Career Management Tips for Legal Executives
By Dan Resendes, Chief Consulting Officer at The Barrett Group
Are you a legal executive considering a career change? The career management professionals from The Barrett Group Legal have tips to keep in mind. These tips will help prevent common mistakes legal professionals make when making a career change.
Do you want to get out of litigation?
Do not center on litigation as your main competency. Also do not focus on the billable hours and casework in your value proposition. Instead, highlight your marketing or business development skillsets. Mention how you run operations of your own law firm. And be sure to include your community outreach. Also include all of the charities you served. Finally, don’t forget to bring up relationships you built with municipalities or government representatives.
Are you transitioning from private practice to a corporate in-house or legal services employment?
Include your competencies in collaboration and leadership. Bring up your interdepartmental and cross-functional communication. Be sure to include best practices and protocol authoring and/or compliance. Also share customer, community, vendor and/or third-party acquisition. Similarly, be sure to include any outreach and relationship nurturing that you can share.
What else?
Focus on corporate or company challenges.
Versus focusing on cases won and case law.
Highlight your operational expertise.
Include accounting and financial wellness, marketing, and business development efforts. Also include pro bono, community, and charity work.
Metrics and quantifiable results.
Employ workarounds in content authoring if concerned about confidentiality.
Get used to working with Word documents.
Versus working with PDFs for your hiring process.
In conclusion.
The compilation of these career change tips for legal executives is the result of recent studies. These studies indicate a sharp escalation in the number of attorneys who expressed career dissatisfaction.
Above all, there are many reasons for legal executives’ career dissatisfaction. They include:
- Lack of growth potential or security.
- Negative impacts on marriage, parenting, and quality of life.
- Long work hours filled with repetitive drudgery of motions and depositions.
- Not to mention those seven-day workweeks.
- Little or no sense of fulfillment from their work.
- Stress-related to creating billable hours.
- Also, fierce competition in the courtroom, as well as in the office.
Because you may have more career change questions, be sure to follow The Barett Group Legal on LinkedIn.
