Professional Development

Learning is a career-long adventure. At Sullivan, we support your development at all levels by providing top-notch learning and development tools and resources, and our career development program is dedicated to helping you choose which opportunities to seize. Our focus on your individual career development is second-to-none.

Core Competencies

Every professional development resource Sullivan offers is tied to our Core Competencies, a set of skills that defines a successful Sullivan attorney. Training classes are crafted to support achievement in at least one competency, and usually multiple competencies, and mentoring programs are designed to promote similar achievement. Evaluations of associates at the junior and mid-levels, and evaluations of senior associates and counsel, are tied directly to the competencies. This structure not only ensures maximum transparency, but also best enables associates to take charge of their own success.

Training

Milestone Training

Certain milestones mark a career’s progress. Additionally, they provide a natural opportunity to both reflect on your achievement so far and to take time to prepare for your next challenges.

• First Year Academy
  Your first milestone arrives as you embark on your legal career. Upon your arrival at Sullivan as a first year associate you will spend one to two weeks in our comprehensive First Year Academy, an intensive training experience designed to help you quickly develop the practical skills, in your first year, required for success in your career. From the nuts and bolts of preparing lease summaries to knowing at what point in a business meal to get down to business to leveraging our litigation support technology, you’ll master the basics quickly and emerge poised for success.

SPOTLIGHT: Doing Due Diligence. This Academy course teaches new associates how to successfully conduct due diligence reviews in connection with common types of corporate business transactions. Students learn to: (1) understand and articulate the role of due diligence in a transaction; (2) obtain appropriate templates for conducting particular types of due diligence; (3) identify and analyze issues commonly uncovered by due diligence; (4) identify and complete the appropriate written summary of due diligence findings; and (5) provide appropriate follow-up.

• Mid-level Associate Retreat
  Progressing through your mid-level years, you build on your basic lawyering skills as you develop even more confidence and begin to tackle new challenges, such as managing teams and carving out a leadership role. To support your unique developmental needs during these transformational years, Sullivan periodically brings all mid-levels together from across the firm to build relationships with one another and to explore in significant depth the challenges and opportunities of being a mid-level. Our most recent mid-level associate retreat focused on beginning to identify leadership opportunities and styles.
• Senior Associate and Counsel Retreat
  Training for senior associates and counsel focuses specifically on the skills required to prepare you for the transition from employee to partner. Sullivan's biannual senior associate and counsel retreat brings together senior associates and counsel from our offices for a day of training by partners and business development professionals interlaced with abundant internal networking opportunities.

• New Partner Program
  Promotion to partnership requires you to continue growing existing skills while assuming new levels of responsibility in every aspect of practice. At this level you’ll find opportunities ranging from nuts-and-bolts training – such as how partnership status affects your tax planning and benefits – to an intensive, ongoing, one-on-one focus on client and business development.

Business Development Initiative

Cultivating new work is a business imperative for law firms. Designed to emphasize that every attorney brings different strengths to business development, and recognizing that business development is largely a function of building mutually beneficial, genuine relationships, our Business Development Initiative is comprised of three primary components: ongoing, in-depth demonstrations of the firm’s capabilities and services; periodic essential skill-building workshops; and intensive, personalized coaching for high achievers. 

SPOTLIGHT: Sullivan Right Now: International Tax Practice and Business Relationship with Italy. In this installment of our regular "Right Now" series, partners from our International Tax practice explain what international tax attorneys do, review representative transactions, provide an in-depth review of some of our clients and generally help attorneys understand what sets Sullivan's International Tax practice apart. In the second half of the program, a partner deeply involved with our Italian relationship explains the connection and explores the advantages for clients.

SPOTLIGHT: Client Panel. Our client panelists begin by sharing the perspectives, opinions, experiences, needs of and demands on in-house counsel, highlighting the differences from private practice. Panelists then discuss best practices in client service, sharing personal experiences and insights as to how their organizations make decisions to hire and fire law firms. Finally, all involved spend some time reviewing what Sullivan attorneys do to ensure excellent service.

Ongoing Training

Each department offers specialized substantive training for attorneys at all levels. Most departments meet at least monthly for training, and some gather as frequently as weekly. In addition, firm-wide, multi-level training initiatives run periodically, focusing on such areas as fundamental legal skills and client service.

SPOTLIGHT: Advanced Legal Writing and Editing. This workshop reviews the fundamentals of excellent writing, including writing with clarity and precision, common punctuation and grammar errors, and stylistic tips. Students then apply these concepts to legal work product, such as memos and briefs, and practice techniques for editing one’s own and others’ work. Designed to appeal to associates with a variety of learning styles, this workshop features hands-on exercises, question-and-answer format and lecture, and offers the opportunity for ongoing one-on-one coaching following the classroom segment.

Customized Coaching

As one of the advantages of a mid-size firm, Sullivan offers one-on-one coaching for attorneys at all levels. The range of coaching services spans all needs, from an internal coaching program for an associate who wants to improve in one of our competencies to an outside public speaking coach for a partner who is preparing for a presentation. Senior associates and counsel, as well as recently-elevated partners, are also eligible to apply for our intensive business development coaching program, which combines elements of one-on-one coaching with group activities to promote sharing of experiences and cross-selling.

External Resources

Finally, excellent outside resources for your development abound. We keep track of external development opportunities offered in each of our cities and encourage you not only to attend but to share their learning with colleagues upon return. We also strongly encourage you to participate actively in trade and industry organizations, rounding out your unique development and practice.

Mentoring

Ongoing Mentoring

Everyone needs mentors, regardless of where you are in your career. Sullivan's many training programs and career development initiatives are designed to facilitate the sort of meaningful relationship-building that is essential for the formation of true mentoring relationships. Our structured approach to work brokering means that you have a chance to build working relationships with a variety of senior colleagues. And throughout your associate career, our Chief Marketing & Talent Officer will connect you with partners and other colleagues in the firm for focused, personalized mentoring, coaching and advice.

Evaluation

Annual Evaluation

Ongoing performance evaluation is a core responsibility of associates and supervising attorneys alike. Attorneys are encouraged to solicit and provide feedback on an ongoing basis, and training and coaching programs provide tips to facilitate ongoing conversations. To supplement ongoing feedback, you participate in a formal evaluation at least once each year on your achievement in the firm’s Core Competencies. Supervising attorneys complete written evaluations and are interviewed by department directors and specially-designated “performance mentors,” who together comprise performance teams. The performance teams then review the results with you and provide feedback and guidance on the your career development going forward, setting the stage for ongoing work with our career development resource (below).

First Year Evaluation

First year associates are first evaluated after approximately four to six months with the firm and again during the next annual evaluation process. Conducting the initial evaluation ensures a formal feedback channel to supplement informal, ongoing feedback, and provides an opportunity to step back and reflect with the First Year Work Broker and talent management staff on emerging trends, strengths and areas for focus going forward.

Lateral Evaluation

Lateral associates benefit from formal feedback on their work relatively soon after arrival. The lateral review covers your work product, work style and relationship-building efforts, culminating in a collaborative discussion with the department leader about your experience to date, as well as short- and long-term goals.

Career Development

Overview

Tying together and drawing upon all of our professional development initiatives, our Career Development program is dedicated to helping you chart a pathway to long-term success. Our Chief Marketing & Talent Officer: helps you assess your strengths and areas for improvement and analyze current and future growth opportunities; coaches you in building and managing relationships; looks for and assesses training opportunities tied to your specific substantive development; serves as a liaison between management and associates; works with associates on reduced hour schedules to ensure their progress and development; and generally provides a welcoming resource for all questions and concerns. Ultimately, by helping you to select appropriately from the full complement of tools and resources available to you at and through Sullivan, our Career Development function will help you create, implement, monitor, evaluate, and update your personally tailored career development plan.

Personalized Career Coaching

Our Chief Marketing & Talent Officer, Ojen Sirin, is available to all associates to support you as you set and pursue your career goals. The personalized coaching is done on a strictly confidential basis to encourage an open dialogue to better help you meet your needs. Want to appear more confident in front of partners? Our talent management team can help with that. Want to develop a strong, generalist base while preparing to pursue a niche practice? Again, our talent management team can help with that. 

Work Brokering

All of Sullivan's formal training programs are in place to support the most important means of learning: on-the-job experience. The key to such hands-on learning is getting the assignments that most closely meet your own career development needs. To ensure efficient and fair development, each department assigns work in a manner best suited to balance both your and client needs. In some cases, our Chief Marketing & Talent Officer actually serves as a department’s work broker. In other cases, our Chief Marketing & Talent Officer works closely with department directors and you to ensure that you receive the assignments that will best solidify and expand your skill sets in line with our core competencies.

SPOTLIGHT: Corporate Department Work Brokering. Ojen Sirin is the work broker for our corporate associates. The associates submit work surveys every week detailing their level of anticipated activity for the week so that work can be appropriately assigned to them. Additionally, Ojen assesses the current skills they have attained through work assignments and works with the associates to assess what skills they may need to become more proficient either in a specific core competency or a specific area of law, and ensures the associates receive assignments to assist them in that regard.

Small-Group Roundtables

It is so easy to get caught up in the daily challenges and rewards of providing the best possible client service that it’s easy to overlook the incredible opportunities we have to learn from one another. Through our Career Development function, small groups of associates, such as women associates, associates in a particular department or associates at a particular level, get together periodically to discuss a particular topic, such as work-life integration. Typically over lunch, these informal yet valuable conversations help build relationships internally and provide a forum in which to reflect on issues that affect all of us in this fast-paced, intense profession.

SPOTLIGHT: Women’s Brown Bag Lunches. This small group roundtable brings women associates together once a month in all three of our offices to discuss specific issues pertaining to women in law firms. The discussions are an interactive exchange of ideas and experiences from women associates of all levels to serve as a group career development experience. Such topics have included: gender communication differences, work assignments and specifically how to write and speak more authoritatively, self-promotion and work/life balance.

These are only a few of our professional development initiatives. For more information, please contact Ojen Sirin, Chief Marketing & Talent Officer, at osirin@sullivanlaw.com or 617 338 2414.