Lawyers with strong personal brands stand for something. And for those with the strongest brands, “something” means one thing. They are master craftsmen, rather than jacks of all trades.

The jack of all trades lawyer is busy, bouncing from project to project, learning a little about a lot. Clients think of a jack of all trades when price is a primary consideration. The master craftsman lawyer is also busy, but focused. She knows a lot about a little and is able to charge a price premium as a result.

The objective of becoming a lawyer with a strong personal brand is to make it clear to the market the precise types of problems that the well-branded lawyer can solve. A strong personal brand allows a lawyer to transform from hunter to hunted. Clients seek her out because her value proposition is clear and has been validated through her experience, reputation, thought leadership and the word of mouth of others she’s worked with and against. She knows – and the market knows – what she does, how she does it, and for whom. Success follows.

A great deal has been said and written about the epidemic of the unhappy lawyer. Surveys suggest that career dissatisfaction among lawyers, and even rates of depression, are on the rise. According to research published last year, 28 percent of lawyers experience mild or higher levels of depression.

Associate attorneys are not immune from this issue. In fact, a survey from a few years back found that “associate attorney” was the unhappiest job in the United States. Many theories are posited as to the root causes, including overwork, stress, uninteresting work and the adversarial nature of the law. In recent years, firms have increasingly been urged to improve culture and expand opportunities for work-life balance, particularly for young associates. Firms need to change, the thinking goes, to adapt to the needs and desires of millennials.

This is a topic that is of great interest to me. And it’s one of import and urgency. After all, how can the profession expect to continue to perform at high levels if the young lawyers in the profession (at least large numbers of them) are dissatisfied with the work they spend such a massive amount of time on?

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It’s easy to believe that success in business or in life is binary. Do this. Don’t do that. Achieve.

But it doesn’t work that way. The answer to the question “Should I do this or that?” is often: Both.

Therefore, a lawyer who spends meaningful time on the Internet trying to curate the best advice to help grow his or her practice could very well end up more confused than enlightened. There’s no guidebook, no rule, no single strategy that guarantees success.

That’s a lesson that comes with experience and observation. It’s plain to see that highly achieving lawyers come in all shapes and sizes. Some are young and some are old. Some serious and some quirky. Some introverts and some extroverts. The profession teems with successful professionals of wildly different backgrounds, experience and expertise.

All of us want things. Every year many of us resolve to make changes – personally and professionally – in order to get what we want. Eat better, write that article, exercise, make those phone calls, spend more time with family, learn that new skill. But inevitably another year passes without the results we desire and we are back to square one.

For most the problem is not one of indecision, but inaction. The desire for change is strong, but the will to make sustainable change happen is lacking. For this reason many lawyers spend their careers on autopilot, attending diligently to client needs and priorities but not their own. Days, weeks and years seem to flash by in a whirlwind of emails, conference calls and court appearances. With demanding clients, bosses and adversaries to deal with on a daily basis, who has time to focus on much else?

That’s not to say that most lawyers are mindless or aimless about their future. Far from it. Most have audacious goals for their career. But far fewer take the steps to achieve those goals.

Ironically, many lawyers end up settling for mediocrity because they are perfectionists. They don’t have the time, energy, or mental bandwidth to execute on a perfect business development plan, so rather than do a “good” job of building their practice, they do nothing at all.

Remember the good old days? The days when hourly rates increased year after year, junior associate time could be billed for, and it was considered unprofessional to try to poach another lawyer’s clients? That wasn’t that long ago, in fact. But times have changed.

The market for legal services is flat. Since the Great Recession, there has been fundamental change in the legal landscape. Much like the housing market bubble that precipitated the economic slowdown, the legal marketplace has shifted from a seller’s to a buyer’s market.

This has led to downward pressure on fees, demand for creative, alternative billing practices, and greater competition for fewer opportunities. Work has also moved in-house, as corporate law departments have looked for ways to cut costs and have become not only clients, but also competitors, to solo lawyers as well as law firms.

Sensing this shift, non-legal entrepreneurs have stepped in. From overseas document review firms to Silicon Valley technology startups, alternative service providers continue to chip away at work that traditionally was within the exclusive domain of lawyers and law firms. Companies such as Legal Zoom and Rocket Lawyer, which were once seen as novelties, continue to encroach.

When was the last time you asked yourself this question: “What would happen if I did the opposite?”. Better yet, when was the last time you actually did the opposite? 

Doing the opposite – going against the grain, bucking conventional wisdom – can be scary. It can result in failure. Particularly in the legal profession, it welcomes skepticism. It invites derision. It makes people uncomfortable.

It is also the indispensable action that is inextricably linked to virtually every breakthrough idea that has moved the needle of human progress. “Doing the opposite” is just another term for innovation.

Conventional wisdom is, by definition, a generally accepted theory or belief. Any action or idea that is contrary to conventional wisdom is, therefore, generally not accepted. The person propounding it is considered wrongheaded and countercultural – until the radical is proven right, of course, and the new idea replaces the old. As Albert Einstein said: “The only sure way to never make mistakes is to have no new ideas.”

When I was a fifth year associate at a large law firm, a big opportunity fell into my lap. A former colleague at a firm I previously worked at had moved on to an assistant general counsel position at a large Tier 1 auto supplier. He was in charge of the company’s “troubled supplier” issues, and contacted me about the possibility of taking on the work. It was a significant, career-trajectory altering, high six figures in annual billings opportunity.

As I began the process of evaluating the hoops to jump through – conflicts, in particular – to bring in the business, a number of other lawyers at the firm surfaced who claimed pre-existing relationships with individuals in the legal department at the potential client. If the work came in, they argued, they should receive origination credit. I remember clearly the ten-plus lawyer conference call that was scheduled to discuss conflicts and credit. Ostensibly the call was organized to discuss the opportunity that I was presented with, but I barely got a word in.

Eventually, I just gave up. It seemed like there were too many hands in the honey pot. The opportunity went elsewhere.

Mentorship is one of the most powerful means of training and developing young associates. But many mentoring programs fail because they’re premised on a misguided notion that what a lawyer needs is a mentor, when what she really needs are mentors.

The mentorship system in many modern law firms looks no different than it did 30 years ago when a junior associate was paired with a senior attorney who (at least this was the idea) takes the young associate under his wing and provides career guidance. In a typical situation, the mentor and mentee meet periodically – for example, every quarter for lunch – to discuss the mentee’s career development.

There are problems with this style of mentorship, particularly if it’s the exclusive mentoring that an associate receives.

Back in July of 2014 (How could it possibly be that long ago?!), I wrote an article for Attorney at Work that focused on the importance of narrowly focused, niche legal practices, and how to go about building one. It was one of the most popular articles I’ve written, and became the catalyst for my book which came out in 2016.

In it, I challenged lawyers to visualize a continuum. On one end is the general practitioner – the “Jack of All Trades” – and on the other is the specialist – the “Master Craftsman.” The Jack of All Trades is busy, bouncing from project to project, learning a little about a lot. Clients think of the Jack of All Trades when price is a primary consideration. The Master Craftsman is also busy, but focused. She knows a lot about a little and is able to charge a price premium.

My thesis, backed by research and the experience of myself and others, is that if a lawyer is looking to build a practice, it’s better to become a Master Craftsman.