WSJ listed some great crowd-sourced tips learned from big career mistakes. These 5 lessons especially apply to lawyers.

1. Build soft skills, which are as important as hard skills. From day one, lawyers need to not only learn the substance of the law, but also how to work with others and communicate effectively. As counsel get more senior, their judgment and rapport are increasingly valued. In the article, an exec found earlier in her career that her “superiors had fewer credentials than [she] had, but were so much better at everything else—such as breaking down complex accounting terms for nonfinance people to help make better business decisions. Their insights, acumen and soft skills made all the difference.”
2. Don’t take the counter-offer. When you are ready to move on and tell your management about your next opportunity, they may counter. It’s not a good idea to take it because the obstacles that you encountered won’t go away (other than more money), and now your managers will remember you were ready to walk away.
3. You need to self-promote. Your work product does NOT always speak for itself, and your managers will not automatically advocate for you just because you do good work. The article quoted an employee: “It took a long time for me to realize that the people I considered blowhards or glad-handers were moving ahead, getting promoted and following their mentors or sponsors from firm to firm, while I was still head down, doing the work. The light finally went on when I was approached about a new role by a former colleague, and realized that I had to get out of my own way, break old habits and promote the heck out of myself to make this happen.”
4. Don’t avoid work that’s “beneath you.” The opposite of #3 (the overly humble lawyer), #4 is extra important for lawyers because we do a lot of mundane work, not just strategy, to be impactful. So don’t try to avoid the unsophisticated work (unless it’s busy work assigned to you because you’re a woman, see here for more). One contributor to the article said, “In my early career days, if I didn’t want to do a task, I made it known that it was ‘beneath my skill level’ or ‘didn’t dovetail into my goals,’ believing that stance would show my bosses that I was meant for bigger and better things. Invariably, when I was still stuck doing those ‘menial’ tasks, I let it make me miserable and I ended up hating whatever job I was in. I would leave after one year, thinking I had to find something better. I developed the reputation of a job-jumper. It took until my mid-30s to break that pattern and rehabilitate my reputation, and meanwhile I lost out on a lot of great opportunities to further my career.” This description is the exact nightmare hiring managers try to avoid when hiring.
5. Know your worth. Employers expect you to negotiate compensation at the offer stage, so you should do it (but respectfully, and keep it to one round!). And you should continue to know your worth as you stay at a job. One woman said to WSJ, “I was not confident in negotiating my salary when I first started my corporate journey. It was a mix of being grateful that I had a job during a recession, being a woman in a male-dominated company, and inaccessibility to the right mentor. Now, as the owner of a tech startup, the tables have turned. It is such an incredible experience to see how women understand their worth and are now initiating those tough conversations with their bosses with confidence. Instead of just asking for a raise, I encourage all of my mentees to build a portfolio of every successful project to have ready for those conversations to use as ammunition. Your boss will have tangible, irresistible evidence of your value.”

For more crowd-sourced career lessons that apply to lawyers, see here and here.