Legal support professionals are often called upon to tackle multiple tasks, but specialization can be the force that moves your career forward. Focusing on a specific practice area (such as litigation) or industry (such as insurance or real estate) can make you the “resident expert,” expand your network and more.
How Specialization Helps Advance Your Career
Here’s how developing a specialty can help advance your career as a legal support professional:
It helps you focus (and be focused on).
Instead of applying to every legal support position that appears, a specialization helps you target your job search to openings that demand the knowledge and skills you have developed. This helps you build a stronger case for your abilities and stand out among more “generalized” candidates.
It makes you the “resident expert.”
Legal support staff are often relied upon to be the “resident expert” on the minutiae of a case. With a specialized focus on the case’s relevant areas of law or industry, you’ll also be able to more accurately predict conflicts on the horizon and suggest strategies to avoid them, allowing you and your team to provide better value to clients.
It helps your network help you.
When you’re known for having a certain specialty or area of focus, you become your professional network’s “go-to” person for questions relating to that specialty or area of focus. You also become the first person your colleagues (and your recruiter) think of when they hear someone say, “we’re looking for a legal support team member who knows….”
It opens doors.
Many organizations have positions for specialists. Some create a position for a specialist simply to avoid losing a valued team member, or because their growing practice demands that a staff member focus on an area more closely. When you’re already the informal “resident expert,” you position yourself to become a formal one through a move into one of these specialized positions.
At Kent Legal, our recruiters specialize in helping legal support professionals connect with some of the best law firms and job openings in the Toronto area. Contact us today to learn more.