On the Awkwardness of Being Networked

At some point in my first year of practice — I cannot identify the precise moment, but it was probably during a firm-sponsored "networking masterclass" delivered in a CBD hotel conference room — I had the disorienting experience of being instructed, in significant detail, on how to do something that I was fairly sure most of the people in the room already knew how to do, but that nobody had apparently told the organiser.

The instruction covered: how to hold a drink so that your right hand is free for handshakes; how to approach a group that is already talking; how to disengage from a conversation that has run its course; and how to follow up after a networking event with a personalised email that does not feel like a template. This last piece of advice was accompanied by a warning that the email should not feel like a template, immediately followed by a template.

I have thought, intermittently, about what was wrong with that session ever since. Because the advice was not incorrect, exactly. And yet something about it failed to describe anything recognisable about the way human professional relationships actually form.

What the received wisdom misses

The standard advice on professional networking treats relationship-building as a technical problem with technical solutions. Go to the right events, say the right things, follow up in the right way. The relationship is an output of a process, and the process is learnable.

What this misses is that relationships — professional relationships included — are not generated by process. They are generated by genuine engagement over time, in circumstances where the parties to the relationship have some actual interest in each other beyond the abstract utility of being connected. The handshake technique and the follow-up template are not wrong, in the sense that bad form will not help. But they are not sufficient, in the sense that good form without substance produces nothing.

The professional relationships that have been genuinely useful to me — the ones that led to introductions, opportunities, collaborative work, or simply the pleasure of a periodic conversation with someone whose perspective I find interesting — have, without exception, originated in a context where there was some genuine content to the interaction. A matter worked on together, an event panel where the discussion was substantive, a conversation about a case or a legal development where the two parties were both actually engaged.

The cocktail function at which you circulate systematically through a room of people who are also systematically circulating produces, in my experience, business cards and LinkedIn connections. Occasionally it produces a conversation that goes somewhere. The ratio of investment to outcome is, candidly, not great.

What does work

The professional relationships that compound over time tend to originate in contexts that are activity-centred rather than networking-centred. Mooting competitions and law school events where the interaction was about a shared intellectual problem. Industry working groups or professional association committees where the work was real and the relationships formed around it. Matters where the client's complexity required genuine collaboration between lawyers from different firms or different practice areas.

The implication I draw from this is not that structured networking events are useless — they are not, and the serendipity argument for attending them has some genuine force. It is that the investment of time and energy should be weighted toward the contexts where genuine engagement is likely, rather than toward the events where the primary purpose is the exchange of contact details.

For junior lawyers in particular: join things. The Law Society's Young Lawyers group, the section committees of the relevant specialist law associations, the pro bono programmes that put you in the room with practitioners from other firms working on shared problems. The relationships will form from the work, not from the intention to form them.

The social media dimension

I should say something about LinkedIn, which has become, for better or worse, the platform on which a significant proportion of legal professional networking activity now occurs. My relationship with it is, I think, the honest relationship that most junior lawyers have and few publicly admit to: I use it, I find it occasionally useful for the passive maintenance of a professional presence, and I find much of its content somewhere between mildly useful and actively demoralising.

The content that is most valuable on any professional platform is the content that reflects genuine expertise and genuine thought. The post that briefly illuminates a legal development, that offers a specific observation about a practice issue, or that shares something learned in the course of real work — that content has value proportionate to the quality of the thinking behind it. The content that is primarily designed to demonstrate that the poster is the kind of person who posts engaging content tends to reveal, over time, exactly that.

The rule I have settled on: post when you have something specific and useful to say, and not at a frequency that requires you to have something specific and useful to say more often than you actually do. It is a modest standard. I find it sufficient.

Author is using a pseudonym.