Hi there! It’s Heather Stevenson.
Happy Wednesday and thanks for being here! Here’s what’s covered in today’s issue:
What’s changed about personal brand building in an AI world;
How to build a personal brand using the new playbook;
Links you'll love;
And More.
Let’s dive in.
In partnership with:
AI in legal work is becoming standard, expected, and in some cases mandated. But how well do you actually understand the technology you're relying on?
Where are AI's strengths and blind spots?
What's happening under the hood of your AI tool?
How does your AI fluency compare to your peers?
Most in-house lawyers don’t know what they don’t know about AI or how to fill the gaps in their knowledge.
Take our Legal AI Readiness Quiz to find out where you stand. In five minutes, you'll answer questions across three scored categories and get a personalized class recommendation based on your results.
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Deep Dive
When no one knows you . . .
Several years ago, I realized that I needed to do some work to build my personal brand as an in-house lawyer.
The problem with my brand, at least as a lawyer in Boston, was that it did not exist.
I had joined Boston Globe Media Partners as Legal Counsel after a few years away from the law, building my business. My previous legal experience was as a big law litigator in New York.
People who knew me in Boston knew me either from time spent growing up together before I moved to New York for college, or from my years as a juice bar and wellness entrepreneur. Both of those reputations were positive, but not particularly useful for a person looking to build an in-house career.
So I decided to start building. I started attending in-person networking events, making an effort to re-connect with lawyers who I knew in Boston but hadn’t seen in a while, and almost as an afterthought (at first) I started posting on LinkedIn.
And then, the Covid-19 pandemic hit and Boston shut down. I moved all of my networking and brand building efforts online, and the community I started to build felt especially important during a time period when I really missed being around people.
By the time we were back to regular in-person events, I’d built a meaningful community of Boston based lawyers with whom I talked regularly, and a larger national network of lawyers who I “knew” from LinkedIn, networking events, and online events in which I’d participated as a presenter or guest.
And those online ties - both the close ones, where I spoke to people almost daily, and the loose ones, of people whose posts I occasionally commented on - opened in-person doors. My LinkedIn presence played a role in my getting connected to Red Cell, where I’ve been GC for the past four years, and led to my joining the board of Legal Mentor Network, to name just two examples.
What’s Changed
Building a professional brand online, especially from 2020 through 2022 when Covid was ever-present and in person networking opportunities sparse, made sense and was relatively straightforward to do.
You showed up on LinkedIn, shared thoughtful ideas, and engaged online and “met” other lawyers. Your LinkedIn presence got you invitations to write for existing digital legal publications, or to speak on online panels. It was work and it could feel exhausting in a time when the world was already so heavy, but the playbook was clear and in retrospect, the rewards were clearly worth it.
Significantly: that online presence opened in-person doors, because people Googled you—or went straight to your LinkedIn—and saw both who you knew in common, and what you stood for.
During that time period, some lawyers started to build on other platforms like Instagram and TikTok, others became active on Twitter, and a few others started blogs or newsletters. Any of those playbooks worked, and LinkedIn felt like a safe simple bet.
The Old Playbook Doesn’t Work Anymore
With the ubiquity of AI, the amount of similar looking content online is overwhelming. And “how to” content without some unique angle or story has become less useful, because AI writes it too (I found this take, including data, from Tim Ferriss, interesting: Has AI Already Killed How-To Nonfiction? Sales Trends, My Personal Data, and What It Might Mean for the Future). This makes it harder to cut through the noise when you post online, and less likely that others who you want to know (and who you want to know you) will find you.
If you struggle to build a brand and community online, it becomes harder to use those things to open in-person doors. This is not to say that building an online presence isn’t worth it, because it absolutely is. But you need to do it differently, and it can’t be your only strategy.
On top of that, the commoditization of certain legal work makes this more urgent than ever (more on this below).
