giving face-to-face feedback. You learn a lot just from the interaction that you have.
I honestly think, people are welcome to work at home, and may do that, but it is very difficult and will make it difficult for you to advance if you continue doing that.
Law firms may have no choice but most people that have books of business, they don't get the books of business over the phone. They get them by arranging dinners, meeting with people and doing all that. That's also very important and you need to do what you can to interact with everyone. The other thing I would say is, if you feel like there's training issues, you need to become very disciplined and ask for feedback from senior associates, from other attorneys and really try your best to look dedicated.
I know that in [00:02:00] our company there are people that take feedback and they do a very good job at it. They're working hard so those are the kinds of people that any rational firm would want around.
Working lots of hours and doing everything and their learning will help you. But the thing is even though you may have started work during a pandemic, the law firm's business model is still there and they still need to advance people.
The partnership model and the business model are not going away. Maybe watered down a little bit, but it's not going away. That's something to remember.
I would do whatever I can to be as visible as possible. One thing I spoke about at our meeting last week that deals with this question.
They always say that, if you're in a branch office, it's very difficult to make partner.
The reason is because you're not around, people don't get a chance to see you. People who make decisions about who's going to make partner.
You're not forming relationships. That can be very harmful.
You wanna make sure that you're you do [00:03:00] what you can to be in the office and to get in front of people, even though you may not want to do that. It's important to your advancement.
