> Category: Law Management

Want To Stand Out As A Lawyer?

LawFuel - The Law Jobs and Legal NewsWire

By Karen Shapiro* Once the freshness of starting a new legal job dissipates, some lawyers can experience a sense of malaise that may come in part from feeling like their uniqueness just doesn't matter. There may be a sense of serving as a mere "cog in the wheel" of legal machinery. While the legal work produced may at times seem rote or somewhat factory-driven, the truth of the matter is lawyers are not simply interchangeable, fungible beings. You are each unique individuals who have something distinct to offer.

One significant part of my job as a personal and professional coach is helping people focus on their key values, attributes and traits. Helping clients develop and cultivate their own unique brand can be a useful and fun way to help them get more clarity about what makes them special and how they want to present themselves to the world.

Branding yourself is one way to get more deeply connected to your particular and unique set of offerings and to outwardly convey them to the world.

In our culture, when we think of brands, we think of products and their slogans -- like Wheaties ("The Breakfast of Champions") or Bounty ("The Quicker Picker-Upper") or Visa ("It's Everywhere You Want to Be"). The idea behind these slogans is that they highlight for the outside world the very best aspects of the product represented, so people come to remember and appreciate these products for their specific strengths.

Similarly, when you work on branding yourself, you help other people know better what you do well and why they should appreciate you.

Branding also contributes to your own self-knowledge and can serve as a guidepost or motivational tool to help you stay true to the best of who you can be. Your brand is a promise you make to yourself and to those who come to know and rely on the traits your particular brand signify. Left unattended, our brands are liable to be determined by someone else, in a potentially less than flattering fa...

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