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The ½Û×ÓÊÓƵ Flying Solo event took place on Wednesday 15 October 2019. We had a great turnout with over 60 lawyers from different industries ranging from Aston Martin to Ocado attending the session.

Paul Newton, formerly General Counsel and member of the Executive Team at BUPA shared an interesting and very useful 10-step guide on the importance of personal development for in-house lawyers. He highlighted that ‘Our career success depends less on what we know and more on the impact we have on our organisations’

Learning development – How do you make sure you have an impact?

1. Your personal development is too important to leave to somebody else. You must take initiative – drive is a key characteristic of talent potential.
2. Be ambitious - but be ambitious about the right things – not your job title, salary, etc. but about your performance. Be clear on what that ambition is and where you are going – think about your mission, what do you want to achieve.
3. Be a leader. A leader is someone who has a vision on how things can be better and the ability to make others realise that – be a leader first, lawyer second.
4. Get out of your comfort zone! Put yourself at a state to achieve extraordinary outcomes - extraordinary performance comes from extraordinary action, which comes from extraordinary thinking.
5. Measure your performance and embrace feedback. You don’t learn if you don’t identify your weaknesses.
6. Skill up. Don’t leave it too late to meet the requirements of the next step. There’s so much that lawyers need to know and it takes time.
7. Think ahead – identify where your skill gaps are, fix them, talk to your line managers.
8. Get Help. Get a coach – someone who can assess your performance – they can analyse what you’re doing and how it can be improved.
9. Recruit heavyweights – It’s important to have the best people you can afford working for you. Think about the future – have people around you who challenge you to be a better version of yourself.
10. Improve. How can I do this better? Always improve what you worked on last – how can you do something better than the last time it was done?
    

Flying Solo is a forum created exclusively to support sole in-house lawyers and those in small teams. It is run by a committee of in-house lawyers and it’s facilitated and sponsored by ½Û×ÓÊÓƵ and Radius Law. Join us at our next event on