Okay, so now to Part III: Law School Network and Alumni Groups.

I have found that the typical advice, both formal and informal, to a junior associate trying to start building her professional network is that she should start with keeping in touch with law school classmates.  Therefore, I have built that into my networking plan. 

How to keep in touch, is the real question.  Afterall, personal emails and phone calls eat into billable hours.  Nights at the club or hanging out on the weekends, cuts into family or "me" time.  So far, I have tried a three-pronged approach to keeping in contact with my law school classmates and have even extended this to my undergraduate and B-school classmates, to a lesser extent.  The first prong is Facebook.  As I mentioned in Part VI of this series, I am pretty new to online social networks.  However, I have found that Facebook is the time-management-obsessed networker's dream.  It is a very time efficient way to keep up with all of your friends and to keep people posted on what is going on in your life.    The second prong is emails and telephone calls.  I have to limited this prong, time-wise, but I do have a list of 10 or so classmates that I have decided to make a concerted effort to keep in touch with.  They are, of course, the people that I was the closest to in law school but are also now pretty geographically diverse.  I have them on my "list" of people to call and/or email periodically in order to keep in much closer contact than Facebook allows for.  The third prong is lunch.  I recently saw Gail Evans talk and she mentioned that she always tells business women that they should never go to lunch alone because it is the perfect time to do maintenance on your professional network.  I have committed to making time for lunch at least 2 times (but hopefully more like four times) each month with a law school classmate or other young lawyer connection in the local area. 

So, what am I hoping to get from this part of my networking plan?  I hope to keep up long term connections with lawyers who will have successful careers and happy lives.  I hope that these people remain friends, of course.  But I also hope that these relationships bear professional fruit in the future-- perhaps a recommendation or endorsement when I run for office or look for a new job, perhaps a client referral when a company is too big for a classmate's small firm practice, perhaps an invitation to sit on a prestigious nonprofit board or an invitation to an event where business connections can be made, heck, maybe even referrals for the stuff that make life easier like good nannies, housecleaning services or dry cleaners.

This branch of my Junior Assoicate Networking Plan takes about 6-8 hours per month (remember there are a couple of lunch meetings worked in, but some of that time can be attributed to the need for nurishment!)