May 15, 2025 • 26 mins
Tony Albrecht is a former litigator turned legal marketing strategist, and the founder of CONTENDER, a company that helps lawyers build trust and visibility on LinkedIn through meaningful, well-crafted content. Known as “The Yoda of LinkedIn Lawyering,” Tony draws on his years of experience as a practicing attorney to guide legal professionals in growing their personal brands and connecting with their communities. He earned his J.D. from Saint Louis University School of Law and began his legal career as an associate at McGivney, Kluger, Clark & Intoccia, later working with The Cook Group and in business development roles before launching his own ventures. He’s also the author of In the Creative Arena and the co-founder of UNrationed, a community for entrepreneurial men. Tony lives in a forest north of Toronto with his wife and two young children.
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(00:16):
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,
(00:39):
you know, social media a contender.
And I'll be so excited to hear alittle more about that for for
us to start our conversation today.
Tony, could you tell us a littlemore 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
(01:01):
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
(01:22):
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 mytime in practice doing.
(01:45):
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
(02:08):
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 tostart businesses doing a bunch
of traveling. Met the woman who had become my
wife while traveling in India in2015.
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
(02:31):
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,
(02:51):
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
(03:13):
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.
(03:35):
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
(03:56):
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
(04:17):
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 nowis given the way my my career is
unfolded in this rather unusual way, I now tend to think I maybe
(04:37):
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
(04:59):
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
(05:20):
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 awriter.
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.
(05:42):
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 schoolwith this, this was my reasoning
(06:05):
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 becomingmore aware of these things,
right? When we think about, you know, a
few like our grandparents and soforth, or, or for the most of
us, there wasn't much of an opportunity to think too much
(06:27):
through purpose, careers and allof 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.
(06:50):
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, butit's it's a very different world
than it was when our grandparents or even our parents
(07:11):
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
(07:32):
switched law firms once or twicethat 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 thatwe could still find success,
(07:57):
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 intotraveling and other things?
(08:19):
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
(08:43):
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
(09:04):
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,
(09:26):
which maybe prepared me for a stint traveling around the
world. I was also doing a lot of
reading at that time, and one ofthe things that I ran across
back then that has stuck with meis a line from the author Ray
Bradbury that says we must continually be jumping off
(09:47):
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
(10:11):
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 thefolks in the US government.
And I really didn't know what I wanted to, to do when I grew up.
(10:35):
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.
(10:57):
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
(11:19):
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
(11:40):
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 thatusually hold people back, back
either from expressing their voice or from a lot of people
have interesting stories, but putting that out there,
(12:02):
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 geta new job or when we're looking
for a new job or if we want to share a company press release or
(12:25):
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, thinkwe see LinkedIn as a place
primarily where we might be ableto get in trouble, that we, we
(12:46):
don't want to show up on the platform in a way that might get
us yelled at or get a talking toor 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,
(13:08):
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 feellike I've shared these with
(13:30):
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, shareexpertise and all these things.
And then as a student, it's hardto feel like you really have
(13:52):
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
(14:14):
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.
(14:37):
There's there are good things that can come from showing up.
And the way I talk about this isa 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
(14:57):
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 whenthere's something to announce.
We don't think about it as a place to be generous, as a with
(15:20):
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 badprofessional headshot.
You know that that that we we show up thinking that we need to
be like that personified in the digital space.
(15:43):
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, ifyou can be generous with, you
know, commenting on other people's posts, sending people
(16:07):
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
(16:28):
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 doit.
And who knows what good stuff might come out of this
(16:50):
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
(17:11):
researcher at Osgoode Hall, the other law school, and then ended
up meeting the person who becamemy 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.
(17:33):
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
(17:54):
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 rightthere is I think this this idea
(18:16):
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 wantto spend my time and energy
paying more attention to LinkedIn.
(18:37):
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.
(18:57):
So it's this situation where allthis 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
(19:20):
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
(19:41):
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 andgood.
But where things really get interesting is when you're able
to start building relationships,right?
(20:03):
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
(20:28):
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 doget interesting.
The platform changes in some crazy fundamental way and
(20:52):
opportunities start getting created.
I it. It's not predictable.
It was totally unexpected for mewhen 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
(21:14):
my early millennial and slash zoomer folks from those
generations is y'all are digitalnatives 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
(21:36):
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.
(21:58):
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 haveno 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,
(22:22):
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
(22:42):
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.
(23:04):
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
(23:25):
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 befocused geographically centred
in your major metro areas, New York, LA, Chicago, maybe.
(23:48):
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
(24:08):
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 ahaystack opportunity, she
managed to find it. Or I would say it managed to
(24:30):
find her. She had connected with the
founder of this firm more than ayear 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
(24:50):
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 opportunityarose, when there was a a
(25:11):
position that might be a fit, itall happened pretty quickly.
Offer that as a a case study in really how this can.
Work that's just amazing, that'sjust amazing how connections
lead to, to really life changingultimately.
So thank you so much for for sharing that.
I think that's enough encouragement for anybody who's
(25:33):
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
(25:53):
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.
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,
(00:39):
you know, social media a contender.
And I'll be so excited to hear alittle more about that for for
us to start our conversation today.
Tony, could you tell us a littlemore 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
(01:01):
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
(01:22):
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 mytime in practice doing.
(01:45):
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
(02:08):
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 tostart businesses doing a bunch
of traveling. Met the woman who had become my
wife while traveling in India in2015.
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
(02:31):
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,
(02:51):
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
(03:13):
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.
(03:35):
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
(03:56):
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
(04:17):
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 nowis given the way my my career is
unfolded in this rather unusual way, I now tend to think I maybe
(04:37):
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
(04:59):
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
(05:20):
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 awriter.
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.
(05:42):
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 schoolwith this, this was my reasoning
(06:05):
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 becomingmore aware of these things,
right? When we think about, you know, a
few like our grandparents and soforth, or, or for the most of
us, there wasn't much of an opportunity to think too much
(06:27):
through purpose, careers and allof 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.
(06:50):
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, butit's it's a very different world
than it was when our grandparents or even our parents
(07:11):
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
(07:32):
switched law firms once or twicethat 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 thatwe could still find success,
(07:57):
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 intotraveling and other things?
(08:19):
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
(08:43):
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
(09:04):
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,
(09:26):
which maybe prepared me for a stint traveling around the
world. I was also doing a lot of
reading at that time, and one ofthe things that I ran across
back then that has stuck with meis a line from the author Ray
Bradbury that says we must continually be jumping off
(09:47):
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
(10:11):
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 thefolks in the US government.
And I really didn't know what I wanted to, to do when I grew up.
(10:35):
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.
(10:57):
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
(11:19):
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
(11:40):
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 thatusually hold people back, back
either from expressing their voice or from a lot of people
have interesting stories, but putting that out there,
(12:02):
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 geta new job or when we're looking
for a new job or if we want to share a company press release or
(12:25):
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, thinkwe see LinkedIn as a place
primarily where we might be ableto get in trouble, that we, we
(12:46):
don't want to show up on the platform in a way that might get
us yelled at or get a talking toor 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,
(13:08):
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 feellike I've shared these with
(13:30):
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, shareexpertise and all these things.
And then as a student, it's hardto feel like you really have
(13:52):
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
(14:14):
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.
(14:37):
There's there are good things that can come from showing up.
And the way I talk about this isa 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
(14:57):
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 whenthere's something to announce.
We don't think about it as a place to be generous, as a with
(15:20):
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 badprofessional headshot.
You know that that that we we show up thinking that we need to
be like that personified in the digital space.
(15:43):
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, ifyou can be generous with, you
know, commenting on other people's posts, sending people
(16:07):
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
(16:28):
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 doit.
And who knows what good stuff might come out of this
(16:50):
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
(17:11):
researcher at Osgoode Hall, the other law school, and then ended
up meeting the person who becamemy 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.
(17:33):
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
(17:54):
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 rightthere is I think this this idea
(18:16):
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 wantto spend my time and energy
paying more attention to LinkedIn.
(18:37):
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.
(18:57):
So it's this situation where allthis 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
(19:20):
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
(19:41):
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 andgood.
But where things really get interesting is when you're able
to start building relationships,right?
(20:03):
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
(20:28):
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 doget interesting.
The platform changes in some crazy fundamental way and
(20:52):
opportunities start getting created.
I it. It's not predictable.
It was totally unexpected for mewhen 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
(21:14):
my early millennial and slash zoomer folks from those
generations is y'all are digitalnatives 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
(21:36):
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.
(21:58):
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 haveno 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,
(22:22):
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
(22:42):
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.
(23:04):
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
(23:25):
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 befocused geographically centred
in your major metro areas, New York, LA, Chicago, maybe.
(23:48):
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
(24:08):
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 ahaystack opportunity, she
managed to find it. Or I would say it managed to
(24:30):
find her. She had connected with the
founder of this firm more than ayear 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
(24:50):
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 opportunityarose, when there was a a
(25:11):
position that might be a fit, itall happened pretty quickly.
Offer that as a a case study in really how this can.
Work that's just amazing, that'sjust amazing how connections
lead to, to really life changingultimately.
So thank you so much for for sharing that.
I think that's enough encouragement for anybody who's
(25:33):
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
(25:53):
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.
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