5 Secrets to Thrive for Lawyers & Law Students | Brian Cabrera, Silicon Valley Senior Tech Executive

Let me give you just five secrets that I thought about that I did not know when I was sitting here as you 30 years ago. No particular order, but I thought I would mention them. The first thing I think I've learned since then over the course of years is it is not a race. I don't know if you think it's a race because probably to get into law school it was a race for the LSAT, it was a race for this. You'll hear about the bar exam. I remember thinking at the bar exam a woman left next to me day two and a guy left day three and my thinking was, yeah okay, that's two less that I have to worry about. That was my mentality, just like dog eat dog, gotta get through it, three-day exam. And I've learned over the course of my practice it is not a race. If you think it is, you're missing the point. I would suggest taking your time a little bit more. For example, if you have a chance to go do a master's, I did a master's in public administration, go do it. If you're sent on a deposition, I was getting sent all over the place, all over the country doing depositions in my first year. But my dad had said to me, he was smart enough to give me the lesson. He said, Brian, when you go to do those things, take an extra half a day. Go see that museum that's in that... I'm in the middle of Dayton, Ohio, right? The Wright Brothers' little shop is right there, the bicycle shop, and then the Air Force Museum. Or Canada, you know, I'm negotiating an OEM agreement. I went and went halibut fishing and caught the largest. Take the time when you're doing this. Don't let the world and the billable and everything cause you to freeze up. I get it, I understand why you want to succeed. You all got here because you were hardworking, doing your homework, getting it. But take the time for yourself to be good to yourself. I learned early on that no matter what happened in the morning, I always woke up by myself, right? No matter how you might be with your loved one, love of your life, you might be with family and friends, you might be traveling, but at the end of the day, day in and day out, the one thing that was true for me during my career was I always woke up by myself or with myself. And if you're not your own best friend, you're really not helping you. If you're just beating yourself up, you're doing yourself no good. Be your own best friend, be kind to yourself. These are hard professions. This is a hard profession and it's getting harder in a sense. It's getting more rewarding, right? We're making more money than we made. We have the ability to be other officers, we have the ability to do other things. But it's harder in that everything involves a lawyer nowadays. You cannot do business. When I go out there in business, whether it was at Nvidia, whether it was at Synopsys, hardware, software, SaaS, I've done it all, right? Taking companies public, laying off folks, doing whatnot. Everything requires an attorney nowadays. And it's almost like my business people don't want to travel unless they've got an attorney or at least I'm available by phone. And that feels pretty good. I mean, it's nice to be needed, it's nice to be engaged. And I engage with my partners. That's a partnership that I have, right, with my outside law firms. Gone are the days where I view my law firms as it's us against them and we need to cut their rates and they're doing... No, no, no, no. My law firms are my best friends. They're my partners, right? They are people who helped me to be successful and I look for ways to help them to be successful. It is a symbiotic relationship. And if you're not thinking about it that way, then you're doing it wrong. You're doing it all wrong. They should be some of your best friends, the people you want to work with. When I need support, when I need to reduce rates, or when I need to figure out something different, it's my partners at the law firms that I go to. The partners at the law firms are the networking that recommend me for that next job, or I recommend them. So don't... It's a small world. So next point is relationships matter. It is a small world. And I'm saying that to my 15-year-old today. Like, if you haven't said hello to Monica, who is reception here, and remembered her name, you just missed an opportunity. I can't tell you how many times I've seen candidates come in and blow through the receptionist and treat him or her like crap, and then get to the interview and they don't know that I check in with Monica. I ask, hey Monica, what did you think of Julie? Oh well, she didn't have the time to even say hello, she was really upset because of the parking. You're interviewing, these are all relationships. I say hello to my waiter. They all know me, they know when my birthday is. Think about that as you start to think about practicing. What are your relationships? And not just with your... I get it, the partner, yes, you have to have that, that's really important. What are your relationships with the gardener? Do you ever say hello to him when you come in? Right. I still have relationships with people. The guy who brings carpeting is a guy who I referenced to get to move into my neighborhood, right? Think about that. I learned that from my... Not from my parents. My dad didn't... My dad taught me be the best at what you do and work the hardest. That was all he taught me, bless his heart. And that's what I did. I didn't learn till mid-management that there's a third leg to that stool. Why is it that there are people, and there may be people in this room, who might be the hardest working and done the most homework, most prepared, and they're not getting ahead? And I would submit, just at least check that. What I learned was the third leg of that stool is relationships. At the executive level, you are already assumed to know the content. You're already assumed to be hard working. You're putting in the extra hours, you're on flights, you're traveling, right? At the partner level, you already know your skill, right? You're already putting in the hours and the work. But to me, I submit to you, the differentiator is that the third leg of the stool is the relationships. And I can't tell you how many times as an executive I've been able to go to somebody and say, you know, I can't figure this out, can you help me? I'm just not getting it. It's a spreadsheet and I used to be good at math 30 years ago or 20 years ago, but you're fabulous at this. Can you just look at my spreadsheet and tell me what I'm doing wrong? Or can you look at my PowerPoint and just I just want to get your feelings on it and get your feedback on it? Can I take you to lunch and just let me just show it to you? Those kinds of relationships where you're asking for help and you're building relationships and you're working out. Don't just sit in your cube. Don't sit in your office. Even if you're an introvert, that's okay. Plenty of introverts do fantastically in this profession. Right, as we get more neurodiverse, I think we're going to see more and more different skill sets of people coming into our profession, which is fantastic. But that doesn't mean that relationships aren't still really key. Any questions about that? Anybody have any other comments, thoughts, stories? Let me not forget integrity. Right, what is integrity? It's what you do when no one's watching. Right, it's whether you pick up that trash off the floor when you know you didn't throw it down, you didn't drop it, but no one's paying attention to you. Do you pick it up? Do you clean up the place? Somebody's left something, what do you do? And one thing I would say that has been crucial to me is I've seen throughout my career situations where it's very tempting as you get into these positions where you're the counselor. Very soon here, people like me are going to be relying on you. I need to get the answer. I need to know what you think I should do in this situation. What is your judgment? I can Google the law, remember? Right, the law is not hard for me to get. I don't need you guys for the law, honestly. I can either know it or I can Google it, I can figure it out. It's the application of the law to the facts. It's the judgment about situations, right? That's where you should be focusing your time as you move up. Right, because that judgment is what I'm going to be coming to you for, to say I've got this situation. I know the law's over here says this, there's some laws over here that say that. What's the right thing for us to be doing as a company? What's the right business decision? And the more that you can help develop that judgment, that's the difference between just being a lawyer and becoming a counselor to executives, to companies, to boards. My board rarely asks me what the law is. They ask me what they should do. They ask me, what do you think? And my partner, one of my partners at Pillsbury, I asked him, hey, give me your sense of this. I'm not asking him what the law is per se. So keep that in mind in terms of both integrity and in terms of looking at the bigger picture. Let's see, I think I'm down to my last one, which is just, again, when I put myself in your seat, I was gung-ho. There were 14 of us at Bronson at the time, 14 new hires. And there was definitely competitive, there was definitely a sense of who's going to go to the deposition, who's stuck in the library, who's getting... There was definitely a sense of all that. And I can tell you, when I grew up, not too many people realize, but when I grew up, I have a severe hearing loss, a disability if you will. I have an 80% hearing loss in my right ear. And so you'll tend to see, if we're in a crowded thing, I'll tend to try to read your lips, right? Or I now have a hearing aid, I didn't all growing up. But I think again, my mom, bless her heart, it wasn't about disability, it was about you overcome, you get an accommodation. She sat me in the front row, went to the teacher, said you're going to sit on the right side. And I think probably made me a better student because I couldn't mess around in the back of the class. I had to be on the front row listening. And I sort of learned early on that all of us have something. I'll bet if I went to each one of you, you have something, something that is a weakness, something you feel like, oh, I wish I had more of this, I wish I had less of that, I wish if only I hadn't had this. And I would just say to you, I get it. But as much as you can, look for an accommodation, find a way around it. My mother just didn't let me believe that. She just said you work through it. She took me every year to a hearing doctor and eventually I got hearing aids. But all through school I had to deal with it and I just dealt with it. Just don't let that stop you. Find a way to fix it. The other thing was, and that's the last thing I'll touch on before opening it up, is I was an incredibly sensitive kid. What I tell people and what my close friends know about me, I said to them, if people had any idea how sensitive I am, they would never believe that I'm in this profession. They would never believe that I have that resume. Right, I mean my kids, if my three kids are here, they'd be at an AT&T commercial, I'm bawling. Every movie they're looking over, dad, you're embarrassing, can you please stop crying? But you know what I realized in the last 15 years is that my secret superpower is my sensitivity. I over time developed that into something where I read the room. Because I was always that new kid, I was always that small kid, I was always that deaf kid, I was always something that separated me from everybody else. Right, and I realized over time that having that sensitivity to other people, to diversity, to that loner over in the corner and going and making friends with that person, to sensing what people were doing, whether they were lying, whether they were BS-ing me in negotiations, made me a better negotiator. And now running HR, being able to understand how people are emoting and those sorts of things, whether I'm doing a promotion or whether I'm doing a reduction, it is actually a secret superpower now that I have that I feel blessed to have been given. And so take that and just whatever you might perceive as your weakness, it may be that it's there for a reason. It might be that it's there to teach you something that you overcome and that makes you the best at what you do going forward.