5 Steps to Building a Successful Legal Career – A Strategy for Uncertain Times

A few weeks ago, I stood in front of a room full of law students and early-career lawyers at the Law Career Fair in Budapest and asked a simple question:

If you are completely honest with yourself, how clear is your next career step?

Some people smiled. Some hesitated. Many of them already knew the answer. Because, despite years of studying, internships, and carefully built CVs, most legal professionals move forward with far less clarity than we tend to admit. Not because they are not capable. Not because they lack ambition. But because they were never really taught to think of their career as something they could actively design.

The story we inherit about legal careers

If you study law, you are given a very clear mental model of what your career should look like. You graduate. You start as a trainee. You pass the bar. You become a lawyer. Maybe one day, you make partner. It is a clean, linear trajectory—one that feels safe, structured, and, at least from the outside, predictable. And often, there is an implicit assumption behind it: that each step will be better than the previous one. More interesting work. More responsibility. More recognition. More stability.

But what I have seen—both in my own career and in my work with dozens of lawyers—is that reality rarely follows this script. Careers are not straight lines. They are much closer to what you might call a “chaotic diagram”: full of turns, pauses, unexpected opportunities, and sometimes even dead ends. And this is not a flaw in the system. It is the nature of how careers actually evolve. The problem is not that careers are messy. The problem is that we expect them not to be.

Why “thinking harder” is not the solution

When people start to feel uncertain about their career, their instinct is usually to think more. They try to analyze their options, weigh pros and cons, imagine different futures, and come up with the “right” decision.

But this approach has a limit. You cannot think your way into clarity about something you have not experienced yet. And this is where many legal professionals get stuck: they are trying to make high-stakes decisions based on very limited information about what those paths actually feel like in practice.

A different approach: design thinking for careers

In my talk, I introduced a framework borrowed from product development: design thinking.

When companies develop a new product, they do not expect to get it right on the first try. They do not sit in a room, think very hard, and then commit to a single irreversible decision. Instead, they move through a process. They try to understand the problem deeply. They generate multiple ideas. They build small, low-risk versions of those ideas. They test them. They learn. And then they refine. In other words, they treat uncertainty not as something to eliminate, but as something to work with.

Careers can be approached in exactly the same way.

Step 1: Understanding yourself beyond your role

One of the most common patterns I see is that people evaluate their career based on external markers: job title, employer, salary, prestige. But these markers often hide a much more important question: what kind of work actually fits you?

I once worked with a lawyer at a top Budapest firm. From the outside, everything about her career looked successful. Yet she felt constantly exhausted and increasingly disengaged from her work.

When we started to unpack her experience, a clear mismatch emerged. She was someone who thrived on deep, focused, analytical work—research, structuring complex information, thinking through problems in detail. But her daily work required constant interaction: calls, meetings, negotiations, managing client expectations in real time.

The issue was not that she had chosen the wrong profession. It was that she was in the wrong mode of working within that profession.

She eventually moved into a compliance role. The legal foundation remained the same, but the nature of her daily work changed significantly—and so did her experience of her career.

Step 2: Expanding options beyond the obvious

Another common trap is stopping at the first solution that comes to mind.

When people feel dissatisfied, they often jump to binary thinking: “I either stay in this role, or I leave law entirely.”

One of my clients, a litigator, came to me with exactly this dilemma. She was highly capable, successful by external standards, but deeply uncomfortable with the level of conflict in her work. Her conclusion was that she needed to leave the profession.

But when we started exploring alternatives, a wider range of possibilities emerged—roles that still used her legal expertise but placed her in a different relationship to conflict: mediation, negotiation strategy, conflict resolution.

She is now working as a mediator.

Nothing about her legal training was wasted. What changed was the context in which she applied it.

Step 3: Moving from thinking to conversations

A particularly powerful shift happens when people move from internal reflection to external exploration.

One of the simplest and most effective exercises I give is this: talk to people.

A student I worked with was convinced that she wanted to pursue corporate law. Instead of discussing it further in abstract terms, I asked her to speak with five lawyers working in different areas. Within a week, her perspective changed completely. What she discovered was not just what those roles involved, but how they felt on a day-to-day basis—and what resonated with her personally. She realized that what truly interested her was not corporate law itself, but the business side of things. She is now pursuing an in-house path.

This kind of clarity does not come from Google searches. It comes from real conversations.

Step 4: Testing before committing

Even with more information, many people still feel pressure to “get it right” before making a move.

This is where testing becomes essential.

Instead of making a full transition, you can create small, low-risk experiments that give you real data about a potential direction.

I worked with a lawyer who was considering moving into teaching. Rather than making an immediate career change, we designed a series of small tests: guest lectures, workshops, mentoring opportunities. These experiences provided much more reliable insight than any amount of speculation could have. Over time, it became clear that teaching was not just an abstract idea—it was something she genuinely wanted to integrate into her career. Today, it is a meaningful part of what she does.

Step 5: Treating your career as an ongoing design process

Perhaps the most important shift is moving away from the idea that your career is defined by a single decision.

I often work with clients who reach a point of burnout and conclude that the only solution is to leave the legal profession altogether. Sometimes that is the right choice. But often, what they actually need is not to leave—but to redesign.

One client came to me in exactly this situation. Instead of exiting law, we restructured her work: fewer court cases, more strategic advisory work, more project-based engagements. She stayed in the profession—but her experience of it changed completely.

This is why I often say: a career is not something you choose once. It is something you design, test, and refine over time.

A small question that can change a lot

At the end of my talk, I asked the audience one final question:

What is one small step you can take in the next seven days for your career?

Not a major decision. Not a dramatic change. Just one concrete action.

Because careers rarely change as a result of one big moment. They change through a series of small, intentional steps that gradually shift your direction.