Are You Making Your Case or Apologizing for It?
October 9, 2026
In 2007, my ninth year at the firm, I applied for a program called Rising Stars. Each year the firm selected five women who were
In 2007, my ninth year at the firm, I applied for a program called Rising Stars. Each year the firm selected five women who were
You know the move. The evaluation form lands in your inbox, you find last year’s file, and you click “Save As.” New year in the
The lunch was already annoying before anyone asked me anything. It was an associates’ lunch on the “path to partnership,” and the speaker was a
The Summer We Started In the summer of 1997, I was a second-year law student working as a summer associate at a large law firm
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
The Opportunity One day, when I was a junior associate in my firm’s Miami office, an equity partner I did not work for called me
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.