What BigLaw Teaches You to Expect
If you have spent any significant time in a large law firm, you have probably absorbed a set of assumptions about professional development without realizing you absorbed them.
The firm covers CLE. The firm brings in speakers. The firm decides which training programs associates attend, which coaches get hired for business development, which leadership curriculum gets rolled out to senior associates approaching partnership. Your development, in this model, is something the institution provides. You show up, you participate, and you wait for the firm to tell you what you need to know.
I operated inside that assumption for years. I was not passive about my career. I worked hard, I took professional development seriously, I engaged with every program the firm offered. I worked with marketing coaches the firm hired. I worked with business development coaches the firm brought in. For a period of time when I was a “Rising Star,” I even worked with a life coach the firm sponsored.
But I never thought to hire a coach myself.
It simply did not occur to me that this was something I was supposed to do individually. The firm had always provided it. I was waiting, without knowing I was waiting, for the institution to give me the thing I actually needed.
The Limits of Firm-Sponsored Development
Here is what I eventually understood: firm-sponsored development is commissioned for a purpose the organization defines. And that is different from development you choose, fund, and direct yourself.
This is not a cynical observation. It is an honest one about how incentives and mandates work. The coaches the firm hires are often very good at what they do. But the engagement exists because the organization commissioned it for a particular purpose, usually to make you more effective within the institution and around objectives the institution has identified as valuable.
What that kind of engagement cannot always do as easily is begin with the more open-ended question: what do you need, given the career and life you are actually trying to build?
That matters, because sometimes the answer is not “succeed more efficiently inside this firm.” Sometimes the question you need help answering is one the firm did not (and would not) commission anyone to help you figure out.
There is also another dimension to professional development that institutions are not always designed to reach. The work that changes how you experience your career is not necessarily purely professional. It may reach into your upbringing, your socialization, your assumptions about who gets to succeed, what ambition is supposed to look like, and what you believe it costs to take up space.
Why do you freeze when a senior partner dismisses you in a meeting? Why do you struggle to tell people you want partnership? Why is it easier to just work harder than to ask for credit? Why do you assume that being excellent should be enough to make someone notice you?
Those are not CLE questions. They are not easily addressed through a lunch-and-learn.
The deeper and more individualized the work becomes, the more valuable it can be to have chosen the person, defined the objective, and created a relationship whose purpose begins with what you need rather than with an organizational mandate.
The Development I Didn't Know I Needed
I had been stuck in the way that signals something is wrong for several years before anything changed. I was a relatively new junior partner. I had made it to the destination I had been working toward for over a decade. And something still was not right, in a way I could not fully name and the firm’s programming had never touched.
Then I found a podcast.
A coach who worked with attorneys in BigLaw was talking about the experience of being a woman lawyer in a large firm: the imposter syndrome, the business development struggles, the particular weight of navigating an institution that was not designed with you in mind.
She named things I had been experiencing for years without having language for them.
I did not need more CLE. I did not need another marketing coach.
I had been receiving development for the lawyer the firm needed me to become. I had never independently sought development for the person and professional I was actually trying to become.
I hired her.
It changed my career. It changed my life.
What Became Possible
The biggest shift was not tactical. It was conceptual.
Before working with a coach I had chosen for myself, I had been operating inside a false binary: either the environment was fine and my struggles were my fault, or the environment was problematic and the only honest response was to leave.
I could not find a way to hold both things at once, to acknowledge that the system had real inequities and still choose to stay and build something there.
My coach gave me the third option I had not seen.
You can name the systemic problem accurately. You can refuse to pretend the inequitable access is not real. And you can still decide, strategically and with clear eyes, to stay and build a career in the institution.
Those things are not in conflict.
Seeing them clearly, all three at once, is not compromise. It is sophistication.
That was the first time I had worked with someone who validated what I was experiencing without suggesting that the validation itself required me to leave. We could acknowledge the reality of my environment and then strategize within it.
That combination, honest about the external and strategic about the internal, is the foundation of everything I now teach.
The Questions We Rarely Separate
I see lawyers confuse two questions all the time.
The first is:
Would this investment materially help my career?
The second is:
Will my firm pay for it?
Those are not the same question.
A lawyer identifies a coach, a program, a conference, a credential, or some other resource she believes could help her. Then she asks whether the firm will reimburse it.
If the answer is no, the inquiry often ends there.
But the firm’s reimbursement decision answers a question about the firm’s budget, policies, priorities, or willingness to fund that particular kind of development.
It does not answer the question of whether the investment makes sense for you and your career.
BigLaw makes this especially easy to confuse because firms pay for so much. CLE. Bar dues. Conferences. Coaching. Leadership programs. Professional memberships.
After enough years inside that system, it becomes surprisingly easy to absorb the idea that professional development is something the institution should provide before it becomes something worth pursuing.
I absorbed it too.
And eventually I had to confront a much more useful question:
If this is something I believe could materially change the trajectory or experience of my career, why have I made my employer’s willingness to reimburse it the deciding factor?
A Disclosure Worth Making
At this point, I should acknowledge the obvious: I now make part of my living doing exactly this kind of work. So yes, I have a financial interest in the argument I am making.
But I came to the argument long before I had anything to sell.
I hired my own coach while I was still practicing law because I finally understood that the development I needed was not something my firm was responsible for identifying or providing.
That experience, and what it made possible, is ultimately why I built this practice.
What I Want You to Consider
Your firm absolutely should invest in your development. Take advantage of everything it offers.
But your firm is not responsible for building the entirety of the professional you are going to become.
That part belongs to you.
Sometimes that means investing your own money in development you chose because it serves the career you are actually trying to build, without waiting for the institution to decide that what you need is worth reimbursing.
Whether the firm will pay for something and whether it is worth investing in are two different questions.
The more important shift is recognizing that your professional development is not simply an employee benefit.
Your career is an asset you own.
You do not need your employer’s permission to invest in it.
Strategic Radical Acceptance™. This is not Resignation. This is Liberation. And it’s Strategy.
