Episode 149: Angela Meyer
Client Relationship Expert & Former Executive Director of the Product Liability Advisory Council
00:47:35
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Show Notes
Client relationship expert Angela Meyer joins the podcast to talk about her corporate career, including business development strategy and tips for lawyers. She is a mechanical engineer, the former executive director of the Product Liability Advisory Council, and a client relationship guru. Tune in and gain important insights on business development from today’s amazing guest.
Relevant episode links:
Angela Meyer, Product Liability Advisory Council, Give-To-Get, Making Rain
About Angela Meyer:
Angela Meyer
Dr. Angela Meyer has more than 30 years’ experience working with attorneys, engineers and scientists in the area of business development, marketing and client service. As Director of Meyer Vorst Consultants, she works with clients to build their brand, improve the network and be successful at business development. Over the course of her career, she learned to be successful at lead generation and marketing and teaches others to do the same.
Angela is a licensed professional mechanical engineer and worked with one of the largest forensic engineering firms in the world, Exponent, as an engineer, corporate officer, and business generator. She was President and CEO of the Product Liability Advisory Council (PLAC), a specialty legal association for product manufacturers and select outside counsel. She is also a board member or advisor to several privately held companies in the legal technology and scientific consulting space. She holds three degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
Transcript
On the show, I’m pleased to have join us, Angela Meyer. I’m excited to hear all the wonderful things she'll share with you, particularly about business development and her career. She has had many hats. I’ll say that I know her from her time with a litigation consulting company and also in her role with the Product Liability Advisory Council directing that organization. Welcome, Angela.
Thank you, MC. It's good to see you.
I wanted to talk about two parts. It might all be meshed together, but the first is your career and what we might learn, those of us who are in law practice from your trajectory into partnership at a litigation consulting firm. Also, you have a beautiful natural and authentic way of building relationships and communicating with others and, in my view, a paragon of business development and marketing. I’m excited. You probably don't even consciously know most of what you do that's fabulous. Maybe there's a little bit you could share that people could think about in developing their own practices.
I’d be happy to talk to you about it.
The first thing I wanted to talk about you and your trajectory, how is it that you got into the whole realm of becoming an expert witness and doing litigation consulting?
I’m not a lawyer, as you said. I’m a Mechanical Engineer. I have a PhD in Mechanical Engineering and my professor, that was also my department chair at Southern Methodist University, was an expert witness and he did accident investigations for airplane crashes. It turned out he was a plaintiff's expert, which was funny, as I found out later in my career. I wanted to be an airline pilot. That was my goal. My parents were both in the military. I saw engineering school as a path to getting into the military to fly airplanes and go commercial. What happened was there was no path at that point for me to get in and start flying because of my age as I am now. I said, “If I can't fly airplanes, why don't I figure out how they crash?”
He was an expert witness, so he introduced me to some of his clients and I started working on a number of his projects. I found that fascinating. I went on to get my license and my PhD. He told me, “If you want to do this work, the best place in the world to do accident investigation is a company called Failure Analysis Associates, now Exponent in California. I was finishing my Post Doc at UC Berkeley and was looking at where I was going to go to work. I saw a job advertised for Failure Analysis and that's what happened. I went to work for them and started down the expert witness path. I did that for a number of years, supporting and testifying experts. I didn't get to testify. I got close to deposition, but I didn't get it.
At the time, I was looking around. I didn't feel my career was moving as fast as I wanted to be. I was the only woman in this practice area that I was in. I didn't feel like I had as much billable work as I wanted. I would go around the office because I was in the corporate office in Menlo Park and I would knock on doors and ask for work. That was probably one of my low points because I’m like, “I got to go be a salesperson and go sell myself to people internally to try to get some work.” I started getting on some bigger and bigger projects. People would say, “I need some help to do this or do that.” I ended up working on a project for the CEO of the company and eventually, a job opened working for him directly.
I ended up getting that job, which I’m very grateful for because it changed the trajectory of my career. About 6 or 8 months into that job, he said to me, “You're changing jobs. You're going to the marketing department.” I said, “We don't have a marketing department.” He said, “You're it.” I said, “What does a PhD in Engineering know about marketing?” He said, “You're a PhD and you can do anything.” For the next 25 years, I did marketing, sales, business development, public relations and became the client face of the firm. I absolutely loved it.
I loved working with lawyers, in-house and outside council, and it was a great run. I was fortunate because we were a sponsor of the Product Liability Advisory Council. When they were looking for a new executive director, they came after me, which was a dream. I got to work with you more and the rest of the crème de la crème of litigation and appellate lawyers. I did that for a while and then I went back to Exponent and finished my career. Now I’m doing my own business development coaching and training for lawyers and other professional service companies.
There are a couple of things in there. We had spoken offline a little bit about it. There are a few nuggets in what you talked about that I wanted to explore a little bit. The first one was how your career blossomed and moved off in a direction that you hadn't contemplated. That was because somebody else saw something in you that you didn't even know that you had. I’m wondering how that came about.
To be perfectly honest, when I was getting ready to go college, I wanted to be a Theater major. Theater or Choreographer. That was my goal. My mother was like, “Absolutely not. We're not paying for you to get it.” I had a little bit of a ham in me. You need to have some of that to do marketing. What Exponent saw in me was the fact that I could combine having a strong technical background, but I was able to translate it in a way that people understood what we did and why we did it. Much like an expert does, but I was looking more at the value proposition for the client. We had to decide whether or not the product was defective or not or there was an issue or not. That's all about science.
What I felt that I was got to be pretty good at was that I could speak to clients to try to understand what their business issues were and then how Exponent could fit into solving their business issues versus, “I’m a lawyer, hire me,” or, “I’m an engineer, hire me.” I do that now. I was at a board meeting at SMU talking about the brand of the engineering school and how we could be better at communicating with the corporate world and the DFW area. It's one of these things where engineers specifically, and I’m sure you're going to say lawyers do the same thing. We're great technicians, but we're not great at communicating and we're not comfortable with the networking selling effort. I always say business development is like dating.
You've got to know and get to know people, like them, and they need to trust you before they're ever going to hire you. You got to get off this, “I got to sell.” To me, it's all, “Can you connect the dots and create the relationships all the well by doing great work, providing excellent service, following up, making the deliverables happen, and all that. Can you solve the client's issues of cost-effectively, credibly, and with no errors from an engineer point of view to the point where they say, ‘This was the greatest experience I ever had? I want to hire them again.’” That's what I tried to do. I tried to make sure that I was representing our company and the breadth of the services we offer, not just one myopic area.
You’ve got to know and get to know people, and they need to trust you before they will hire you.
In terms of professional services, where people fall down is they say, “I’m a construction lawyer. I’m an IP lawyer. I’m an appellate lawyer. I can't sell across the firm.” You can sell across the firm. Everybody is a network. It may not now impact you directly, but it impacts your firm, which impacts you because everybody's in the boat. If everybody’s working together, the boat rises. If you're working as an individual, you might as well be out on your own doing it your own way. If you're in a law firm, especially when you become a partner, you're looking out for the total good of everyone. It's not the good of the one. It's for the good of all.
There's so much reticence within firms in part because individual lawyers might be concerned that they want to make sure that the client experience is as good as somebody else. It’s because they don't want to upset the relationship with the client inadvertently. That can always be a little bit of reticence there, but it's interesting. There were two things when I was listening to you. The first thing was I was trying to describe what your raw talent is in this regard that you look at, as you said, the value proposition. You're looking at things not necessarily from a strict technical engineering standpoint but from a business and human standpoint.
The second part is that you're bridging the communication of the technical to the client who isn't technical but once the benefit of the technical knowledge. Your ability to bridge that communication gap and think about things or ask questions from a business and value vantage point leads to your understanding. As a result of that, the whole client experience is better because they feel heard and everyone is meeting each other's needs and all of that.
The fact that you have that approach, that's your mindset when you're doing it. People respond to you differently because you have that mindset. Everybody can sense when somebody is just looking for, “Can you use me for something right now? If you can't, they go cruising around the room and leave you.” Nobody likes to have that feeling, but if it's the feeling you are creating, people enjoy that.
They do. Mo Bunnell, who's a fantastic business development coach and mentor and was a great business generator who's an actuary because of his science background, always says he has a great book. He calls it Give-To-Get. I don't know if it was my Roman Catholic upbringing or my service. My mother sent me off to work at thirteen years old and go flip hamburgers or whatever. It’s a service attitude. I have a very strong belief that everybody should do a service job. I don't care if you're flipping hamburgers, waiting tables, picking garbage up, or whatever you're doing. Everybody is important in their own way. I also feel like you need to be in a situation where you have to communicate. The telephone, texting, and all the virtual stuff are great, but it defeats the purpose of developing the relationship.
The telephone, texting, and virtual stuff are great. But they can defeat the purpose of developing the relationship.
It's an artificial way of developing relationships. I wasn't always in the service business and as I said, this might be my religious upbringing or whatever. I always felt like if I could pay it forward and help somebody, eventually, it's going to come back to help me. For me, with clients, whether a client called and it turned out that we didn't have the right expertise, but I could direct him to another firm that had the right expertise, I’m trying to solve the client's problem and help them out. If I’m helping the client, you're making the client's life easier. What people saw in me was that I was trying to help them in the most efficient way possible and get the answer they needed.
Not a technical answer, but I’m not talking about being the witness. I’m trying to figure it out. It could be as little as I had people that I knew that we'd be sitting at a cocktail party and they'd be talking about their kids and their kid didn't like reading. I offered a suggestion of a particular book that my son liked when he was learning to read. He is like, “I never heard of it.” I went to Target and I bought him three books. I put them in the mail and sent it to him. It turned out his son loved them. Many years later, he is still talking about how I sent his son these books and he started reading it. It had nothing to do with business.
I genuinely liked him and felt his pain trying to be a great partner at a law firm, do all this business development, try to juggle being a parent, the frustrations and difficulties, and raise his children. We did that and I’m like, “It didn't cost me a lot of money for me to do it.” I didn't do it out of a sense like, “If I do this, he's going to give me business.” It was purely empathy and I felt for him. Those kinds of things, whether it's putting a presentation together for a client or sending them a paper in an area that they might want to be interested in learning about, or doing a webinar or writing a paper together.
However, we don't think that way because we only think about, “I’ve got to do this brief. I’ve got to get ready for this deposition. The client is going to fire me if I don't get the outcome he wants.” You got to think about that stuff, but it's about the client's hiring you for an answer, which you're going to give them as best as you can. They're also hiring you for a client experience and you want it to be a good client experience, so they come back and hire you again. There are plenty of people. They go out there and hire. The question is, did you bring the best experience possible? I tell people all the time, “There's plenty of people they can go hire. Why do they hire you? It isn't necessarily because of your firm. It's because of you.”
Including how you approach the work, how you think about their problems, but also this human part.
I never worked in a law firm, but law firms have the same problems as the consulting firms. You graduate from law school. You go to a great law firm, they put you to work billing, and then they forget about all the things like the client has a budget and they think they're going to spend $20,000 on the budget. You come in there and you're going to do all this stuff. All of a sudden, you recognize you've billed 30 hours a time and you've eaten up three-quarters of that budget. You haven't even done anything yet. It’s the project management skills, the financial management skills, and the communication skills. When I talk to people, I’ll say to them, “Invest in yourself. You can ask your firm to invest in you.”
As a professional, the one thing when they threw me into marketing that I did is I went and took a two-day short course on presentation skills. I thought that because I had a PhD, I’d gotten up and given a dissertation defense and presented at a major technical conference that I was a good presenter. I got myself taped and I found out how horrible I was. That was years ago. It was $150. I spent that money out of my pocket to do it because I felt I needed to improve myself as a professional. I would not necessarily expect your firm to do everything for you. If you are weak at writing, get better at writing. If you're weak at presenting or speaking, go practice.
There are plenty of things out there or go talk to somebody. There are all these other things thinking about you buy a product. You won't even want to spend the amount of money. Think about buying the service you're offering so that you understand the profit and loss and what the client's budgets are and work to those needs. That's all about the service. That's one thing I never got taught until I got burned. You get burned and you've already destroyed the relationship or at least damaged it a little bit.
Usually, those kinds of things were maybe incrementally taught, but not really. A good question is, when you think about the client experience, what do you think of when you say that? It seems like it's a variety of things. Obviously, it needs to be the work itself. The work needs to be good, creative, and fit their particular needs but that's just one part of the pie.
When I coach people, I talk to them about the first thing when you're in a new client experience. How does the client want to be communicated with? Do they want texts, an email, or a phone call? They don't want anything. How often do they want to go through it? I also say, “Before the first bill, when you get the invoice to review that you're going to send to a client or your company is going to send to the client, go through it and then call the client and say, ‘I want to go through this with you when you get it.’ I want you to understand that you're hiring me.” This is another issue that I find in all professional services.
Unless you're a sole practitioner, they're hiring you. If not, they're hiring your associates or as a partner, but they didn't understand what the associates are doing, the legal assistants, the admin assistant, or whoever it is. They need to understand their point in this project. They need to understand it early on and before you start building a lot of time because you could damage the relationship right from the get-go if they think that they're hiring you and they get this cast of thousands on the bill and they don't understand it.
That's all about the experience. The earlier you can nip that in the bud and make a good experience for the client from a professional point of view, the better off you're going to be getting them back as a client. That doesn't take away from being creative in your brief and being creative as a litigator, in the contract dispute, or whatever you are doing. I take that as a given. It's just all the other stuff that you need to think about.
I’ve never done that, but I could see where it would make sense to do that. I always think about it in terms of managing expectations at the beginning and then making sure that whatever is sent, the invoice is very clear. There's a clear description that when you read all of the entries, it reads like a story and you can understand how all this fits together. It doesn't look like everybody is doing the same thing over and over or there's some repetition. I usually think about that a lot. If I get the bill, how would I look at it? How would I see it? It doesn't make sense about what all these people are doing, how it all fits together, and how it furthers the goal and mission. I’m now having that discussion beforehand. I like that idea. That's great.
I know I’ve had several points in my career where I’ve had in-house counsel call and say, “I want to go through this. I don't understand this bill.” I was an objective observer. In my position, I was the client service VP. If they had an issue or a question, they could come to me. Once I ended up getting to know you very well, I would come and say, “You're an objective observer. Tell me why this person is on this bill. Get the information.” I love them a lot, but I ended up mediating between the people in my firm and the client in terms of figuring out how we can solve this problem because the client didn't want to pay the bill.
It was an interesting career. As I said, it wasn't something I was trained in. Believe me. I’ve had many failures. I was working with a client and I was so excited. It was early on in my career and we wanted to get this guy's work. I ended up meeting him at a DRI conference of all things. It was late at night and I was tired, and we were chit-chatting. He was asking something and I said, “Why don't you hire us?” It came out of my mouth and I couldn't even say, “Did I say that?” He looked at me and he laughed. We went on and I said, “I’m sorry I said it that way.” He said, “I’m happy to talk to you about it.” We did. We eventually ended up sitting down at dinner and talking about why he hadn't hired us. Realistically, it became obvious that our people never reached out to him.
We fixed a lot of stuff and they ended up using the firm almost exclusively from then on. It was great, but it was one of these things where we assume, and I won't put that tagline what assume means, that the client is going to call if he needs us. It could be that the client isn't even thinking about it, but you trigger something when you call them. It's a little bit of a change in mindset. There are plenty of podcasts out there. There are great books out there. Also, YouTube. I constantly try to learn, listen, and watch people. I’m not the authority. I know what I do. I do a lot of things wrong. I guess I’m pretty humble that way and I learn from other masters.
What I do find, which gives me gratification, especially when I’m teaching, is that when I listen to people doing a video or I’m reading a book or whatever and I see things, I’m like, “It reinforces that what I’m doing is the right thing and the right thing for me.” You may not want to be out on the frontline doing sales or sitting across the table from somebody trying to get business. You might do it by writing. You may like to get up and speak, but you can't do it one-on-one. There are multiple ways to get business and build your brand. It doesn't have to be going out and trying to sell a product. You don't necessarily have to do it. It could be that you're a prolific writer and people read your briefs. You're so impressive and they'll hire you because of that. It doesn't have necessarily be sitting over a cup of coffee saying, “Please hire me.”
I think about that too. People think about tactics, especially newer people that think about business development in terms of tactics, which is okay, but that's a tactic. People say, “I have to write. I have to speak. I have to have a certain amount of lunches.” Maybe those are tactics or one of them you feel more comfortable with than others. That's one way of doing it. Do what is genuine and comfortable for you.
You also have to be sincerely interested in that area. I was sincerely loving. I loved aviation and everything about airplanes. I want to know how they worked, how they failed, and what human factors were associated. I loved everything about it. It was an ideal thing for me to go into aircraft work. As a lawyer, you could be an IP lawyer, an entertainment lawyer, or an appellate lawyer but you got to really like it because people can find fakeness in everything. You find fakeness in friendships. That's why I say business development is like dating. You go going out and you're talking to a whole bunch of people and you resonate to people that you're interested in. People resonate with you because you have energy, exude, and enthusiasm about what you do and what an interest in them.
If people say, “What was the best thing that Angela brought to me? Angela was always interested in me, what my end game was and helping me be successful.” That's what I always try to do, whether somebody is looking for a new job, trying to find an expert, or want to get business. I’m so grateful when I see somebody be successful in whatever it is. That's how I get my happiness. It’s seeing people happy and being successful at what they like to do. That is something you need to have in business development. You have to genuinely want to help somebody. Once they see that, they gravitate towards you more versus being a flat-line way to look at it.
That's genuine to you. People respond to genuineness in that regard and a genuine interest in them and helping them out in various ways. By helping in a number of ways that isn't even directly the line of work that you could help them with, you're telling them, “I care about you and I want to help you in any way that I can.” Even if it doesn't mean that it's a direct line to being hired at this point in time, people understand that feeling when it's true.
People also have to recognize that business development takes time. I had a client that it took five years. We developed a relationship, we became “friends” and it took five years to get a piece of work from his company. There have been people that I’ve gone traveled internationally and we've talked about it. I’ve sent them to my travel agent or I’ve told them where to go in a particular country that I was lucky enough to go to. All of a sudden, they have a project and they call me and they say, “I could call somebody else, but I’d rather work with you because you were helpful to me.” “Great. I appreciate it.”
Some of the biggest pieces of business that I brought in over my career weren't necessarily because I was an expert and doing expert witness work. It was because I was solving people's problems. What happened is I got a reputation in the industry of helping people and then lawyers would call me and say, “MC told me to call you.” I was like, “This is great.” I would help them and sometimes we could help some of them but I always made sure that I would call you back and say thank you for the referral. People fall down on that. People fall down on thanking people for the work, the referral, and the introduction. It's something that I don't think is ingrained in people anymore. They take it for granted.
That's a good reminder. A thank you note or a thank you call or something like that is nice to do to recognize that people. You don't have to do that. They did you a solid in that referral. Even if it doesn't work out, sometimes I do that. People refer to something and say, “It didn't work out for whatever reason. There was a conflict or something happened. We didn't end up doing the work but we certainly appreciate you’re thinking about us.”
The next time it comes, they will hopefully think about you again. You had a good extent and a good experience.
I think about that client experience thing. The hardest thing is to think about what that whole experience is, including the extended team, whether people are responsive to you and all of that. All those little things are, are important.
Very much so. As I grew in my career, I’ve made many mistakes, even with the teams that I led. Now I look back on things and say, “I wish I would've done things a little bit differently with regard to it.” You mentioned I have a client relationship. Can I trust my associates or can I trust my other partners to not botch it up? You have to have healthy respect in your associates and stuff. You have to have confidence in them that they're not going to do it. I would say to people, “I’m going to transition this relationship to you because they've gave me the work, but you're actually going to do the work. Therefore, it's your client to manage.
I’m telling you right now, if you botch it up, I’m going to come back and I’m going to fix it, but I may never give you an opportunity for a while until you can prove to me again that you can manage the client's expectations and that relationship.” As a leadership point of view, you also have to look at very diverse perspectives. As leaders, the best leaders are people that listen to what their team is telling them and are willing to be open to suggestions, even if they're outlandish and crazy. Do not be judgmental about knocking them down and say, “No. We can't do it that way.” There's always a different way to look at things. I never knew how to do marketing. I was self-taught or took marketing classes that teach myself.
I went back and there was a marketing team in one of the firms I worked with. I was like, “I never thought about doing it that way.” I was twenty years into my career. When you move to a different law firm, you learn things by watching and listening. That's how you pick up on things with clients. Having a conversation with a client about their business or what's a personal win for them, you pick up on things then you can ask questions.
One of my favorite authors is Andrew Sobel. He has a number of books about marketing. Making Rain is one of his power questions. Learning how to listen to the client and then ask questions is a skill that everybody needs to learn. Litigators are trained that way when they are in depositions to ask questions and to do follow-up questions based on the answers. They've got a good phrase.
Learning how to listen to the client and then ask questions is a skill that everybody needs to learn.
That's for a different purpose. It's not for finding commonality and not for bridging needs.
It is but litigators can learn from that even contract negotiators. Remember, networking and business development is all negotiation in some respect. You could take what you learned and apply it in a little bit of a different twist in terms of trying to get to what the client's real issue is by asking great questions.
To your point, listening and paying attention to things, being in the room where things are happening and watching someone else, you might have a different style than someone, especially with this building relationships. There are a lot of subtle points to it that it's better to observe it than to have someone tell you about it.
That's why it's hard when you have a relationship to say, “I’m going to bring my associate with me to the meeting to sit and watch and learn.” It's so valuable. It's unfortunate that we all feel vulnerable like, “My client may like this other person more and may not want to call me.” We all live in fear in some ways. At some point, you got to get over that fear and have to say, “I’m pulling on my big boy pants or big girl pants or whatever. The client and I have a relationship that will never change, but I need to help foster and show my team that number 1) I’m a team player. Number 2) What constitutes a good relationship and how I’ve been able to at least give way I grew it.” It’s not one-size-fits-all, but that's why mentorship and sponsorship is important.
I was lucky that I had a male mentor. Many years ago, there weren't many women engineers doing expert witness work. I was lucky that I had a CEO that was very pro-women. Now is a wonderful time for women. It is a good experience. I was also lucky to have all this alphabet soup behind my name with my PhD and license. All these people would always ask me, “What's PE mean?” However, I was a woman doing it in a male world, so I was a little bit of a different animal at that point.
Over time, nobody looked at me as a woman doing it. They looked at me as a professional doing it that I was aspiring to. It wasn’t that I’m equal to them. It wasn't that I was a woman doing sales. I was an equal partner or a professional friend to them. Could I solve their problem? I wasn't trying to put the favors is what I’m doing.
You had great encapsulation of mentoring and sponsorship in your experiences and what you're suggesting people be willing to do. Bringing others into the room to see what's happening and mentoring them in that way but then also having your mentor see something in you that he thought was valuable in fostering. Also, you could bring something unique to the company that would be valuable to the company. That's the perfect encapsulation of how mentoring and sponsoring happen.
Individuals also have to ask as much as I walked around asking for work. To be willing to extend yourself to ask for it. If you're a partner and you've got seven associates working for you, you've got to go and ask for the attention, work, tutoring, and sponsorship. People are very busy and they're very focused on what they're doing. They won't necessarily think about it. You have to take your career into your own hands and not assume the company, the law firm, the professional service firm, or whoever it is you're working for is going to do it for you. You can't do that. You have to take charge of your own life but not be too aggressive and pushy.
You have to take charge of your life but not be too aggressive and pushy.
I was like, “There's a fine line there.” I also thought your point thinking about it as investing in yourself. Maybe it's asking for opportunities and input from people within your firm, but also taking the initiative if there's some skill you want to develop, some force you want to take, or a conference you want to go to. Sometimes it's nice that the firm will pay for it. Other times, they won't, but because the firm won't, it doesn't mean that it isn't something you could invest in and learn.
I totally agree.
For someone who's starting out, they're not partnered, but they're still an associate at a law firm. What is your top advice for them in terms of developing their business development chops?
My son works for an economics consulting firm and they work with lawyers. I give him this advice. I say, “Build your brand. Make sure your resume is polished and your LinkedIn's profile is good. Connect with people. It's all about your network.” The things that I tell people are, “Understand not only what you do, but what your firm does. Get out and start talking to people.” You may make a fool of yourself. I’ve fallen flat on my face many times. Go out and start building your network and listening to people. Learning how to listen is important and making connections, even if they're not always the right connections.
Never forget that you need to ask something. It could be to ask for a meeting or work. Eventually, you got to ask for the work because we're all vendors in our own way. In-house counsel hiring outside council knows that you want work. It's a question of how you go around doing it. Eventually, somebody has got to ask for the work or they're going to go to somebody else. They're going to say, “I love the relationship with you, Angela, but you never asked me for any work, so why would I hire you? I guess you're too busy.” The young lawyers have to get out. I would be serving whoever is in your chain of command, meaning people across the firm asking for meetings and talking to people about how they got to be where they were.
Finding out things with regard to this and asking for the opportunity to do it versus waiting for somebody to say, “I’m so great. Why isn't somebody helping me?” You don't want to do that because, eventually, you get to the point where you don't feel like you belong. Sometimes you might not belong. That's okay. Realistically, when I went around asking people for work at my firm, I questioned whether or not I belonged in expert witness work and whether or not this was the right company for me.
When I went to work for the CEO and interviewed for that job, I told my father, “I was thinking engineering wasn't the right place for me. Dad, I love cooking. I’m thinking about if this doesn't work out, I’m going to culinary school and completely changing my life.” He was like, “Do whatever makes you happy, Angela.” Fortunately, I got the job and asked for the opportunity to work with him. I ended up getting the opportunity to do the marketing and then I asked to do a sales role. I didn't want to do sales, but I found myself in a position where I needed to grow. That was the only way my career was going to grow.
As much as I hate the word sales, I ended up doing it. If it's not the right fit, there are plenty of things out there. It's scary, but if you're not feeling right in your position, then maybe you need to go look somewhere else. You manage to do that. Do it before they let you go or they downsize. If you think the company is not doing well, you might want to start looking around. If it doesn't feel well, start looking around. Don't wait to be asked to leave.
Be proactive. Sometimes people think because in law school, there's one path and there's one thing to do. If that isn't working, it's all over. That's not true. Sometimes you have to find your best home or the perfect niche for you. It can also mean going outside the practice, but other times, like you did, adjusting what you're doing within the firm or practice.
I know many women lawyers. In fact, one of my most admired lawyers is Madeleine McDonough over Shook, Hardy. Madeleine was a pharmacist before she went to be a lawyer. Now she's managing partner or executive chairman or whatever they call it at Shook. She's a rockstar. I admire her so much. She's a genuine, wonderful woman. I admire her so much for everything she's done. She was a pharmacist and became head of a major law firm. There is no one home. If anybody would've told me when I started engineering school that I was going to be doing business development, I would say they're crazy, but it made me so happy. I was pretty good at it, so it's all good.
Being open to things that you might never have considered doing before. In part because somebody has seen in you some spark of natural talent or skill in a certain area that could be developed. Angela, I so appreciate hearing your own journey and how you adjusted professionally. Listening to you, there are different tips and tactics. However, you embody and describe very well what it means to be interested in client service, client development, and how to become very skilled at business development for others to think about it and think about their attitude towards it. Sometimes, people are a little scared. If you have this attitude of helping others in a genuine way, that goes a long way towards being comfortable.
Don't get me wrong. I’ve been doing this for decades and I still get scared. Fear is good. Fear is a great motivator. What I find is if you don't even try, you've already lost.
That's how you grow too. You might discover you're good at it. You just don't know it yet. Normally, I ask a few lightning-round closing questions and I wanted to ask you a couple of those. The first one would be, what talent do you wish you have but you don't?
That was a hard one. I was thinking about it because I love cooking. I can cook pretty, but one thing that I said in my retirement, which I haven't done yet, is that I used to play guitar and love to be a classical guitarist. I’d love Spanish guitar. That would be something I want to do.
Who are your favorite writers?
I told you Andrew Sobel. Anything from Jane Austen. I’d love Patricia Cornwell. I have a dear friend who's a forensic pathologist and I’m obsessed with that whole idea of forensic pathology.
I think about Jane Austen and Patricia Cornwell. There's a human nature aspect to both of those that are interesting and I could see where you'd be interested in both of those. It’s a study of human nature. Who is your hero in real life?
This was another hard one. I’m going to tell you that I’m at a certain age where I have a number of close friends that are battling cancer. My son went to the University of Wisconsin. One of his very best friends, his name was Mike Wirman. Mike was 25 years old and died of liver cancer in 2022. He's one of my personal heroes because he fought it and anybody fighting cancer or any debilitating disease. He has to be a hero because he fought it with such grace until the end. He was an amazing young man. He's not around anymore. As I said, anybody who's on the journey and puts a smile on their face when they're going through much pain, but I don't have one hero.
It might be related, but for what in life do you feel most grateful?
I was like, “Do I not say my family?” I have a great family. I will tell you what I’m most grateful for. I’ve been fortunate to meet amazing people. I’ve seen most in the United States traveling. I only have 3 or 4 states I haven't been to and see beautiful places. I came back from Southeast Asia, but I’ve been lucky in my life. I don't know if you ever knew this because you and I have known each other for a long time. I had a bumper sticker in my offices that said, “I love lawyers,” and I still do. I actually am grateful that I was in litigation. It's fantastic.
You were in the right, so that's good. I like that attitude. If you were to have your fantasy dinner party, who would you invite?
The one person I would definitely invite would be Katharine Hepburn. She would have moxie. She was gorgeous in and out. She was assertive and smart. She dressed impeccably. I love the way she dressed. She would be my first dinner guest. I also want to be anybody else. I could say the Pope. There are lots of people I could say, but definitely, it has to be Katharine Hepburn.
When you were talking about it, I was thinking about all the scenes from the various movies she was in and how strong she was in a lot of them. Of course, it was Spencer Tracy, but also in other movies or whatever force.
Meryl Streep is probably as close as you're going to get nowadays to somebody like her. There was nobody like her. I’ve read her biography and she was pretty amazing.
No one has ever suggested that before. You're the first to mention Katharine Hepburn. Last question. What is your motto if you have one?
Pay it forward. As I said, I’m a give-to-get person. Thanks, Mo Bunnell, for that. I’m a pay-it-forward person. In fact, we were talking earlier, but I was talking to a good friend of mine who retired from Womble. We were talking about business development and we were having lunch. He would tell his associates, “Make friends of clients, but not clients of friends.” I give a shout-out to Christopher in North Carolina for that one. From a business perspective, that's exactly what it has to be. It's all about service in the true sense of the world.
When you said to pay it forward, I was like, “That's perfect. That embodies Angela.” It's a total alignment with how you are. It's a perfect quote and a perfect way to end in terms of having people think about that. Also, have that resonate with them hopefully for the rest of the day and maybe beyond on how they think about their practice and business development and how they are in the world and in the profession. Thank you so much for brightening my day and the show and having some great ideas and tips for people to consider in business development.
Thank you for inviting me. This was wonderful. It was great to catch up. I wish you continued success. This is a great show. I love hearing about all the strong women and all the interesting things that they're doing in the law. Kudos to you for putting this together. I hope I see you soon in California.
Thank you so much, Angela, for joining. I appreciate it.
Thank you.