The Unwritten Rules: What I Tell Every Mentee
Five Truths That Can Make—or Break—a Legal Career
August 2026
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The most important rules of a legal career are the ones nobody teaches you. Law school covers the law itself, and your first year at a firm covers the craft—how to research, how to write a brief, how to put a filing together the way a particular court wants it. But neither teaches you how the profession actually works once you’re inside it. Nobody explains who holds the real power, what partners want from you and never quite say, or why two equally talented associates can end up in very different places five years later.
I’ve talked to hundreds of law students and junior lawyers over the past decade, and their questions are more alike than you might expect. They are rarely about the law. They are about why a partner suddenly went quiet, why the work dried up, and how to tell if you’re doing well. These concerns all trace back to the same unwritten rules about staffing, reputation, and how careers actually get built, particularly in Big Law.
What I tell them rarely changes, so I finally wrote it down. Below are five rules I wish someone had told me when I was starting out as a first-generation lawyer. They hold true across the board, irrespective of firm or practice group.
1. Where you start is not where you end up.
This is the first thing I tell people, and most of them do not believe me when I say it. The first job, the first practice area, the first firm—none of it locks you in for life. I’ve watched people start in litigation and end up in corporate, start in Big Law and end up in-house at companies they love, and start in a small firm in a small city and end up running a national practice from a place they chose deliberately. I’ve also seen people start in law and end up in public policy, politics, consulting, venture capital, journalism, entrepreneurship, or nonprofit leadership—the list keeps getting longer.
The idea that where you start decides where you end up is comforting in a way, because it gives you something to blame. But it’s also wrong. The legal profession is more porous than the people inside it will admit, and the careers that look the most coherent in retrospect were almost always built through a series of pivots that did not feel coherent at the time. Take your first job seriously but don’t mistake it for a lifelong verdict. Case in point: me. I worked for several years before law school and did not participate in on-campus interviewing. I started as an IP lawyer at Microsoft, moved to Perkins Coie in the Tech Transactions group, shifted to commercial litigation, and now work as a privacy, data security, and trust and safety lawyer.
2. You drive your career, not your mentor or your firm.
No one will ever care more about your career than you do, which means you are the one who gets to steer it. The single most common mistake early-career lawyers make is waiting to be invited. They wait for the partner to set up a regular check-in. They wait for the senior associate to ask how the assignment is going. They wait for someone to hand them work in the practice area they actually want. None of that is coming, and the people who advance are the ones who stop waiting to be noticed or contacted. They build real relationships with the people they want to learn from. They reach out first, ask for the feedback and help they need, and show up prepared.
This also means being deliberate about how you build value with the partners you work with. Learn the substance until you become a subject matter expert in your own right, not just someone who executes on what is handed to you. Use that depth to make the partners look good and their jobs easier—two of the most valuable currencies inside any firm. Become the person they think of first when something complicated comes up, and make yourself useful in ways that outlast any single assignment: keeping the case calendar and deadlines straight so nothing slips, tracking the documents and filings so the partner never has to ask where something is, anticipating the next step before being told, and suggesting ways to streamline how the team works or sharpen the client experience. A reputation for making the team effective—not a record of completed tasks—is what builds a real career.
3. Use AI, but don’t let it replace the work that builds your judgment.
This is the newest addition to the list, and it has become one of the most important things I say. You’re entering the profession at a real inflection point. AI is going to be part of how lawyers work for the rest of your career, and most of you arrive more fluent in these tools than the partners you will be working with. The question is not whether to use AI, because you should, but how to use it without undercutting the learning that makes you a competent lawyer five years from now.
Start with the rules. Using AI well as a lawyer is a different skill from using it well as a student, and a firm’s rules about it are tighter and more particular than anything you ran into in law school. Most firms are settling on some version of a traffic-light policy, where confidential client data in public tools is off limits, research and drafting require partner oversight, and only low-risk administrative work is fully open. Ask about your firm’s specific version on day one.
The rules tell you what you are allowed to do. The harder question is what you should do, even when the rules say you can. This is where a lot of people get into trouble, because AI can do a surprising amount of the work that used to be how junior lawyers learned the job. Reading the deposition transcript yourself, pulling the cases yourself, writing the first draft of the memo yourself—that work is how you actually learn to practice law. More precisely, it is how you build judgment, which is the ability to know what matters in a document, a record, or a set of facts, and what does not. Judgment comes from the friction of doing the underlying work and getting it wrong enough times to know what right feels like. AI removes the friction, and it removes the learning along with it. Outsource that work to a tool before you have done it enough times to know what good looks like, and you will end up with the credentials of a senior lawyer and the judgment of a first-year. Judgment is the one thing AI cannot replicate, at least not yet, and it is the reason you will still have a job in 10 years.
So use AI, and use it often, because the people who refuse to learn it will be at a real disadvantage. A few habits will keep you out of trouble while you do. Never paste confidential client information into a public AI tool, even to see what it can do. Verify everything a tool produces against the underlying source—every case, every fact, every quotation—because a hallucinated citation or a wrong fact that traces back to AI will follow you far longer than the assignment that produced it. And if you used AI to speed up part of an assignment, be transparent about it.
4. Be aware of the silent feedback problem, and take it seriously.
Big Law has a (silent) feedback problem. When a supervising attorney is unhappy with your work, the path of least resistance is to fix it themselves and move on—often without staffing you again—rather than walk you through what they would have done differently and give you a chance to fix it. That means you cannot wait for feedback to come to you. If you want to know how you are doing, you have to ask, and you have to ask regularly and specifically.
The vague “any feedback?” will usually be met with “looks great.” To get genuine feedback, you need to ask specific questions after an assignment: what worked, what didn’t, and what you should do differently next time. Supervising attorneys are also more likely to have something useful to say when they’ve had time to reflect rather than when you catch them between meetings. For this reason, a short, considered email often works better than asking them in the hall or firing off a quick Webex message. Then return to the same person on the next matter so you can see whether the change you made landed the way they intended.
Build the habit of asking for feedback. Most supervisors will respond to it. The ones who don’t are telling you—through their silence—where you should and should not be spending your energy.
5. Reputation starts now, and is built in every direction (not just upward).
Whether the milestone in front of you is an offer at the end of a summer or a strong review at the end of your first year, the decision is never based on one memo or one conversation. It is the accumulation of small moments—the email you sent, the meeting you were late to, the partner you had a good conversation with at coffee, the assistant whose name you did not bother to learn. The partner you met in your first week will remember whether you were prepared. The associate who handed you a research assignment will remember whether you turned it around on time. None of these moments will feel like much while you are in them, and that is the trap, because they are exactly what people remember when someone finally sits down to evaluate you.
What makes this harder is that reputation is not built only upward. Junior associates spend almost all of their energy on partners and senior associates and the people whose names appear on the matter team, and everyone else gets treated as background. That is a mistake, and it is one that compounds quietly enough that you might not notice it for years. Firms are smaller than they look from the outside. The legal assistant who supports the partner you want to work with sees every email you send. The paralegal on document review knows which juniors are easy to work with and which ones are condescending. The document services, conflicts, and docketing teams all talk to each other, and the picture they form of you is often more accurate than the one the partners have.
Hierarchies are not fixed, either. The fellow associate you barely acknowledged at a welcome lunch becomes someone’s general counsel in 15 years, and the second-year you snapped at on a Friday night becomes the hiring partner at the firm you are trying to lateral into. The legal world is small, careers are long, and the seating chart rearranges itself constantly. The way you treat the people who cannot do anything for you right now is the truest read on your professionalism, and any one of them could be your boss, your client, or your reference in a few years.
So show up on time, answer your emails promptly, learn the names of the people around you no matter where they sit, and be the version of yourself you would want a partner to introduce to a client.
Final Thoughts
Learn these rules early, and the rest of your career will be easier to figure out. Notice that none of them are about being the best student—the one thing school spent years training you to be. Instead, they reward something quieter: paying attention to how the profession actually works and to the people who make it run, up and down the org chart.
The lawyers I’ve watched build careers worth wanting were rarely the ones who arrived with everything figured out. They were the ones who stayed curious and understood that a career is the sum of a thousand small choices rather than a few large ones. Stay curious, treat people well, and the rest tends to follow.
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