Rise to Point-Person on Your Litigation Team by Connecting Dots

Clients rely on their outside counsel to offer deep, substantive expertise in specific areas of law. But large institutional clients also prize a “point person”: someone who understands their business and the forces impacting their industry, can coordinate across specialties, and can drive pragmatic outcomes by mobilizing the right team. Serving these clients in complex, high-stakes situations requires agility and a multifaceted toolkit honed over years of practice.

By being proactive in building core skills; developing a working understanding of related disciplines; and cultivating a fine-grained knowledge of their clients’ businesses, junior lawyers may position themselves to become that point person over time.

My career trajectory has been shaped by my experience within the financial services sector. While my focus is on antitrust and securities litigation, my deep understanding of my financial services clients means I’m expected to advise on a broad range of matters as circumstances dictate, including private litigation, regulatory investigations or criminal enforcement—sometimes all at once—which unfold against the backdrop of complex business strategy considerations.

In a practice environment that evolves quickly and prizes coordination as much as command, learning your client’s business isn’t a detour from excellence—it’s the route to it.

Create Stretch Opportunities

Legal issues are often holistic and impact a client’s entire business. A regulator’s inquiry can reverberate through parallel civil litigation, for example. The most valued counsel connect the dots early, spotting issues and escalation points that siloed teams can miss.

Litigators in the initial phase of their careers are expected to develop a broad toolkit of litigation and investigatory skills applicable to many kinds of cases and have numerous opportunities to learn about the client’s business at a granular level. Repeated exposure to recurring fact patterns, enforcement priorities, and briefing postures also fosters the development of instincts about what will matter at each phase of a litigation or investigation. Early-career litigators can fast-track their learning curve by identifying gaps in their training and proactively seek out opportunities to stretch themselves.

Defending depositions—a task often assigned to junior members of the team—provides a wonderful entrée into the client’s business. By interviewing witnesses as part of a litigation, and in drafting the fact-specific materials needed to prep them, junior litigators have a real opportunity to become the team’s “resident expert” on the case’s specifics.

Clients expect counsel to be proactive and to help them understand risks on the horizon. Closely following the news related to the client and the client’s industry is essential professional hygiene for attorneys at every level in issue-spotting—regardless of whether the news pertains to a specific practice. Junior team members who can recognize and funnel information pertinent to legal risk to more senior team members increase their value to the client while building their practical knowledge base.

Client-Facing Dividend

Sophisticated counseling requires a deep understanding of a client’s business, institutional priorities, and risk tolerance. This understanding is often as much about reading clients as it is about reading cases and business documents.

Some institutional clients are intensely hands-on and require dense, frequent engagement; others prefer distilled recommendations that minimize demands on their time. Understanding that divergence, learning when to push and when to defer, and how to craft a tailored legal strategy is a judgment muscle-toned by experience. Over time, lawyers exposed to different clients across matters learn to calibrate their strategy and communication to the specific client.

Junior lawyers have less direct interaction with clients than senior attorneys, but it is helpful to practice these “softer” skills internally. Knowing what client expectations the partner or senior associates are confronting can help junior team members calibrate the level of detail or type of work product that they provide to the specific client. Treating more senior attorneys as “clients,” drafting client-ready emails that colleagues then refine and send, and shadowing real-time calls can help expose associates to cadence, tone, and level-of-detail decisions, all with the security of a safety net.

Taking advantage of opportunities to shadow more senior attorneys on calls and meetings with the client is another way to learn the preferences and priorities of in-house and business stakeholders. I strongly encourage junior members of my matter teams to join important calls.

Impact of AI

The use of artificial intelligence has begun to streamline certain high-volume tasks, such as document review, keywording, and even first-pass chronologies. But AI can’t replace the foundational importance of collecting and understanding the detailed, idiosyncratic facts of each case—and that’s an area where junior and midlevel attorneys on a case team can excel and add value.

AI’s rapid adoption also amplifies, rather than replaces, the need for human judgment, especially as tools vary in quality. Lawyers with a broad knowledge base and deep familiarity with their client’s business are better positioned to evaluate AI results, test assumptions, and translate machine-processed data into decision points that align legal risk with business realities.

As routine work becomes more automated, those who can blend technical literacy with communication, judgment, and a multidisciplinary lens will be more equipped to command a premium for their skills.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law, Bloomberg Tax, and Bloomberg Government, or its owners.

Author Information

Staci Yablon is a partner in the litigation department of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, based in New York.

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