When our 2024 Dallas Bar Association President Bill Mateja asked me, just about a year ago, to spearhead what he called a “go-getter” series for the DBA, I was intrigued.
He told me that his theme for the year was getting bar members “back” to DBA headquarters for as many in-person events as possible, after such events took a big hit during the pandemic and the years following. In that regard, he wanted me to reflect on what I thought it meant to be a go-getter in today’s legal market and how it might be different today than when I started practicing law almost 40 years ago.
The legal landscape has certainly changed over the years. The dominant law firms of the late 1980s in Dallas either no longer exist or are no longer dominant. Many national firms that were barely known to Dallas lawyers decades ago are now the leading law firms in the city. My own firm, Winston & Strawn, didn’t have a presence outside Chicago when I started practicing law in Dallas and now counts Dallas as one of the firm’s largest and busiest offices. As co-chair of our firm’s litigation department here and abroad, I find myself helping to further the careers and success of not a handful of lawyers but nearly 500 of them.
As for the concept of go-getting, which Bill used as synonym for drive, ambition and hustle, the basic tenets of it are unchanged. To be a success in the legal profession hinges much more on how you work than where you work. Taking ownership of your own success and not expecting someone else to provide it for you is every bit as important today as it was 40 years ago. For me and many others my age, that has long meant being in the office and working long hours in and out of the office. Working from home meant taking work home, not working from home. But what the series revealed is that different generations have a different sense of what go-getting looks like today.
Our first panel last February was comprised of what I would call traditional go-getters, including Dallas trial lawyer Leon Carter and my Dallas trial lawyer partner LeElle Slifer. Both spoke passionately about the importance of putting in long hours, juggling family obligations and generally dedicating themselves to, and achieving, great professional success. Even though they came out of different generations, they seemed to have a consistent old-school approach. And proudly so.
The second panel in May was not billed as a reaction to the first panel but in some sense it was. Made up of younger lawyers from big firms, small firms and in-house legal departments, the message of excellence was the same, but the journey was different. Gregg Gallian, for example, spoke of working with his wife in a small firm environment, Hisham Masri described working in-house at Flowserve, and Serene Ateek addressed the larger firm environment. Jennifer Ryback and Haleigh Jones completed the panel with their own unique large and small firm experiences.
What the panel consistently messaged was the importance of the variability of the path to success and how it can be achieved and measured in different ways. It’s not that these lawyers weren’t hard workers. They most assuredly are. But for their generation in particular, hard work and success might look and feel different than it did in the past. At least sometimes, it includes remote work. Flexible hours are a given. Gone were the days when business development took place only at either elite downtown Dallas clubs or golf courses or fancy charitable events, for example. The traditional multiyear partnership track was also gone. These lawyers talked of their kids’ soccer games, vacations with friends and even social media connections as outlets for business development.
We ended the series with an all-female panel of distinguished judges and an equally distinguished trial lawyer who took the crowd through the unique journey of being a woman lawyer in Dallas over the decades. Their stories showed the incredible progress that has been made, but also the progress still necessary.
Veronica Moyé of King & Spalding noted the difference between how young male and female lawyers described their tasks in working with her. A young female associate might describe her work with Veronica as “reviewing documents” while her male counterpart would describe the same work as “assisting with trial strategy.” The stories of how Magistrate Judge Rebecca Rutherford, Justice Maricela Breedlove, and Judge Monica Purdy got to where they are today were a complete inventory of all it can mean to be a go-getter — setting one’s sights on a goal, overcoming an initial disappointment and even moving to an entirely new state.
If I am being completely honest, I started this series with the nagging sense that it was going to have something of a “kids these days” feel. Certainly, many lawyers my age and even younger look around in their workplaces and see, in some instances, lawyers who seem less interested in the grind many of us believe is necessary for a successful career.
As an expert in generational differences noted when he came to my firm recently, “With your young lawyers, you are looking at a group who grew up, for the most part, hearing every day they were loved and being lavishly praised for every success, large or small. You probably aren’t giving them that.” And I see that perspective in some instances.
But I also see the generational difference as an opportunity, not as a weakness. What of all those dominant firms that have fallen away since I started practicing law? They didn’t fall away because they had it all figured out. In some sense, something was missing that kept them from being sustainable. Our Gen Z and millennial lawyers almost certainly hold some of the keys to any firm’s continued success, whether that be increased empathy, perspective or something else entirely.
Successful go-getting does not admit to shortcuts or part-time effort. On that, I cannot compromise. But whatever it is you are trying to “get” exactly can vary tremendously and happily so.
For example, some remote work is here to stay, and that’s a good thing. It’s also an undeniably good thing that our Dallas bar — and bench — looks a lot more like America than it did when I started practicing law. And today, probably more so than ever, the Dallas bar has highly successful lawyers in all sizes of law firms and businesses and all kinds of legal practices. If that’s not successful go-getting, I don’t know what is.
Not everyone can get a trophy or should get one. But the truly ambitious can obtain that which lawyer go-getters of all ages truly seek — the satisfied and grateful client.
Tom Melsheimer is co-chair of the Litigation Department at Winston & Strawn. His email is tmelsheimer@winston.com.