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How Lawyers Sabotage their Practice by Questioning their Expertise and How to Avoid it

July 4, 2019

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This Article is written by Ramanuj Mukherjee, CEO, LawSikho.along with Abhyuday Agrawal, COO, LawSikho

Most of you are guilty of this.

If you can cure this one bad habit, and I will tell you how, you can get to the next level of practice in a matter of months.

It is well known that regularly writing and publishing is a great way to build authority and credibility as a lawyer. In fact, in our Dream Job Bootcamp we use it as the primary weapon for getting our trainees jobs at decent law firms. We also extensively teach article writing, publishing and blogging, just like networking, to all our students of premium LawSikho courses.

Why is article writing so important for lawyers?

Yes, it helps you to get more clients. It helps you to earn the respect of your professional network. It can bring in more direct clients as well as referrals through the door.

Why just articles? What if you published a book in a cutting edge practice area such as arbitration or IBC?

However, when I ask most young lawyers about why they do not write and publish more aggressively, here is what they say.

I am not sure I am qualified to write yet. I am not sure I know enough. I think I need more experience before I begin to write and publish.

The lawyers who write regularly tend to publish one article in a month. Usually their articles are published online. It gives them great mileage. It is very obvious, and in the open for all to see. Even law firms are aggressively building their own blogs and hiring professional bloggers into their communication teams.

Still most lawyers don’t write at all!

Not writing because one is not confident of their own expertise is not a single dimensional problem. It is a disease that plagues young lawyers pervasively and causes all sorts of problems. This questioning oneself prevents any chance of early growth in legal career.

Many lawyers in their early years question their own expertise. They want to get more experience, years or whatever it is they are insecure about before they write more, begin to build their brand, start networking or even solicit clients. Years pass by and so do opportunities. Before they realise, they discover themselves slotted into various pigeonholes as mediocre lawyers by the legal industry. This is the reward of waiting for too long on the sidelines.

Also it is hard to develop new habits as an old lawyer. If you haven’t been building your brand in your 20s, it is unlikely that you will suddenly start in your 30s or 40s.

Also, even if you start, by now those who started 10 years earlier will be miles ahead of you.

Sure if you did not start early and have only now began to value brand building and investing in your name as a lawyer, then please go ahead and start immediately. The best time has passed long back, but now is the next best time.

This advice is against the general grain of what you will hear in your local bar library. Seniors will caution you against growing too fast, or getting noticed too early in your career, or step onto the toes of more established players.

However, it has to happen now or later. Why wait to be the best you can be?

You need to be good enough to merit the brand. The only risk is when your brand building gets ahead of your actual capabilities. Then you may be in trouble. Otherwise, there is hardly any problem.

When young lawyers do well at the bar, there would be some oldies who get threatened. There will be many established lawyers who will support you, if you deserve their support, against unwarranted attacks. However, is anything worth avoiding doing well over?

In most courts these days, judges are quite appreciative of young lawyers who are highly competent. Focus on competence along with brand building. That’s the right path to take. Do not ignore one to develop the other.

Now, understand this – ‘expertise’ is always a relative term. Expertise is determined not by the number of years of practice in that industry, but by the amount of work I have put in on a specific issue.

I may have 10 years of experience as a criminal lawyer and may have done 5 arbitrations in my whole life. In another scenario, I may have only 2 years of experience but I may have written 20 articles on arbitration and done 4 arbitration matters. Who has more experience in arbitration?

Clients may prefer to approach me because I have worked more on arbitration.

Also, by putting out my articles to the public I have showcased my knowledge and interests in arbitration, which has already begun to get noticed by my peers and potential clients, increasing my odds of success in the area of arbitration.

I cannot directly influence the number of matters I get from clients. This is not in my hands.

However, how many articles I write and how more and more people get to know about me and my passion for that area of law is entirely up to me. This is something I can control.

And the better I get at this, the more chances are that in the initial years of my practice, I will have no problem in finding work. I am likely to get my own clients, and my friends and lawyers will trust me more and will be comfortable to refer their trusted relationships to me.

This is how the foundation of a good practice can be built. Of course, goes without saying that when clients come through the door you also need to satisfy the need for which they have come to you, and you can’t do unless you have expertise to do so.

However, if you have a strong focus on acquiring expertise, and getting real life work, it is likely to come to you much faster than those waiting on the sidelines and blaming their own lack of expertise. Lack of expertise is not going to change magically some day after a few years, it depends on your working on this hands-on, and hustling to get your clients the results they need.

The more you do it, the better you get at it.

Do not worry all the time about how much expertise you have when you are in the initial phase, or when you are still struggling to get clients like most lawyers do.

Instead, worry about how you can create some time for research and writing every single day. I know you are busy and you do not get enough time to watch Netflix and play with your dog, but this is critical if you want to build your own reputation as a lawyer and get started with building a practice.

This needs to be done frequently – one needs to take out some time every week and publish an article every week at the minimum. As you grow older and your practice gets more established, you can slow down if you want to. However, in the beginning, going slower than this is not recommended.

There are two things that will happen as you do this.

One, you will begin to stop questioning yourself as you learn more and more in the process of writing, as well as get appreciation from others about your article. As more people begin to tell you how they have immensely benefited from your pieces, you will come to peace with the fact that your knowledge is useful and worth paying for. Also, you are constantly learning new things so you can make your articles better, and there are very few things in the world that can help a lawyer more than the habit of regular learning and development.

Imagine that many people regularly read your articles and look forward to your insights. How will that boost your confidence?

The second major transformation you can expect is growing recognition from other lawyers as well as potential clients who contact you for information and advice. With more time, this would lead to a solid reputation that will be a pillar of your practice.

Remember that this is not a shortcut to building a law practice. Writing and scholarship helps immensely, but if you fail to deliver results to your clients then this is not going to work for you. You must also be a competent lawyer for this to work at all. Law is a profession of the learned, because those who never stop learning can only succeed here.

To sum up, if you don’t start writing in your early years, it will always remain a hard task for you. And you are losing precious opportunity.

If you are at an advanced stage of your practice, it’s a great opportunity to start now and incorporate this into your routine, unless you are already a major success. In which case, please write because it will still give you unparalleled intellectual satisfaction and we would get some great stuff to read.

And please, if you need any help with any of these, just let us know. We help all our premium course students at LawSikho to implement these principles.

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