Login
The tips for making an award-winning legal career
Managing expectations, tailoring job applications and being persuasive can open budding lawyers up to a career worthy of award wins and the new opportunities that come from them. Three past 30 Under 30 winners talk to Lawyers Weekly about the ways future applicants can set themselves up for their own wins.
Naomi Neilson
By reflecting on advice that they would give their younger selves, Lawyers Weekly’s 30 Under 30 winners Alex Solo, Dan Trevanion and Tanya Diessel gave new and budding lawyers a glimpse into what it takes to make an award-winning career. For most, it starts with being flexible enough to new opportunities as they come up.
“Every opportunity that has come to me has been something that has popped up. It’s the phone calls that I have had which are saying, ‘hey, do you want to come do this?’ While I continue to work day in and day out doing my job and moving down a path that I want to work towards, my opportunities and achievements have come to me because of the flexibility and ability to say when something isn’t working,” she said.
Sitting on a panel for the inaugural Career Expo and Emerging Leaders Summit, Clyde & Co associate Mr Trevanion said that it is vital for young and new lawyers to be putting themselves out there as much as possible: “You need to be putting yourself out there because that’s the way these opportunities will come about.”
When he started out, Sprintlaw co-founder Mr Solo went out and had coffee with many different people from many different areas of law without any agenda. In that period, he said many connections were made and ideas imparted to him that influenced where he ended up: “That is a big component to being open to new things, open to new people and being open to new situations.”
As for what he looks for on résumés and applications, Mr Solo said that anything jobseekers are putting on their resumes should tick traditional boxes but should also have one or two things that the hiring manager has not seen before. Those things should also be adjusted to tailor the specific work environment they are applying for.
“At Sprintlaw, we get quite a lot of applications and the ones that stand out are the ones that have taken a little bit of time to tailor their applications to the firm and have shown that they care about it and we are just not another number in the list of places they are applying for,” Mr Solo said, adding that the unique parts of the résumé “will show employers you will be someone that can learn things quickly”.
Mr Trevanion mirrored this, saying that having something new will make applicants stand out. He is still doing this, having launched a business and investing podcast recently that inspires new conversations with lawyers in different industries.
“We brought on a bunch of interns to help out and when we were looking at their applications, one thing that was really apparent was that some of them have experiences in different files, like they’re doing a business degree, etcetera,” Mr Trevanion said. “You can have these very left-field experiences and if you tailor it a bit to the application, you can really draw some interesting links.”
Another piece of advice Mr Trevanion has is being persuasive in applications by making them as specific as possible. For example, he said there is the method of “smart interviewing” where when applications are explaining to interviewers what they have done, they go further by being very specific about it.
“In my [30 Under 30] application, that came through. I’d say how many pages of documents I was reviewing for discovery, how many documents I’d go through and it just provides a bit more detailed information for someone looking at your application,” Mr Trevanion said, adding that it “tells a better narrative about you and your skills. Don’t tell people, show people through your examples”.
Ms Diessel recommended that these lawyers are also managing their expectations throughout the entire process. She cautioned that if they are coming into any of their new opportunities with an expectation of “I’m going to do A, B or C” and end up doing something else, “you’re going to be disappointed” and, importantly, not open to the new skills and abilities that can be picked up from what they are given.
“I’ve had many, many opportunities that I didn’t enjoy but I can tell you the things that I have learnt from them and the people that I met along the way. There’s still something that you can take away from it,” Ms Diessel said.
“From a law student point of view, an opportunity such as sitting on an admin desk answering the phone. You’re going to be talking to people you have never spoken to, they may be challenging, they may be emotional, they may be agitated, but how are you managing that? Something as simple as talking to someone on the phone can bring out a whole new set of skills.”
For more from the 2021 Career Expo and Emerging Leaders Summit, check out this panel and others here.
Naomi Neilson
Naomi Neilson is a senior journalist with a focus on court reporting for Lawyers Weekly.
You can email Naomi at:
