
Decide Who Deserves Your Energy
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

Your Firm Says It Is Returning to Merit. The Question Nobody Asks Is: Returning From Where? Lately, I keep hearing law firms talk about “returning

Stay or Go Is the Wrong Question. The Right One Is Whether You Ever Chose. It usually happens late at night. You are doing the

Everyone Else Seems to Know the Rules. You Were Handed a Different Map. When I was a first-year law student at Harvard, I wrote to

For most of my time at my law firm, I was not a passive participant in its diversity and inclusion efforts. I was a Women’s

When I arrived at my law firm, I had one primary goal that had nothing to do with the practice of law. I wanted to
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.