Uncovering Your Natural Gifts as a Lawyer – Legal Up Virtual Conference 2025 by InfoTrack

Episode Notes

Transcript

Joe Scott:

Hello and welcome to On the Road with InfoTrack and Legal Talk Network. I’m Joe Scott, one of the programming coordinators at Legal Up the Annual Virtual Conference hosted by InfoTrack. Over the next few weeks, we’ll present special episodes of the On the Road Podcast to highlight some of the best insights from past events. This year’s keynote was presented by Chad Aboud, an individual who carries a drive for purpose, inner meaning and connection to every place he goes. Now, the Chief commercial Officer at Good Lawyer Chad, delivers this helpful discussion about uncovering your natural gifts as a lawyer to build a career in a way that is personally meaningful. We hope you enjoy this episode and don’t forget to pre-register for the next Legal Up Virtual conference at Legal Up 2020 six.com.

Chad Aboud:

What are my greatest at? That’s easy for me. That’s fun. What is an environment in which I thrive and what is a goal that feels very fulfilling to me? That was what eventually brought me to Good Lawyer. Now I’m the Chief commercial Officer. Good lawyer, good lawyer is an alternative legal service provider providing fractional and full-time legal support to legal teams and businesses that have capacity overflow or need subject matter expertise. The good lawyer model. It’s not like this job was out there in the ether and I applied to it and got it. It came because for me, the path was stepping out of what I thought I was supposed to do based on my historic path, and instead taking the energy and time to deeply be reflective about who I am, what I’m about, and putting that out into the world so that I collided with the folks from Good Lawyer and it was more of an organic connection than blasting my CV to a million legal postings that a thousand other people have.

So that’s just my specific path. We’re all going to have our own way of getting there, but what I do want to show and share with you today are the three key kind of tenants that helped me get to this place where today I do honestly believe that I am doing exactly what I am meant to do in this phase of my life and that gives me peace, and that is really what I would want. For each of you that are considering this, I’m going to ask you a question for each of these kind of three key pillars today, and then we’re going to go through these kind of three main pillars. We’re going to help you uncover your natural gifts. We’re going to help bring those into goals that are very meaningful for you, and then we’re going to uncover the best fit environments in which you thrive.

And then I’m going to capture these in the three quick takeaways that you can use on your own, even if you don’t want to do it right now. What we’re going to now is we’re going to start dialing into the first pillar so that you can start understanding about how you uncover your most natural gifts. So when you think about a natural gift and each of you will have multiple, here’s how you can start thinking about them. These are things that you do not need carrots or sticks to do. You do not need to be incentivized or threatened to take these actions. They are things that feel very automatic for you and you do them without being pushed to do lots of formal training. You’re drawn to these things and the reason why you’re drawn to them is because they actually give you energy to do it.

My example there is I will have more energy at the end of this presentation than I will before. That’s a good signal to me that this is something that’s very accretive to my life because it’s leveraging a collection of gifts that I believe I uniquely have to offer. And what I think you’ll find is you’ve been doing these things most of your life. And so I’m going to give you a question now, and we’re just going to take 30 seconds here. Think about something that a team member has said to you that had a really, they said, you really had a big impact on my work or on me. This is what you did. You might’ve even felt surprised that it was meaningful to them. This is going to be a really helpful thought starter for you on this first pillar to continue reflecting on and sharing with your community, whether that’s in person or in broader events or online about the types of things that you do for people that you’ve always done.

They bring you energy to do it. It’s easy, it’s automatic, it’s funny. These things that we do very easily, we think they’re easy for everyone else. They’re not speaking publicly. It’s not something that everyone enjoys writing white papers, not something everyone enjoys. Building processes, not something everyone enjoys, lifting other people up, not everyone’s bag. And so we forget that as the owner of our own gifts, we think, oh my gosh, it’s so easy for me. This must either be not valuable or easy for everyone else. And that’s actually not the case because we’re all different. And so even if you think, oh, this thing isn’t that big of a deal, write it down anyway because I bet you and from coaching probably a hundred or more lawyers in my dime is that when you start capturing these notes and then sharing them with other people, you would be surprised about the consistency of feedback you will get about how impactful you’ve been.

So here’s the second pillar. Right now what we’ve got is we’ve got the beginning of reflections about our most natural gifts. The second thing is driving those gifts towards missions industries, goals that are meaningful for you, doubles or triples the impact of your gifts. And I’ll give you the example from myself is that I’ve always loved helping people do two things, figure out what they’re greatest at, and two, building a path forward that is really practical and efficient. I will take incremental wins over theoretical big ideas any day of the week because if there’s no actual progress, I don’t really care. I really value seeing the movement forward. So in lawyer’s careers, that’s what I really helped them do, and that’s what I continue to do with good lawyers, helping people design careers that bring out their best, but also build a path forward. Now, as a gc, I was able to do that by helping folks in account management team or helping other people in the legal team or salespeople kind of like do the most in their role, or I was able to help build legal ops processes or help the sales ops build processes and that’s good, but with good lawyer now, not only am I driving my gifts, I am leveraging them towards a purpose that is very meaningful to me.

That is the improvement of lawyer careers and the improvement of how legal services are delivered and received and leveraged. So that’s why infusing your gifts towards really meaningful goals makes it so much more impactful. So how do you figure out what goals are meaningful? What industries or passions are meaningful to you? Think about events that you look forward to going to. These aren’t the ones that you’re forced to go to all the time, but they’re events where you’re like, oh, I can’t wait to go to this thing. Or maybe it’s books that you read, podcasts you listen to. Maybe it’s projects where you’re excited to contribute regardless of if you were told by your manager you had to do it. And I’m not saying anyone’s going to be doing work for free, but think about the concept of I’d do this even if I wasn’t getting paid.

I’m glad I’m getting paid, but I’d do this even if I wasn’t in a different world. What you’re going to start to get here is themes around stuff that you are drawn to, missions you’re drawn to, activities that you’re drawn to, and that is going to feel more like you are swimming with the current instead of swimming upstream. And so here’s why this matters. You’re going to be working hard anyway, whether you’re in legal ops, you’re a paralegal, you’re a lawyer, whatever it is you’re doing with your career, you’re always working hard. It’s a difficult industry, it’s challenging, it’s complex for all of the puts and takes that the legal industry, how it’s developed. But technical skills, while they’re important are becoming more commoditized at different levels, right? The way that technology allows us to operate faster, more consistently, leverage deeper and deeper resources, you are already working super hard and your technical skills, these things are not necessarily the differentiator for most of us anymore.

Also, it’s hard to step back and take the time to figure out what industries or mission really matters to you, but simply mirroring someone else’s career path. For me, it just wasn’t enough. When I was in big law, when I was in different industries, when I was gc, a lot of the time what I was doing was I was looking ahead to peers or people that were at a different agent stage than me and trying to mirror what they had, but really I was becoming a derivative of them. I wasn’t maximizing my own abilities and my own life, and I couldn’t even replicate theirs because all I was doing was trying to mimic whatever it is that they were doing. And for me, it just wasn’t enough. But what I do want to offer you is it is quicker than you think to start moving the needle.

And one concept, and I talk about this a lot in my TEDx, if you want more of a three or four minute debrief on that, but it’s something called job crafting. And I like actually throwing the word positive job crafting in the front. So job crafting, if you haven’t heard of it, is a concept where you’re doing kind of the assessment and the analysis of the topics we’re talking about today, what you’re greatest at, where you like to work, what missions matter to you, and then you slowly start bringing them into your career. Here’s an example of how you could do it. Say that I had to lead a standup for my function and listen, I ought do this for at good lawyer. I’ve got a report on OKRs, KPIs, whatever you call them. I’ve got to speak on this. If Brett Colvin, the CEO was saying, Hey, everyone, we’re doing this purely through written format.

Now I’d call him and say, I don’t really think that’s the best for me because that’s not the best way that I like to communicate. I find it painful, I find it slow. I don’t find I can connect in the same way. My ideas don’t jump out at the same rate or with the same creativity. And listen, like I said at the beginning, of course, you generally get more leverage to design your career as you go on. So it’s not like a light switch that you just get to turn it on and dictate your terms. But if you never start, you never get anywhere. And so if you’re in a function or in a role where you feel like, okay, I can’t dictate all the terms, but there is this one meeting every week, and I would sure rather present through canvas slides instead of talking just in real time or I would definitely rather send a brief ahead of time, talk to your manager about what’s possible, because if you never ask, you’ll never find out.

What I’ve found in building teams and bringing folks on and building my own career is that the more we communicate about how we can positively impact and become really specific about lightweight ways that we can design our career and our impact towards it, usually you get a pretty receptive audience. And that really leads me to the last piece here about when you are doing work that leverages your gifts in a space that is meaningful to you, it is way more fun for you. And when you are in an environment in which you feel excited, passionate, that you deeply care, that is contagious, that’s a bonding agent, right? All you have to do is think about and so many folks in the legal industry here getting pitched with cold emails and dms all the time, think about those conversations that you’ve had. If you’ve taken any of those cold calls or maybe you’ve been doing kind of a vendor scoping and you’re doing a bunch of demos, think about the folks that feel like they’re having fun, they’re professional, but they’re having fun because they’re driven.

They feel the mission. You feel more engaged often to listen, to learn more, to be more engaged in the time that you’re with them. Well, you can deliver that same impact to the people around you if you are leveraging your gifts, if you’re job crafting a bit more to bring those into your career. If you’re angling more of your work towards missions or projects that are very meaningful for you, and if you frame it up as like, I can drive more value for the company or for the function by doing this and offer a very lightweight thing, you’re not asking for different money, you’re not asking for different resources, just maybe a different way in which you present or a team that you want to support with an extra 10% of your time, typically, you’re going to get a great response if you do not get a positive response.

And if that no response makes no sense to you, that’s a really helpful data point. Nothing has to change tomorrow in terms of your time with that job, but it’s a good data point to know because that way you can say to yourself, maybe that gives you a bit more courage and permission that you do want to start figuring out the next phase of your career. And so no matter what, if you ask, you get a lot of valuable feedback, and I honestly feel like it’s got to be in the 75 to 85% of the time, you get some sort of positive response At a bare minimum, people know you’re engaged, you care, you want to deliver more. So here’s question two, takes 30 seconds to write down what is a topic that you’re drawn to learning more about. And then kind of a little bonus point for yourself is once you’ve kind of thought about themes, missions, projects, industries that you’re very drawn to, maybe put a subnote for yourself about is there a really lightweight way that I could job craft a bit more of that into my day?

It might just be your style. It might be who you spend a little bit extra time working with. It might be a side project that isn’t getting enough love by the company that you’re like, Hey, I’ll put in a recurring meeting with a couple of key stakeholders. I would love to do that off the side of my desk to drive it forward. The third pillar is ideally we come out of this having a better sense of our natural gifts and missions or industries that are very compelling to us. The third piece is the environment in which you thrive. You can operate in lots of environments. We all have. I’ve operated in big professional services in large retail, in pe, back tech, and now I’m in much more agile earlier stage company in the A LSP space, I’ve worked in person with lots of people. I’ve worked fully remote as all of you have had your version of this.

I’ve worked with people who are more formal versus informal. Larger teams, smaller teams, places where you have tons of autonomy and places where their arms are wrapped around it a little bit more. There aren’t right and wrong answers here. There are right and wrong answers for you, and this is the work. Really uncovering these things is such a core foundation of building your career because if you do not know the answers to these questions, all we can do is send out CVS to job applications. But when we know the answers to these things, we can actually speak what we care about into the world. And the more that we do that in our close-knit communities and larger communities like events like this, and on socials, you can actually draw incredible opportunities to you. So for you think about different dynamics of different environments, both personally and professionally that you’ve been in that have felt very meaningful to you.

What are the characteristics of these groups that have helped you thrive? You feel at home, but I don’t want to let this feel at home thing sound like laziness. No, I don’t mean you feel at home. So you just lie down and you don’t do any work. Of course not everyone’s a big time operator that’s here and has lots of professional pride in their work quality. What I mean is you feel comfortable to be yourself and encouraged to be more of yourself when you’re thinking about this in the professional setting is think about groups where people have seen your talent, they’ve seen your passion, and they’ve encouraged you to bring more of that out and start writing down what those characteristics look like. Some of them, maybe for some people you like a more formal structured environment. It helps you focus. It helps you drive your value.

Some people might like a really flexible, informal environment where you’ve got to kind of design it yourself and it’s a bit more friendly. I have close friends as we all do that, different environments. So there’s no right or wrong here. It’s just right or wrong for you. And this is the work across these three pillars so that you put it down on the page. Because if you don’t do that, it is really hard to share it with the world. So we’ve got these three pillars captured here. These are the three questions to write for yourself. And here’s what I’d really encourage in question one, ask three different people in your life, family member, friend, coworker slash former coworker, ask them the question of what do you see me do to lift others that doesn’t require a carrot or stick for me to do it? I asked you to ask that of yourself.

You will get incredible data points if you ask those three people. And the reason why I say those three different kind of personas is what I have seen every single time I have done this in lawyer coaching is the answers are 90% the same and the other 10%, they’re basically the same thing in different words. And that’s because you’ve been doing it your entire life. You are great at it because you think about it a lot. You spend a lot of energy towards it. It’s very automatic for you, and that makes it very impactful. The second piece is noticing what you do in your off time. So for me, I gave the example of I build time into working out and listening to these podcasts. I do it at the same time so I can stack those benefits. Notice it. Notice what you are drawn to start to uncover.

I just don’t think to myself, oh, I like the Adam Grant podcast. He has famous guests. No, I think, okay, what is the point of the podcast? Human dynamics. Okay, so what is the magic of human dynamics? How does that come into our careers? Start to ask the second and third and fourth level questions down so that you can understand why am I drawn to this? And then once you do, start telling your people, your mentors, your managers, your friends, that you care about it, whether you’re kind of in the foundational, where should I take my career conversation with people that you believe care about you will be respectful about your career aspirations, or you’re in the tactical. I think I’m in a pretty good job, but I think it could mean more to me and I could drive more impact. And what kind of tactical things can I do in my day that my manager can help me do?

Tell people, make it a lightweight lift on them and give them a pathway where you think you can test whether you can drive value or not. You’ll typically get quite a great reception. The third one is the environment. Think about those past group dynamics that brought out your best, and then have your eyes open to teams that line up with that. So in a law firm is actually a really good place to do this. I know not all of us are in law firms anymore, but there’s lots of sub teams in firms. And so you can see what are the dynamics, more autonomy, less autonomy, whatever it is. Funnier, more serious, even in corporate settings where your legal team might not be big enough to have lots of subteams. You can look at other business functions and you can see how do they operate, what do they value? And you can start capturing those data points that are very meaningful for you. If

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