From the Yld President
| Publication year | 2022 |
| Pages | 0010 |
Fake It 'Til You Make It: Establishing Your Brand as a Young Lawyer
ELISSA B. HAYNES, YLD PRESIDENT STATE BAR OF GEORGIA
elissa.haynes@fmglaw.com
“Personal branding is about managing your name—even if you don’t own a business—in a world of misinformation, disinformation and semi-permanent Google records.” —Tim Ferris
Webster’s defines marketing as “the process or technique of promoting, selling, and distributing a product or service.”[1] Regardless of the type of law you practice, you market yourself daily. Personal injury attorneys may advertise on billboards and market to other lawyers in hopes of obtaining case referrals, while civil defense attorneys may direct their marketing efforts towards insurance carriers and other businesses. If you are a prosecutor or criminal defense attorney, you market yourself to the jury to “sell” your client’s position. And unless you are a solo practitioner, we, as young lawyers, market to our superiors to gain their trust or to get more desirable assignments. Ultimately, we all market directly to our target audience through our interactions and communications.
Marketing can have a different meaning depending on who you ask, but at its core, it is about building your brand. Some of us may have become lawyers because we looked up to another lawyer—wheth-er it was a someone we knew, a fictional TV or movie lawyer, or otherwise. If not, then I bet each of us can at least name a handful of lawyers who we view as the best in their respective areas of expertise. Think about those people and what draws you to them or makes them excel in their profession. Those defining traits are all a part of someone’s brand. We all convey a message, whether intentional or not. And to market effectively—in a way that resonates with our internal and external audiences—the message conveyed must be authentic.
In September 2015, after just a few months of being on the defense side of the ‘v,’ I had my first jury trial. A few weeks before trial, the partner on the case told me that I would be doing voir dire. I politely informed him that I had never tried a case and did not know the first thing about voir dire, to which he responded, “You’ll figure it out.” After painfully “figuring it out,” I spent the rest of the trial studying the partner’s opening statement, cross-examinations and closing argument, while noting his style, catchphras-es and...
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