Building a professional personal brand as a lawyer
Establishing your profile doesn’t happen in a silo. Relationships really matter. Doing the hard work really matters, writes Liberty Moore.
![Liberty Moore](/images/articleImages-850x492/Liberty_Moore_lw.jpg)
What does a personal brand mean to you? I am often asked about how to develop your personal brand and specifically developing a personal brand as a lawyer. I support my team to establish theirs every day. To give some context on my approach, I’ve been on a steep learning curve after leaving marketing agency land and taking on an in-house role with a boutique law firm over the past year.
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At university, and in the agency world, you learn and rely on so many “tricks of the trade” and predefined campaign tools and tactics; when you’re producing marketing as service, you need to “package it up”, commoditise it, put parameters and scope on the work you deliver. For me, depending on the nature of the work, this process can be where you lose some of the sparkle and meaning. In contrast, in an in-house role, you need to explore, go a bit deeper, be open to what naturally arises, jump on opportunities, and foster concepts as they grow.
Now, don’t get me wrong, there is definitely a place for agencies to support professional services, but when it comes to personal brand building, for real success, I believe this needs to be driven by the individual with the support of a few trusted advisers. While you may gain some wins, you can’t simply roll out a predefined list of activities and check them off to achieve long-lasting career growth and success.
So, while I apply my campaign experience to how Travis Schultz & Partners as a brand is seen by the world, when supporting our lawyers on their path to growing their careers as an expert in their field, I take a less curated approach. In a professional services firm, there is so much emphasis on promoting the individuals within the mix of the broader firm strategy.
And while every team member is an extension of the firm’s brand, they are people, and people are unique; they aren’t a product for you to market and pigeonhole. Embracing the “human-ness” of yourself and the people you want to connect with is the first step to building a personal brand in law.
As Simon Sinek notes, “100 per cent of employees are people. One hundred per cent of customers are people. One hundred per cent of investors are people. If you don’t understand people, you don’t understand business.”
Here are eight awesome tips (well, I think they are!) that you can adopt to help build your personal brand as a professional:
- Expertise and authenticity
- Don’t wait around for luck to come knocking
- Relationships are gold (in real life and online)
- Experience and experiences
- Put yourself out there
- Taking the time to apply to be a speaker at a relevant conference;
- Host a dinner seminar – you could also build relationships by inviting a co-presenter;
- Seek out media and podcast opportunities;
- Research, write and publish academic articles;
- Write blogs or opinion pieces and share them with relevant publications; and
- Engage on social media.
- Patience is a virtue
- Accountability and goal setting
- Be kind
In a nutshell, building your profile doesn’t happen in a silo. Relationships really matter. Doing the hard work really matters.
Liberty Moore is the community and brand manager at Travis Schultz & Partners.