Career Management Tips for Legal Executives
by Dan Resendes, Chief Consulting Officer at The Barrett Group
When considering changing careers, keep the following tips from The Barrett Group Legal’s career management professionals in mind to prevent some of the most common mistakes legal professionals make:
- If you want to get out of litigation, do not focus on litigation as your main competency, nor billable hours and case work in your value proposition. Instead, highlight your marketing or business development skill sets; how you run operations of your own law firm; your community outreach; all of the charities and relationships you built with municipalities and government representatives.
- When transitioning from a private practice or law firm employer to a corporate in-house or legal services employment, include your competencies in collaboration, leadership, interdepartmental and cross functional communication; as well as best practices and protocol authoring/compliance; customer, community and vendor/3rd party acquisition, outreach, and relationship nurturing.
- Focus on corporate or company challenges versus cases won and case law.
- Highlight operational expertise, accounting and financial wellness, marketing and business development efforts, pro bono, community or charity work.
- Include metrics and quantifiable results – employ workarounds in content authoring if concerned about confidentiality.
- Get used to working with Word documents versus PDFs for your hiring process.
