Alisa Peskin-Shepherd, at the beginning of Transitions Legal
Sometimes, despite nearly a dozen years of leading Transitions Legal, I like to look back on my legal career and reflect on how I gathered the confidence and the courage to go out on my own.
It was a gradual process, where I went from being an associate attorney in mid-sized law firms to joining two seasoned practitioners as their third partner, before starting my own firm. In that partnership, I had the support of knowing I was part of a team, but we brought in and worked on our own cases, so it was a good step toward becoming my own rainmaker.
Nobody was paying me, then; my income came from the cases I attracted and resolved. I was also responsible for expenses, albeit sharing those expenses with two seasoned practitioners who had been doing it for a while. I didn’t question things, I trusted them.
And then, when I felt ready to grow and take the next step in my professional career, the partnership dissolved over a difference in values, and that gave me the push to go out on my own 100%.
Lynne and I kayaking on the Huron River – friends and colleagues!
But I wondered how to get my name out there and even struggled with it for a while, until I found my marketing consultant and now good friend, Lynne Golodner. We met through a mutual friend. I hadn’t even come up with a name for my new law firm. Lynne helped me settle on branding, identity, marketing messages, everything—from website to social media to public relations to strategy. We still work together to this day, and now I’m known for my thoughtful, unique branding and marketing, and other attorneys are copying what I’ve been doing since 2013.
But it wasn’t just confidence that came out of that relationship. It was the wisdom that a professional needs the support of other professionals to really make their mark. Yes, I am an accomplished attorney. I am the expert on Family Law.
But any entrepreneur needs a team to run their business. What I learned from Lynne was to trust myself to spend the money and that by hiring the right support professionals, it would generate income, build my credibility, build my business.
That’s been the biggest lesson of all: to know what I do well and farm out what may not be my strong suit (like bookkeeping).
Creating a team of experts has given me the confidence to grow. Finding the right people for every role. Because I don’t have time to do everything, so I have to trust other people to get the job done right.