“Be Consistent, Be Generous, Be Genuine”: LinkedIn Advice for Lawyers with Tony Albrecht

Hello everybody, Welcome to another episode of studying law around the world. Today we have the opportunity to listen to Tony outbreak. Tony will share with us a few different things. He he's had an awesome career. He's been a lawyer for many years in the States, now living up here in Toronto and has been building an awesome business of, you know, social media a contender. And I'll be so excited to hear a little more about that for for us to start our conversation today. Tony, could you tell us a little more about your story and also about the work you do these days? Sure. Thanks for the invitation to join you, Claudio. It's a pleasure to meet you and my my journey. I describe as being a lawyer who accidentally got good at LinkedIn, which is how I've come to be building the the Business contender, my agency that is focused on LinkedIn ghost writing for lawyers. I've been working on that business since 2022. Before that I practiced law, as you mentioned in the US, mostly in insurance. Defence firms are working from the the town of St. Louis, MO, practice mainly in Illinois and Missouri. There on opposite sides of the Mississippi River. There's a very long story between how I came to be doing what I'm doing now up here in Canada versus what I spent in my time in practice doing. That involves I doing the whole life I In 2013 I quit my job, sold all my stuff, took a backpack and a one way ticket to Bangkok thinking I was going to spend maybe a year traveling and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. One one thing led to another. I fell into doing contract work as an attorney while I was travelling. The one year turned into more like 4 years between full-time roles where I was like trying to start businesses doing a bunch of traveling. Met the woman who had become my wife while traveling in India in 2015. She is Canadian, which is how I've come to to be living up here and in my path has been unpredictable and far from linear. But let's say that's the the short version, Claudio. I'll try not to go down the rabbit hole any further. Well, that, that sounds, that sounds pretty interesting. I love to hear that and hearing about your story, hearing a little bit about all of that, something that I noticed when I was looking up your information, your background a little bit. I saw that your, you, you got out of university before law school, you studied English and I'd love to hear a little bit about that. It was law school always something that was on your mind. Did you kind of go into undergrad knowing about it, decided through that And and then also into that question, if I may ask, does that background also help you in shapes some of the way you think and you work and you know, storytelling and brand and all that, all that work you do today? Good questions. So I grew up in a house where my parents emphasized education. My mother was a college professor, taught marketing for 25 years, and my dad had an MBA. He was an engineer who also ran businesses for the vast majority of his career. And in our house, the question wasn't whether you would go to college. The question was what graduate degree or professional degree are you going to end up with? And so I have one sister is an MBA. I have another sister who is in a CPA. And then I'm the lawyer in the family. We didn't have anybody who was going to become a doctor. But I, I gravitated toward law because I've always liked writing. And obviously writing is an integral skill for the practice of law. And I like talking. I like arguing. So, you know, it was that sort of thinking that OK, yeah. And I don't like blood. And so no medical school. So law school has that natural extension for me, although I now is given the way my my career is unfolded in this rather unusual way, I now tend to think I maybe shouldn't have gone to law school in the 1st place. I think that I decided to go to law school for the wrong reasons. I think when I decided basically coming out of undergraduate in the US, the way I think about it now, the 2020 hindsight and all that, I was scared of making mistakes. And law school for me seemed like a safe path, a path toward success, financial security, a good career. And while my time in law has been my time practicing, I, I feel like I had a, a really good quality of life while I was practicing. And obviously I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing today were it not for my background in law. The way I think about it, yeah, I, I wish I would have gone for the right reasons. But now I think that maybe to your point about me studying English, I always wanted to be a writer. And so, you know, it's interesting that now a company that I started, you know, the age of 39, you know, now I am, I'm indeed making my living writing. And I now think I may have been better off just starting companies and writing from the time I was 21 years old. Possibly. Not to dissuade anybody from going to law school. That's amazing. You know, some of the conversations had in the past, people told me something that was interesting too, along the lines of I, I went to law school with this, this was my reasoning going in, but I stayed because of XYZ. So I really like how, you know, more and more I feel like overall people are just becoming more aware of these things, right? When we think about, you know, a few like our grandparents and so forth, or, or for the most of us, there wasn't much of an opportunity to think too much through purpose, careers and all of that. It was basically like people were retiring the same job that they started, right? They were in the same company, much, much different than the world we have today. And you know, after all, you know, you don't become the, the Yoda of LinkedIn lawyering by, you know, not being a lawyer. So I'm I'm so glad you went through the the rough Rd. Yeah, it's, it has. I think you're right. It's we are in a very different situation. 1, how old are you? You're still in your 20. Yeah, yeah, that's right, 27, yeah. Yeah, so I've got 15 years on you. So we kind of bookend that millennial generation maybe, but it's it's a very different world than it was when our grandparents or even our parents were out there where I think we need to to be more adaptable. And it's pace of change only appears to be accelerating. So, yeah, that that idea that we're going to plant ourselves in in a law firm maybe and then just work our way up. And, you know, maybe 30 years later we retire, maybe we switched law firms once or twice that that path to professional success seems to be getting harder and harder to realized. Something I spent a lot of my time thinking about and writing about it and talking to people about is how do we navigate this changing landscape in a way that we could still find success, whatever that means for us, and hopefully feel good about it along the way. Amazing not not to go too far from this topic. When you look back in your career is is there one decision that you made that helped you to build, you know, a more meaningful and and creative path for yourself? Was it really the the day you decided to leave law and go into traveling and other things? Or do you feel like there was a few other little things that you started way before that? Great question. Well, so I I say that I've torched my legal career twice now and 2013 and then again in 2021 when I left the practice. It would be a year between when I did that in 2021 and when I started Contender. And at the time that I left the practice, it still would not have occurred to me that writing LinkedIn post was a way to make money, much less build a sustainable business. But if I go back to what really changed things to your point, there was a time 2012, way back when, where at that time I was, I spent the first few years of my career largely traveling around the US taking depositions and one specific kind of personal injury case. And I had the chance to go to went to 38 different states over the course of 2 1/2 years, basically lived on the road, which maybe prepared me for a stint traveling around the world. I was also doing a lot of reading at that time, and one of the things that I ran across back then that has stuck with me is a line from the author Ray Bradbury that says we must continually be jumping off cliffs and growing wings on the way down. And there's another line from the poet Mary Oliver. Just tell me what it is. What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? And it's on Marine stuff like that that was getting lodged between my ears and eventually kind of sent me over an edge of saying, I, I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing with this life, but let's go try something different to see if we can figure something out. And one of the things that I've learned, I mean, at that time, I still had six figures of debt, which I've since we've wiped all that away, we're square with the folks in the US government. And I really didn't know what I wanted to, to do when I grew up. So that decision I mentioned about going to law school as the safe path of wanting that predictable, say, less risky path to success. The thing that I've I've learned and I keep relearning is that awesome things tend to go better for me when I'm taking calculated risks. Let's say that it's it's a matter of recognizing and again again that the that the life that I want, the future I want for myself, for my family, it probably is waiting on the other side of a difficult decision or something that makes me uncomfortable. That's amazing. Feel like we've got the chance, you know, hear a little bit about your story, dive a little bit into, you know, couriers purpose and how you've found that for yourself and you feel. Let me divert here a little bit and go into your, you know, subject matter of expertise here. I feel like it's so interesting that first of all, that you can make a living out of LinkedIn, right, Just to start with. But I'm sure that by now you've worked with, you know, different fields within the law professionals that, you know, do different things and all of that. And if I may ask you, you know, is there is there some kind of popular trend that you find that usually hold people back, back either from expressing their voice or from a lot of people have interesting stories, but putting that out there, especially on LinkedIn, what have you seen so far? What's your experience shown? That's a great question, Claudia. The way I described this is we all learned LinkedIn the wrong way. We all learned LinkedIn is the place to stash a digital resume and then to announce when we get a new job or when we're looking for a new job or if we want to share a company press release or announcement. And that's basically what LinkedIn is for. Through my 12 years of practicing law, that is absolutely 100% how I approached LinkedIn. And so with that mentality, when I say we learned it wrong, think we see LinkedIn as a place primarily where we might be able to get in trouble, that we, we don't want to show up on the platform in a way that might get us yelled at or get a talking to or God forbid, somehow we managed to get ourselves fired. So we are, we tend to be very reticent to say anything that might. We don't even see LinkedIn as a place where we might express ourselves. We see LinkedIn as only for those things. And So what that's created, Well, I'm thinking about your question Claudio and I think I just answered your question. So I'm gonna I'm actually gonna pause there. I think that's the reason that we don't, we don't show up. Only a few of us kind of go against the grain on that. Thank you for mentioning that. I feel like lost students or, or, you know, early career professionals in general, I feel like I've shared these with people and, and gotten the answer from them. So I could say that at least a few people feel this way that we feel like we have quote UN quote, nothing to say or no. A lot of the when you, when you go and look online, like what should you post on LinkedIn? People will say like try to be helpful, try to, you know, share expertise and all these things. And then as a student, it's hard to feel like you really have something meaningful to share, right? So what do you, what's the angle? What's the message? What should we go about doing? What are some of your ideas on that for us? So either lost students or just, you know, early career professionals in general. Question the way I think about this, yeah, we, we come to the platform thinking why would I say anything? I am not the expert on whatever it is. I'm not an expert or anything at your age or your, your stage of, of your career, you don't have anything to to put out there. And my counter to that is you are at least if nothing else, the expert of your own experience. You are the expert of your story and there's power in sharing that. There's there are good things that can come from showing up. And the way I talk about this is a very simple strategy, three-part strategy to getting better at LinkedIn. It's be consistent, be generous and be genuine. I don't care how far you are into your career, you can do those things. You can be consistent, you can be generous and you can be genuine. And if we juxtapose that with how we learned LinkedIn, we learned LinkedIn as a place where you don't consistently show up and contribute to conversations post comment. You only do it sporadically when there's something to announce. We don't think about it as a place to be generous, as a with our time, with our attention, with our thoughts. We think of it as a place to be very guarded with those things. And we don't think of it as a place to be genuine. We think of LinkedIn as a place to be. I think it's like that, that bad professional headshot. You know that that that we we show up thinking that we need to be like that personified in the digital space. Anybody in there? You're a really good example of this, Claudio, is when you show up, you are consistent with how you show up and you don't need to do it, you know, post every day or, or anything crazy. You don't need to take on a part time job being a LinkedIn creator. But if you can be consistent, if you can be generous with, you know, commenting on other people's posts, sending people messages, just connecting on a human level, just being genuine, showing who you are, what you care about, what you believe. That's how you make connections. That's how you learn how to network in digital space, and that's where the good stuff really starts to happen because ultimately what we're trying to do is create opportunities, and we create opportunities by creating connections between individuals, between different nodes in the network. This conversation is as a small example of that, right? It's like you and I connecting out there in Linky Land. We get to know each other a little bit. And when you invite me to come on your podcast, I'm happy to do it. And who knows what good stuff might come out of this conversation? That's so interesting. I love that consistency, being generous, being genuine, and I actually remember the night we connected on LinkedIn. And well, it was such a magical night, Claudia, could we ever? Forget, you know what it it's pretty funny because I had recently moved here. So I, I came to Canada as a researcher at Osgoode Hall, the other law school, and then ended up meeting the person who became my wife. And we, we lived down in Brazil for a couple of years, came back and it was one of the first few months I was back here. I was adding, trying to, you know, add a few people on LinkedIn and all of that. And I actually got the opportunity to participate in a, in a conference. And the dinner for the conference was the at the CN Tower. So I, I was just on my phone waiting for people to arrive to go with the group. And I got your audio message right there. So, so I guess just the day was, was quite an interesting day. And, and I remember getting the message you just sent a nice audio note saying like, I guess just like, thanks for connecting and, and you said something interesting, but it just, yeah, definitely, definitely stayed. And I like that kind of thing that happens in the, in this platform that, you know, might not otherwise might not happen otherwise in other platforms. So I really, really like that. And I guess you just show, you know those attributes that you've mentioned here. Well, to double click that right there is I think this this idea that LinkedIn might be a place to spend more of your time and energy. And again, with this podcast being aimed at, I assume your target audience is other folks early in their career, right, Right. So this idea of why would I want to spend my time and energy paying more attention to LinkedIn. What we're talking about ultimately is how to grow a strong network. We're tight, everybody is on LinkedIn, right? We're all there. I don't care what industry you're in, just about everybody is on LinkedIn. And for whatever reason, most people will check LinkedIn from time to time. So it's this situation where all this attention is gathered. And because we all learn the platform the wrong way, there's almost no competition for peoples attention on the feed. So if you are able to show up and just be more human, you'll be more interesting than the press releases and the standard job announcements. If you can be more interesting, you can get a disproportionate amount of space on other people's feeds. But so there's like an an sort of arbitrage opportunity there on the platform, which you're a great example. So I mean, among Claudia, I don't know that I've run across any law students in Canada who are doing as well as you are in this respect. I can't think of any. But so to that point, like the ability to get attention is one thing. Like that's, that's all well and good. But where things really get interesting is when you're able to start building relationships, right? You're able to connect. Like when we connect, it's something you. You know, just if you find somebody interesting out there and maybe, you know, most of us learned LinkedIn as a place you connect with people you've met in real life. You don't connect with people you've never met in real life. That's that's an idea to change that. We have the ability to connect and get access to people all over the world who we find interesting. When you start doing that and you reach out and talk about LinkedIn as place really where you can nerd out about whatever it is you love in and out about. And when you start doing that and you start connecting with those other people who like nerding out about the things you like nerding out over, things do get interesting. The platform changes in some crazy fundamental way and opportunities start getting created. I it. It's not predictable. It was totally unexpected for me when it started happening and basically 2021-2022, but once that that starts happening, it really can become a superpower. The thing for like let's say my my early millennial and slash zoomer folks from those generations is y'all are digital natives right? In a way that, you know, like me, I, I never had social media. I was out of college before I joined my first social media network. Like we're all learning this stuff on the fly. They didn't teach us this stuff in school. And y'all have advantages when it comes to how to leverage these digital platforms in a way that I think to your earlier question of I don't have anything to offer, you're more comfortable moving in digital spaces. And LinkedIn is 1 where people tend to be on their better behavior, if not best behavior. And there are a number of reasons for that. We don't need to unpack in detail. But it's like people tend to be pretty nice. People tend to be pretty supportive. And regardless of if you know what you're trying to do with your career to start or you have no idea and you're just trying to even think about it, Linkedin's great for both of those things are like finding opportunities, creating opportunities, and also for getting ideas. Amazing. Well, I really love what you, what you just brought here. All of these points on everybody has a message, right? If you spend some time with it, think about there's something out there. And, and even if you're not the one to be, you know, posting all the time, there's always something you can comment. Those relationships can exist outside of just the, the publish button. And really to wrap up this episode today, is there maybe any success story or any experience that you've had with somebody who felt maybe that way, that either they had these stories but really didn't have a way to come out with them or just somebody who just felt like LinkedIn wasn't for them. And professionally, you've just been able to help them to to really get there. I have Are you connected with Kimber Marie Faircloth? The name doesn't ring a bell specifically, but I might be. So Kim and Marie graduated from law school last year, and she went to a smaller school called Elon in North Carolina. She's from North Carolina, and she knew coming out of law school that she wanted to go into intellectual property as a practice area. And beyond that, she has some family ties. She knew she wanted to stay in North Carolina, even though IP in particularly the types of IP she was interested in tend to be focused geographically centred in your major metro areas, New York, LA, Chicago, maybe. She started building her presence on LinkedIn during her second year law school through her third year law school and she graduated, took the bar exam. She ended up working with me at Contender for a little while as she was navigating this liminal space of trying to find this right opportunity. And sure enough, it ended up that it she ended up landing in associate position with an IP firm run by a strong female founder who was just fine with her working remotely from North Carolina. So like this seeming needle in a haystack opportunity, she managed to find it. Or I would say it managed to find her. She had connected with the founder of this firm more than a year before the opportunity arose. And so, but by that time, there was a potential fit. The founder knew who Kimber Murray was and knew that she liked her and knew that she was interested. Kimber Marie had expressed that interest, like previously. She had let her know and they had developed enough of her relation. I don't think they had ever talked, but just from being out there with her own content and then engaging with this founders content, it was this relationship got warmed up to a point where when the opportunity arose, when there was a a position that might be a fit, it all happened pretty quickly. Offer that as a a case study in really how this can. Work that's just amazing, that's just amazing how connections lead to, to really life changing ultimately. So thank you so much for for sharing that. I think that's enough encouragement for anybody who's thinking whether they should be out there and active or not. And I, I love what you said ultra all this podcast, you know, don't, don't need to make it part time job out of keeping your LinkedIn updated, but just showing up makes a huge difference and can really open those doors in the future. Let's keep up doing that and thank you so much, Tony for for sharing your story and your insights with us today. Now thanks for the time. Claudio's great talking to you, brother. Thank you all for tuning in and we'll see you on the next episode.