Network like a business person, not a lawyer

Stop networking with lawyers. Start networking with the people who will hire you.

If you speak with enough General Counsels and Chief Legal Officers about their executive job search and a pattern emerges quickly. They update their LinkedIn, send CVs to a handful of legal executive search firms and bookmark some job boards. Then the waiting begins. It is a perfectly sensible approach but it is also profoundly limiting and most senior lawyers don’t realise it until months have passed with little to show.

To be clear, the issue isn’t effort. It’s that every one of those channels points at the same narrow slice of the market: live, budgeted, advertised roles. Jobs that already exist on paper. Jobs where you are, almost by definition, one of dozens of candidates being evaluated against a specific brief that was written before you arrived.

“The most interesting roles rarely begin with a job description. They begin with a conversation at the right table.”

The hiring market you can’t see from your desk

Alongside the formal recruitment process runs a quieter, a more fluid market driven by relationships, timing, and visibility in the right circles. This is where a significant proportion of senior in-house appointments and General Counsel hires are actually made, particularly in fast-moving sectors where companies scale quickly and decisions are made by small, tight-knit leadership teams. 

Typically a senior hire is made because a business leader resigns, a major funding round closes, a regulator makes contact or a transformative new client is about to sign. In these moments, boards and leadership teams don’t immediately open a job portal, they turn to each other. They discuss what kind of person they need and more often than not, one of them says: “I might know someone.”

That person is rarely someone who applied for anything. They are simply known in the right circles and so their name comes up naturally when the moment arrives. The path from there varies: some are approached directly, some are asked to recommend others and some start in an advisory capacity that gradually becomes a permanent role but what each of these outcomes has in common is that they begin not with a job posting, but with a relationship that already existed.

This is commonplace in sectors where companies move fast and relationships carry weight, it is routine. The question is: how do you make yourself that person?

Where senior in house lawyers typically network 

The instinct of most lawyers, when thinking about professional networking, is to look within the profession; legal conferences, updates on regulatory change, panels on new technology, new legislation, AI and the future of legal services. These are perfectly worthwhile but they are, in essence, networking with other lawyers — and with the vendors who sell to them.

If your goal is visibility with the CEOs, CFOs, investors, and founders who will one day need someone exactly like you, attending another in-house counsel roundtable will not move the needle. You are fishing in a pond that doesn’t contain the fish you’re after.

The more useful question is: where do those people go?

Think like a Head of Sales, not a job seeker

A good sales leader building a go-to-market strategy starts by identifying their ideal customer, the specific type of company and specific type of decision-maker they want to reach. They then work backwards: what do those people read, where do they gather, whose opinions do they trust, which events do they attend?

A General Counsel or Head of Legal looking for their next chapter should think in exactly the same way. You are not looking for a job posting. You are looking for proximity to the people who will eventually need what you offer.

A Practical Example

Say you're a General Counsel with a strong background in retail banking regulation and you want to move into an AI-driven fintech, the legal conferences in your diary are not the place to make that happen.

1.  Identify the active investors and VCs in AI fintech — they often anchor the ecosystem and move between companies.

2.  Find the leading conferences and pitch competitions in the space — this is where founders, operators, and capital gather.

3.  Note the recurring speakers and panellists — these tend to be the most connected voices in the sector.

4.  Go to those events. Not with a CV in hand — but with genuine curiosity about what’s happening in the space.

The goal at this stage is not to find a job. It is to learn, contribute, and be visible. As a seasoned lawyer with relevant regulatory expertise, you will often find that the people in the room are genuinely interested in your perspective. The regulatory landscape, the compliance risks, what a scaling fintech will eventually need to build, these are questions on founders’ minds. You don’t need to sell yourself. You simply need to be present and useful.

Exchange details. Stay in contact. Show up at the next event. Be consistent over time. Eventually — and this is the point — when that company reaches the scale where they need proper legal leadership, yours is the name that surfaces first. Not because you applied for anything, but because you were already part of their world.

A note on what this isn’t

This is not a short-term strategy. It will not replace a structured executive search process if you need to move quickly. It does not require you to pretend to be something you’re not, quite the opposite. Your legal background is an asset in business circles, not a liability. Own it.

What it does require is a deliberate decision to spend some of your networking time outside the legal bubble. Not all of it — legal networks remain valuable. But a meaningful portion, directed with intention toward the sectors and decision-makers that represent your next chapter.

“Being applicant number 130 on a LinkedIn posting is a position of weakness. Being the person a founder already knows and trusts is something else entirely.”

Where to start

The hardest part of this approach is not the networking itself — it’s the initial research. Here is a straightforward process to get from intention to action.

Your five-step starting point

1.  Define your target specifically. Not “technology companies” but “B2B SaaS businesses at Series B stage.” Not “financial services” but “payments infrastructure or embedded finance.” The more precise you are, the easier every step that follows becomes.

2.  Identify the investors active in that space. VCs and growth investors are connective tissue across entire sectors — they sit on multiple boards, attend the same events, and share deal flow. Follow them on LinkedIn, read their portfolio pages, and note which companies they back.

3.  Find the events where these people gather. Search for sector-specific conferences, founder summits, pitch competitions, and industry dinners. Many are open to attendees who aren’t founders or investors — your legal background is often a welcome perspective in the room.

4.  Identify the thought leaders and recurring voices. Who speaks at these events repeatedly? Who do the investors and founders follow and share? These are the most connected people in the space and worth engaging with directly — comment on their content, attend their panels, introduce yourself.

5.  Commit to showing up consistently. Aim to attend two or three relevant events over the next six months. The first time you are a stranger. The second time you are a familiar face. By the third, you are part of the community. Relationships compound with repetition.

The goal of this kind of networking is not simply to find a job. It is to become genuinely embedded in a world that interests you. From that position, things happen that you didn’t plan for. You hear about companies before anyone else does. You’re asked to advise on a problem that turns into a formal advisory role. You meet founders building tools that would make your current job easier. You develop a perspective on a sector that makes you a more rounded, commercially-minded lawyer. A job offer, if it comes, is often simply a by-product of being in the right place, with the right people, at the right time.

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