Jason Feng knows all too well the growing pains of life as an early career lawyer. As an Associate for Pinsent Masons with seven years experience in the law, he found himself helping new lawyers master the practical, day to day skills you don’t learn in law school. This spurred him to start posting his practical tips on LinkedIn - and with hundreds of reactions and comments to his posts, he has become the go-to for down-to-earth advice on every day legal work.
We spoke to Jason about his latest initiative, practisinglaw.com.au, which provides practical step-by-step guides, like File Management for Junior Lawyers, or answers to FAQs. It’s an entirely free service that Jason contributes to the legal community.
What inspired you to create practisinglaw.com.au? What does the site provide, and how can junior lawyers benefit?
Like many lawyers, I felt there was a massive learning curve in the first few years of my career. Law school helps us start to think like lawyers, but it didn’t really prepare us for what it was like to work in a legal team or for day-to-day tasks. Meanwhile, it can be pretty stressful to learn on the job because we figure things out through making mistakes, but there’s also pressure to be mistake-free.
Now that I’ve been working for a few years, I’m in a position where I’m still learning, but can also pass on practical tips to newer lawyers in a relatable way. So I created a website to share the how-to guides and resources that I wish I had access to when I started. On www.practisinglaw.com.au, junior lawyers can find:
- short-form FAQs dealing with common workplace situations;
- longer-form articles on topics like career development, skills for modern legal teams (e.g. project management), productivity tips and work/life balance; and
- templates / resources / examples that can be applied to our everyday work.
Your Linkedin posts have become incredibly popular. What caused you to start posting tips for junior lawyers on linkedin? What are the key aspects of your most popular posts?
I was always curious about Linkedin. It seemed like everyone needed to have a profile, but nobody really used it because most lawyers didn’t find the content on it helpful. (I guess it was all the ‘honoured and humbled’ style posts).
When Covid lockdown started, I found myself doing virtual graduate training at my firm and thought I might as well try uploading some of the tips on Linkedin in case other junior lawyers who were working remotely would find it helpful. Turns out it was pretty useful and it’s just been gradually growing ever since.
I’ve had chats with many new lawyers and what resonates most with them is that:
- there are always step-by-step actions that they can take after reading my posts (instead of vague ‘sounds-good’ advice like “find a mentor” or “build your network”); and
- I’m not some sort of ‘super lawyer’ – I’ve made mistakes and shared what I’ve learned in a way that’s simple to understand and easy to follow.
How have lawyers responded to your linkedin posts and practisinglaw.com.au?
The response has been really positive. I’m really grateful because most of the career advice for juniors is written by super successful lawyers with 10+ years of experience. So I really didn’t know what people would think about the things I was sharing.
The best part has been all the people who have reached out to have a chat with me. The law students and newer lawyers have been really open with the issues that they’re facing so I can make sure I’m actually giving helpful advice. Quite a few experienced lawyers from around the world have offered to chip in with creating content or to collaborate because they’re passionate about helping junior lawyers as well.
It’s created some really cool opportunities for me to do more mentoring and training – which I never would have been able to if I didn’t start writing about this.
Where do you work now, and what does it involve?
Right now I’m working as a construction and projects lawyer at Pinsent Masons. In a nutshell, my job is to help construction companies deliver projects on time, within budget and of a high quality – without taking on unreasonable risks.
I’d say a lot of my work involves learning about how things are built, thinking about all of the different things that can realistically happen in a project, and reaching commercially sensible agreements on who should be responsible if those things happen.
On any given day, I could be helping companies bid for new projects, trying to minimise disputes, helping commercial teams understand their contracts or giving advice on how to deal with surprises from a legal perspective (like Covid!).
My clients (i.e. commercial and project managers, engineers, consultants, etc) are all trained to think really practically. So to keep up, I need to really understand what they’re doing and the real life consequences of any issue or solution.
What's the top piece of advice you wish a senior lawyer had told you in your first year of practising law?
As junior lawyers, we should create opportunities to play to our strengths and design our careers the way that we’d like.
When I started out, I definitely wasn’t proactive enough in getting involved in the interesting projects or trying to be known for things that I was excited about. I kind of just did the work that I was given and hoped that my career would somehow work out that way. My focus was to just fix up all the areas I was weak in (whether that was networking, or attention to detail, or dealing with disputes) instead of leveraging what I was good at.
Now I can see how easy it actually is for new lawyers to start becoming the ‘tech expert’, ‘BD person’ or whatever else they’re interested in from day 1. And it’s probably the best way to actually build self-confidence and create a more sustainable legal career.
It can be a bit daunting to overcome that initial self-doubt – I’ve tried breaking down the steps with a tech expert example here – but so worth it in the long run. If I can somehow become the guy that writes how-to guides for junior lawyers, then you can be anything you want.