Young lawyers, Clee mused, have a “natural inclination to be in a hurry” to achieve their career goals.

However, he advised, “my experience is that the key to long term success is doing the best you can on every piece of work that you're given, regardless of what stage of career you're at, because you never know what is going to come from a single thing that you're doing”.

He has found, he outlined, that he has been recommended for particular client matters because colleagues felt he had done a good job on another piece of work, “and if I hadn't have done a good job on that other piece of work, then [other opportunities] wouldn't have come up”.

“I would resist the urge to look too far into the future, “he suggested.

“I think it's important to have a track in mind, but not to miss out on the important learnings along the way.”

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Clee noted he has been “very fortunate” to have a multifaceted and fascinating career, in which he has worked with “lots of different clients, and learned a lot from them and hopefully made a small contribution to their success as well”.

However, he added, “each element of that step has been an individual transaction or an individual piece of work in which I've needed to do a good job to put myself in the best place to get that next piece of work and try and build momentum in that way incrementally, rather than trying to jump from step one to step ten”.

While the future is uncertain, Clee continued, lawyers can always control their own vocational progress.

“In private practice, there are ups and downs in workflows, and when there's an up, it's important to do a good job when the market is active, if it turns out that for a period of time the market is less busy, then there's always lots of preparatory work that could be done for that next uptick in market activity,” he said.

It is hard to know hard to say where the market's going to go from here, particularly given the current volatility with tariffs and a potential US recession, “but for anybody listening who is less busy, I would encourage them to think about what they can be doing to boosting their knowledge base, their profile, and getting out and meeting people if they don't need to be behind their desk that day”, he advised.

Young lawyers, Clee proclaimed, should be encouraged to “think about how they can make the biggest difference in their role”.

“I found that, as I went through the earlier stages of my career, if I focused on making the life easier of the person the next rung up the ladder from me, it generally resulted in getting another opportunity,” he reflected.

“And, if I did a good job in the context of that opportunity, then another one would come from that.”

“So, I would encourage younger lawyers, as they're mapping out their career journeys, to think carefully about what it is that's meaningful to them, what they enjoy doing, and then working closely with the people more senior to them in an organisation and their peers, to try and do a good job.”

Because, Clee concluded, “doing a good job results in getting more opportunities”.

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