January is Mentoring Month for All Young Lawyers
By Susan Smith Blakely • January 22, 2020 •Careers, Other Career Issues
January is Mentoring Month. It is a way of bringing attention to the importance of mentoring to young and inexperienced workers in a variety of jobs. Workers who wish to advance to levels of management and leadership in their chosen work lives need mentoring to get there. The value of effective mentoring is not only recognized widely, but it also plays out in the lives of managers and leaders throughout our country and the world. Those managers and leaders likely would not have gotten to such heights without help from mentors. The law business is no different. Mentoring is…
My Mom, the Lawyer
By Susan Smith Blakely • January 09, 2020 •Issues, Balancing Private and Professional Life
I just read a book that you all need to know about ---- to read and to recommend to all of the lawyers in your lives. By "all" I mean both the female lawyers and the male lawyers in your orbits. The book, My Mom the Lawyer, by Louisville, KY lawyer/mom Michelle Browning Coughlin, hits all the marks of my own Best Friends at the Bar project for women lawyers. Like me, Michelle and her project, Mothers Esquire, are devoted to increasing retention and promotion rates for women lawyers. And, like me, Ms. Coughlin also extends her project to male lawyers, who are parents and caregivers.…
Young Lawyers Need to Own Their Careers and Increase Their Visibility
By Susan Smith Blakely • November 20, 2019 •Careers, Firms and the Private Sector
The mission of Best Friends at the Bar is to make all young lawyers succeed in practice. I speak and write to advance this mission, and, this Fall alone, I will have delivered at least five programs on the issues of most importance to that mission --- programs specific to millennial lawyers, programs specific to the success of women lawyers, and programs about the responsibility of senior lawyers to take measures to retain and advance young lawyers. One of the most popular programs I present focuses on "Owning Your Career and Reinvention." I delivered messages about your responsibilities for owning and advancing…
Why Young Lawyers Need Business Plans
By Susan Smith Blakely • October 31, 2019 •Careers, Other Career Issues
As a young lawyer, a business plan may be the farthest thing from your mind. Billing hours, making your numbers, trying not to look stupid to the partner and, well, just surviving in law practice in the early years are what occupy you. I understand and remember. But, don't dismiss having a business plan as some other-worldly exercise that is not worthy of your time. It is more than worthy. I have been preaching --- yes, preaching --- to young women lawyers about the importance of career plans for over a decade, and business plans are the same thing. All…
A Case of Outrageous Advice for Women in Business
By Susan Smith Blakely • October 24, 2019 •Careers, Other Career Issues
Consider this advice for women in business: Women’s brains absorb information like pancakes soak up syrup so it’s hard for them to focus. Men’s brains are more like waffles. They’re better able to focus because the information collects in each little waffle square. Surely this would be from some gender-insensitive and stereotype-infused speaker or handbook of yore. That is what you would think. And you would be wrong. And then imagine me as so completely shocked, dismayed and outraged when I read this quote in a recent article in Huffington Post Business that I let out a primal scream. For over a decade…
How Women Lawyers Are Perceived: The Double Bind
By Susan Smith Blakely • October 16, 2019 •Careers, Firms and the Private Sector
Perception can be more important than fact. I learned that when I was Chief of Staff for an elected official. Politics is ripe for misperception, but the applications go far beyond that setting. Women often are the unfortunate recipients of misperceptions. And that is especially true of women lawyers. For example, women lawyers often are judged in a harsher light than their male counterparts when they display assertiveness, self-promotion or anger, according to a survey conducted by the Center for WorkLife Law at UC Hastings College of Law for the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession and the Minority Corporate Counsel…
Young Lawyers Should Reach for Their Dreams: The Example of Belva Lookwood
By Susan Smith Blakely • October 10, 2019 •Careers, Firms and the Private Sector
This blog post is not only for women lawyers. It is for all young lawyers. It just happens that Belva Lockwood is one of the best examples of reaching for dreams of practicing law --- because of the lack of opportunities for women during her lifetime. So, you say, "Who is Belva Lockwood?" If you attend or attended George Washington University Law --- where she graduated from a predecessor law school there and where the Belva Lockwood Society is very active --- you would know. If not, it is much less likely that you ever have heard of her. I am fortunate…
Are You Addressing Your Workplace Wellness?
By Susan Smith Blakely • October 02, 2019 •Careers, Other Career Issues
Wellness is a big deal in the legal world today. Not wellness as in healthcare law. Wellness as in the mental and physical health of lawyers. We know that statistics support a concern about drug and alcohol addiction among lawyers, but until recently the effects of anxiety and depression had not gotten as much attention. It was a 2016 landmark study by the American Bar Association Commission on Lawyer Assistance Programs and the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation that revealed to me just how widespread and alarming the problems have become among lawyers. Anxiety and depression experienced by law professionals are serious and…
The Importance of Feedback for Millennial Lawyers
By Susan Smith Blakely • September 26, 2019 •Careers, Firms and the Private Sector
Millennial lawyers need feedback from supervising attorneys on a project basis --- not just once or twice a year in scheduled reviews. That is well-established. People in positions like mine hear it all the time, and we know how important feedback is to junior lawyers --- especially those who were raised with an abundance of feedback and mostly praise. What does not get as much attention is the critical failure by law firms to revise review policies and mentoring efforts to meet the feedback needs of young lawyers. As I have stated to law firm and bar association audiences…