Decide Who Deserves Your Energy
July 17, 2026
You Have a Finite Amount of Professional Capital. Most People Spend It in Exactly the Wrong Places. The third time opposing counsel mistook me for
You Have a Finite Amount of Professional Capital. Most People Spend It in Exactly the Wrong Places. The third time opposing counsel mistook me for
Erika R. Royal, Esq. is the founder of Royal Influence® and creator of Strategic Radical Acceptance™. She spent 22 years as an employment attorney and Partner at an AmLaw 100 firm. She works with underrepresented senior associates and newly minted partners navigating BigLaw, and with organizations ready to give their people real tools for the real environment they’re operating in.
A Strategic Diagnostic for Senior Associates, Counsel, and Newly Promoted Partners in BigLaw
Excellent legal work builds credibility. Partnership and long-term influence require a clear understanding of the relationships, visibility, economics, and informal systems that shape advancement.
The Partner Influence Toolkit helps you assess where you actually stand by separating evidence from assumption, mapping the people who influence your trajectory, examining how visible and correctly attributed your contributions are, reading the informal systems inside your firm, and identifying the strategic moves that deserve your attention now.
Use the Toolkit as a strategic mirror to understand your current position, uncover gaps in relationships, visibility, business development, institutional intelligence, or agency, and decide where to focus next.