As the traditional legal career path evolves into more of a career “zig zag,” an increasing number of lawyers, like me, are finding themselves pursuing entrepreneurial opportunities.

Crafty Counsel is an online learning and development website for in house lawyers that I founded in October last year. At the outset, I saw that there was an opportunity in the space and knew that I wanted to build a business from scratch, but leaving legal practice was still a step into the unknown, and a lot of my peers definitely still think I'm pretty crazy.

I came up with the idea for Crafty Counsel after moving in house to a venture capital backed e-commerce Start Up, following seven years as a Corporate Finance lawyer at Clifford Chance in London.

In private practice, the breadth and quality of professional development resources, and the bench of expert peers to bounce ideas off of, was almost embarrassingly good. And, much of that evaporated overnight when I moved in house.

Meanwhile, I recalled the hit and miss process of lawyer marketing while in private practice—far too many client briefings going unread, and seminars where the return on investment was unclear.

Something was broken here. Professional and personal development for lawyers, particular Corporate Counsel, seemed stuck in analogue during a digital age.

I launched Crafty Counsel in October 2017, originally alongside my day job as a Corporate Counsel. Our website provides in house counsel with bite sized video interviews, topic introductions and top tips with law firm partners, regulators, recruiters and General Counsel. We're building the 'Ted Talks' style platform for Law.

I have to disagree with the notion that lawyers tend to make poor entrepreneurs. Lawyers often take a lot of flack for not being commercial and not willing to take a view. I've certainly seen that behavior, but it clearly depends on the individual.

Rather, I prefer to focus on the relevant experience that lawyers bring to business. The best lawyers are empathetic, can get to the heart of an issue quickly, are good negotiators, and are outstanding at judging risk and choosing the right option for the circumstance. Corporate lawyers in particular also, inevitably, truly understand the plumbing of the legal relationships that make a business work, such as the mutual dependency of investors, founders, team and customers.

Nevertheless, I've found that there are plenty of challenges for which legal life does not provide preparation. Even in a law firm, the sales side is something many partners struggle with. We've been fortunate in that we have had a steady flow of unsolicited inbound queries from law firms and other potential presenters for Crafty Counsel. But it still doesn't feel natural to sit across the table from someone and pitch the project I built, one that didn't exist nine months ago. Luckily I think we have a great story to tell, of course!

Success or failure definitely feels very personal in those circumstances. You've got to not allow yourself to get too emotionally swept up in either the highs or the lows, while still listening carefully and judging when to adjust to feedback.

Other areas that I would say are likely to be novel for most lawyer would-be-entrepreneurs include website design, marketing and business plan development. And, moving from working with lawyers and similar desk-bound professionals all day, to working with creatives and programmers!

My experience has been that you need to get comfortable with the process of experimentation and incremental improvement. As lawyers, especially in private practice, we're trained to produce a perfect work product. But in a start-up environment, if you wait for perfect, then you'll never get going.

A lot of people have congratulated me on taking a risky step—which is often really just a nice way of saying: “you must be out of your mind”. It's true that, as lawyers, we tend to be a risk averse breed. Telling a lawyer “bold move” can be enough to make that person have palpitations and assess her life choices. But I also think it's important to frame risk properly. The only behavior that delivers 100 percent certainty of business failure is not trying at all. And, I see a clear risk that, if I don't drive forward this idea, someone else will build a platform like it in years to come. Legal practice will always be an option. In that context, it's a classic case of risk arbitrage, which is something that I'm fairly familiar advising on, as a lawyer!

My final piece of advice? Network like your life depends on it. Many of the most important relationships for our business ultimately trace their origins to chance encounters and introductions made three, six, or nine months ago, which then snowballed. It would have been easy to say “no thanks” to many of those meetings. People are often very kind to entrepreneurs and want to support new businesses. Being open to people, enthusiastic, humble, curious and helpful are key. Get out of the office and go meet some people!

Ben White is the Founder of London-based Crafty Counsel (https://craftycounsel.org/), the new home of (free!) bite sized learning and development videos for in house counsel, featuring top law firm presenters, General Counsel, regulators, recruiters and more. You can get in touch with Ben at [email protected].