Years ago, I asked a junior lawyer who worked for me to build a template. The business regularly had to send a particular type of request to a government agency, and they wanted something they could use to draft the requests themselves.

She delivered great work. The template did exactly what it needed to do, and as far as I was concerned, the assignment was done.

Two weeks later, without anyone asking, she checked in with the business team to see how the template was working. It was working well, but they were getting slowed down by the same questions that came back from the agency. So she took the feedback and made adjustments, so that the template anticipated and responded to the agency’s most common follow-up questions.

Her level of ownership made it clear she was ready for more responsibility.

Plenty of lawyers produce good work. What set her apart was that she cared whether her work helped the people using it, and she went and found out. Most of the habits that mark a lawyer as ready for the next level look like that: small, unassigned, and easy to skip.

Here are five I look for.

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In-house lawyers get a lot of requests. Depending on the company and the lawyer’s role, they may come from inside the legal department or from colleagues in other departments. Sometimes the requests are well thought out and include all the background you need to do the job well. Other times . . . not so much.

A lawyer who wants to do a great job will naturally want to get started right away. They want to finish the work and get it back to the requester as fast as possible.

A promotable lawyer is more strategic.

Before starting a task, they ask questions of themselves, the requester, or someone else. They want to be sure the result they deliver matches what the requester asked for and also makes sense for the business.

For example, a request comes in from the sales team for a bespoke contract with a large prospective customer, built around terms the customer sent over. The eager lawyer starts marking up the customer’s paper and sends it back the same afternoon, pleased with the turnaround.

The promotable lawyer asks a few questions first. How big is this deal? Which of the customer’s terms are dealbreakers for them, and which are just their template? Would our standard agreement work with a couple of targeted changes? If we agree to these terms, will the next ten customers ask for them too?

Sometimes the bespoke contract really is the right answer. Sometimes the standard agreement works fine, with a short explanation the sales rep can pass along. Either way, the lawyer who asked first is solving the actual problem.

If you want a longer list to keep handy, here are the 10 questions I ask on repeat, including the one that would have saved my team hours of redlining a contract that was never going to change.

To be clear, I’m not saying you should slow everything down. Most of these questions take five minutes. They often save you a lot more than that.

When the contract gets signed, or the memo goes out, a lot of lawyers consider their job done.

Lawyers who are ready for more keep going. Whether or not it is explicitly their job, they make it their job to know whether the deal closed, the business followed their advice, or the policy changed anyone’s behavior. If something stalled, they find out why.

A legal technician may measure success by the quality of their work product. But a business-minded lawyer, one who is truly part of the business and building alongside colleagues outside of legal, and one who is ready for promotion, measures it by what happens next. Because they understand that a perfect memo that sits unread in someone’s inbox didn’t help anyone.

In practice, this can be as simple as putting a reminder on your calendar to check in two weeks after you hand something off. “Did the customer push back on the limitation of liability?” “Is the team using the new approval process, or working around it?” Those questions tell you whether your work landed. They also show your colleagues that you care about their results, and not just about getting the request off your desk.