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There are 1,330,290 lawyers in the United States, according to the most recent American Bar Association (ABA) statistics as of January 1, 2023.
When my grandfather started practicing law in New York in 1927, only about 131,000 attorneys were in the United States. Fast forward to today, and the state of New York alone has 188,341 licensed lawyers based on the ABA’s data release. Regardless of the precise statistics, it’s clear that there is an immense number of attorneys.
In such a crowded field, how do you distinguish yourself and your practice from others? The answer is that you must intentionally create and cultivate your unique personal legal brand.
The concept of personal branding has been around for quite some time. Tom Peters, a renowned branding and business guru, first coined the term in a 1997 Fast Company article. He declared: “You are the CEO of your own company: Me, Inc.” and “The most important job is to be the Marketing Director for the brand called YOU.”
If you were your personal brand’s marketing director, what would you want people to perceive about you? It’s critical to start thinking that everything you do—from the moment you wake up until you go to sleep—is part of shaping that brand.
In today’s hyper-connected world with ubiquitous smartphones, we’ve all witnessed how quickly people can be recorded and how quickly those videos can be posted on social media, often catching the people in less-than-flattering moments. While some of these viral posts are lighthearted and funny, others can make individuals look stupid, mean, or much worse.
A prime example is the story of Aaron Schlossberg, an attorney in New York. In 2018, he was caught on video engaged in a racist rant at a Manhattan eatery. The footage spread rapidly online, and in one fell swoop, his professional image and legal career were severely damaged, perhaps irreparably. His business Yelp! and Facebook pages were inundated with negative reviews and scathing comments. A GoFundMe campaign even raised money to send a taco truck and mariachi band to protest outside his apartment building, garnering more than 500 outraged participants. Finally, the court publicly reprimanded him.
(As a brief aside, I have a huge personal fear of being labeled a “Karen” in these situations, so I try to always remain courteous and level-headed with others, even when they are unreasonable. If you don’t escalate the situation by yelling back while they are yelling at you, it often leaves them increasingly frustrated that their provocations aren’t working. And when video inevitably surfaces, you will be portrayed as the sane, composed party.)
The key takeaway is that, while I don’t want to make you paranoid, you must understand that your actions and reactions are constantly being evaluated, no matter where you are or what is happening around you. More importantly, a single ill-considered impulse could severely impact your reputation and brand.
Personal and business development experts have preached this principle of “response-ability” for ages. You always maintain the ability to choose your response to any scenario or provocation consciously. You aren’t merely at the mercy of circumstances.
To illustrate this concept, let me share an example from Jack Canfield, one of the creators of the wildly popular Chicken Soup for the Soul book series. In his book The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be, Canfield describes the aftermath of the 1994 Northridge earthquake in California, which measured 6.7 magnitude and caused widespread damage and gridlock across Los Angeles:
Traffic was at a standstill, and what was normally a 1-hour drive had become a 2- or 3-hour drive. A CNN reporter knocked on the window of one of the cars stuck in traffic and asked the driver how he was doing. He responded angrily, “I hate California! First there were fires, then floods, and now an earthquake! No matter what time I leave in the morning, I’m going to be late for work. I can’t believe it!”
Then the reporter knocked on the window of the car behind him and asked the second driver the same question. This driver was all smiles. He replied, “It’s no problem. I left my house at five AM. I don’t think under the circumstances my boss can ask for more than that. I have lots of music tapes and Spanish lessons to listen to. I’ve got my cell phone, coffee, my lunch—I even brought a book to read. So I’m fine.”
I share this story because it vividly illustrates that, while we can’t control many external circumstances, we are ultimately responsible for our reactions to events and situations in our lives, both big and small. In our modern age of personal internet proliferation, those reactions are constantly displayed to anyone, unless you never leave your home.
This mindset shift regarding your personal “response-ability” will become critically important as we continue discussing how to develop your own powerful personal legal brand intentionally.
- You Already Have a Personal Brand
- What Is a Personal Legal Brand?
- Why Create a Personal Legal Brand?
- How To Build Your Personal Legal Brand
You Already Have a Personal Brand
Here are two pieces of good news and bad news that you should understand:
The good news is that you already have a personal brand, whether you’ve been purposeful about shaping it or not.
The bad news is that you might not actually like the current brand perception about you.
More good news is that you can always work to rehabilitate your personal brand and create a new, improved version anytime.
However, the bad news is that a brand that you’ve worked hard to build can still be damaged or destroyed instantaneously.
With any personal brand, you must remain vigilant in consistently monitoring it and your own behavior, because a single high-profile misstep is often all it takes for a brand’s reputation to be decimated.
What Is a Personal Legal Brand?
A personal legal brand is the unique combined impression that you want to create regarding your skills, experience, and personality. It’s telling your personal story through your conduct, behavior, spoken and unspoken words, and underlying attitudes.
You leverage your personal brand to differentiate yourself in a crowded marketplace. There are more than 7.5 billion people on this planet, and as mentioned earlier, there are more than 1.3 million attorneys in the United States alone that you need to stand apart from.
Professionally speaking, your legal brand represents the overall image that people perceive about you as a lawyer. It is shaped by how you present yourself in real life, how the media may portray you, and the impressions people form based on the information about you online and off.
Ultimately, your legal brand intertwines your personal brand and professional reputation into one inseparable identity that you’ve created for yourself in the legal field and among the public. While it should authentically represent who you are, it must also be constantly managed and cultivated.
And I’m sorry to say that, in the modern era, you can no longer fully separate your personal and professional lives into different spheres. When I graduated from law school in the early days of the internet, I could still maintain some divide between my legal career and personal life. There was no social media yet. In fact, Generation X was the last generation to understand what life was like before ubiquitous cell phones, computers, laptops, and tablets.
But today’s technology has irreversibly blurred those lines. What you do and how you conduct yourself in your legal career is inextricably intertwined with your personal brand and life. The two are combined in the eyes of the world.
Before going further, I want to emphasize that many ethical violations for attorneys can occur if you are not extremely careful and intentional in your approach. So, I must start with the ABA Professional Rules.
Rule 1.1 of the ABA”s Professional Rules of Conduct on Competence clearly states:
A lawyer shall provide competent representation to a client. Competent representation requires the legal knowledge, skill, thoroughness and preparation reasonably necessary for the representation.
Notably, the commentary in Note 8 under this rule explicitly says:
To maintain the requisite knowledge and skill, a lawyer should keep abreast of changes in the law and its practice, including the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology, engage in continuing study and education and comply with all continuing legal education requirements to which the lawyer is subject. (emphasis added)
This means that you don’t necessarily have to participate and actively build a brand presence online. However, you must still have a firm grasp on the websites, platforms, and digital spaces where your current and potential clients spend their time. Ignorance of these technologies is no longer an excuse.
More importantly, in our context, choosing not to use the internet and social media channels at all can become a defining element of your personal brand, for better or worse. It signals certain things about your attitudes and tendencies as an attorney.
So, with that ethics disclaimer in mind, let’s explore the key reasons why intentionally creating a powerful personal legal brand is so advantageous and arguably essential for attorneys in the modern era.
Why Create a Personal Legal Brand?
There are three principal reasons why you need to have your own clearly defined and actively managed personal brand:
- You need an established personal brand to effectively build your book of business because, when it comes down to it, people do not hire law firms; they hire individual lawyers they know, like, and trust. Sure, having the credibility of working at a well-respected firm makes the personal branding process more straightforward. But at the end of the day, you are selling your specific skills, expertise, and ability to get the job done right for that client.
- Your personal brand provides insulation against any negative career disruptions. Until the recession of 2008, the legal industry had historically been viewed as recession-proof and incredibly stable. That assumption has been shattered. Now, there are no guarantees that your specific job will persist or that your firm will survive, especially after witnessing how many firms downsized, dissolved, or failed during the Great Recession.
Having your established personal brand, reputation, and book of clients will enable you to transition and land on your feet if anything ever happens with your current role. The attorneys who rebound the quickest after firm shifts are inevitably those who have cultivated their own respected personal brands.
- Perhaps most importantly, developing your personal brand allows you to take ownership of your own career trajectory and future rather than to be beholden to your current firm . Whether you want to stay at your firm long-term, move to an exciting new opportunity, strike out and start your own entrepreneurial firm someday, or leave the legal field entirely for a new path, your personal brand empowers you to control your destiny.
With these drivers in mind, let’s explore the steps for building an authentic, differentiated personal legal brand that becomes a valuable professional asset.
How To Build Your Personal Legal Brand
While the core concept of personal branding is simple, consistently executing it with excellence over a prolonged period is not easy. You must monitor and manage your brand’s perception every single day. One mishandled incident or lapse in judgment can severely undermine years of cultivating a respected brand.
Think of creating your personal legal brand as an intentional multistep process.
1.Defining Who You Are
The critical first step is looking inward to clearly define your authentic self, who you genuinely are. Everything goes into this: your personality traits, values, strengths, and even vulnerabilities that shape your approach to life and the law. This is not about creating an artificial persona that you try to uphold. No matter how skilled you think you are at acting a certain way, your genuine identity will eventually be revealed through repeated interactions. If it deviates from the personal brand impression that you’ve established, it will ultimately undermine the hard-earned trust and respect that you’ve built.
People want to work with people they know, like, and trust on a personal level. An inauthentic personal brand may be able to game the “know” and “like” factors temporarily through marketing savvy. But without a foundation of sincerity and congruence underlying it, the essential “trust” component will never materialize in a lasting, meaningful way. Trust must be earned over a sustained period through unimpeachable authenticity.
So, this first step requires doing the insightful, sometimes uncomfortable, introspective work to clearly define your authentic foundational self before presenting it as your personal brand to the world. Who are you really, at your core? What beliefs, personality traits, and underlying motivations drive you in your approach to practicing law and serving others? Achieving this radical self-awareness lays the groundwork for an influential personal legal brand that attracts your ideal audience.
2.Defining What You Do
The next step is to define what you do and, as importantly, what you don’t do as an attorney. It’s critical to establish the specific area(s) of legal concentration and client value that you’ll focus your personal brand on rather than to try to be all things to all people.
What results and benefits can you confidently deliver through your background and personal strengths? What separates the experience you provide from other lawyers who may practice in the same practice area? Ultimately, this is about positioning your personal legal brand’s value and differentiated promise of excellence that sets you apart in a saturated market.
Be thoughtful when mapping out the scope and boundaries of your knowledge. Where do your personal background, strengths, credentials, and capabilities allow you to be a standout guide for clients? Hone in on those unique value propositions as you define the focus for your personal legal brand.
3.Define Your Ideal Audience
The next step is to clearly define your ideal target client audience for your personal legal brand’s messaging and marketing efforts.
Many lawyers approach their branding to appeal to as broad an audience as possible in the hope of maximizing their potential client base.
When you attempt to make your personal brand marketing resonate with every possible type of client, your message becomes so diluted and generic that it fails to connect with anyone meaningfully. It’s the antithesis of the authenticity and specialization that allows a brand to make a powerful impression.
Conversely, when you focus your brand positioning with laser precision on your defined “ideal client” personas—speaking their language, highlighting the specific pain points you can alleviate for them, and making them feel intimately understood—your message resonates exponentially. You become a perfect solution for that target audience rather than just another generic option lost in the noise.
As you bring those ideal client personas into focus, your personal brand strategy—from the messaging to the marketing channels used to the relationship-building approach—can be purposefully tailored to provide exponentially more relevance and impact for the people you most want to attract.
4.Creating Your Brand
With a solid foundational grasp of your authentic identity, your legal focus, and your defined target audience, you are then ready to begin purposefully developing the content strategy and marketing activities that will bring your personal legal brand to life.
This is when you apply your creativity and thought leadership using the different content formats, channels, and distribution methods to showcase your brand to your ideal audience. From a professional website and social media presence to blog/vlog content, podcasting, email newsletters, seminars/webinars, e-books, community speaking engagements, and beyond, you want to find the opportunities to establish yourself as a go-to authority figure in your niche.
5.Cultivating Relationships
While developing a robust content marketing engine is crucial for a modern personal legal brand, it’s only one piece of the overall branding equation. Another indispensable component is focused strategic relationship-building and networking within your target market.
This goes beyond simply attending random networking events, however. Those types of scattershot efforts rarely move the needle in any meaningful way. The key is to be highly selective and purposeful about the specific organizations, industry groups, community associations, conferences, and communities where your ideal clients have a presence.
6.Manage and Protect Your Brand
The final piece for successfully building an influential personal legal brand is understanding that it requires an unwavering commitment to consistency over a long period. You cannot half-heartedly attempt this for a few months and expect earth-shattering results. Personal legal brand equity is cultivated through a sustained pattern of showing up and continuously reinforcing your brand’s message, value, and authentic personality daily, year after year. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
Embrace this reality from the outset that you’re committing to nurturing and actively managing your personal brand for the entire lifecycle of your legal career. It’s not a finite campaign or fleeting marketing tactic but an integral part of your professional reputation that requires diligent upkeep.
As Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, was once quoted as saying: “Your brand is what others say about you when you’ve left the room.”
The question for you is, “What do you want them to say?”
For the past 22 years, Jaimie B. Field, Esq., has been a Rainmaking Trainer and Coach. She teaches lawyers from Mid-market, Virtual, and Big Law how to build big books of business ethically. And the keyword is ethically. If you would like a complimentary training and coaching session, please sign up for our (almost) weekly newsletter at www.jaimiefield.com. Jaimie will respond personally to schedule a mutually convenient training date.
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