P2P

18 P E E R T O P E E R : I L T A ' S Q U A R T E R L Y M A G A Z I N E | S P R I N G 2 0 2 0 • Career competency. Never stop developing your competencies in your chosen path. Keep your knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs) up-to-date. More importantly, apply those KSAs to what you do – every task, job or position. This gives you proven and verifiable experience that you can build on and point to as examples when your competency is challenged. There is no substitute for really "knowing your stuff." • Goals. Define your professional goals and continually reassess them in order to keep them current and relevant to your career. Goals are important because the path to a goal usually moves you forward in your career. Goals force you to assess tasks and decisions as either moving you towards your goal or away from it. Regularly assessing your long-term goals helps you adapt to any changes in life, interests, industry or economic environment. • Networks (plural). Cultivate multiple networks – not just within your work environment, but also industry networks and support networks. It is difficult if not impossible to get things done in cross-functional environments without establishing a network within your organization. This is part of assessing the working environment that you are in and identifying the decision makers and the "doers" who can move things along for you at each stage. Outside networks help you stay fresh and examine problems from different perspectives. Equally important is establishing a network support system, which is made up of people whom you can trust and who can offer you sound advice from their own experiences. Just like everything else, these networks will evolve as you grow, but each is critical to your success in your career. • Professional environment. Understand the specific professional environment in which you are operating and adapt as that environment changes. What you do and how you interact in a specific project environment will be different than how you act within a corporate environment or an industry environment. Continually assessing your environment and the players in it will allow you to add value regardless of the environment. It's ironic that one of the constants in my life and my career in technolo has always been Change with a capital "C." I recommend to young women and young people of color just starting their careers in the legal industry to be open to that change, and have strategies in place that manage change and support your evolution. You will probably be surprised where you end up on your journey. ILTA Jessica Robinson is the vice president of client services for Casepoint – an attorney with more than 17 years of experience in the legal industry, 16 of which were spent working for such notable Am Law 100 firms as Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, Morrison & Foerster, Crowell & Moring, and Paul Hastings. She has served in a variety of operational leadership roles, ranging from Litigation Support and Senior Firmwide eDiscovery Resource Manager to Firmwide Director of eData Practice Support and the eData Project Management Office. Jessica earned her J.D. from Wake Forest University School of Law and her M.B.A. from Wake Forest University, Babcock Graduate School of Business. F E A T U R E S

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