Why the Legal Profession’s Obsession with Specialization Might Be the Thing Holding Them Back

TThere’s a particular kind of vertigo that comes from scrolling LinkedIn on a Friday afternoon. Everyone seems to be on an elevator going up: promoted, appointed, elevated, thriving. Their career arcs look clean and inevitable in retrospect — a logical progression from one impressive role to the next.

But that’s a story told backward, and it leaves out almost everything interesting.

Jasmine Singh, General Counsel at Ironclad, has a name for what gets omitted: the messy middle. “From the outside, it can appear as though people’s career paths are pretty linear,” she says. “On paper, it looks like they went from one place to the next, and they had a ladder.” What disappears in that telling is the uncertainty between the moves — the moments of doubt, the sideways steps, the times someone said yes before they felt ready. And those moments, she argues, are actually where the useful stuff lives.

The legal profession is a particularly potent incubator for this anxiety. Law school trains you to specialize, to go deep, to become the person who knows the statute cold. Law firms reward it further — the partnership track is essentially a decade-long bet that depth is the only thing that matters. And so by the time many lawyers are ten years in, they’ve internalized a story about themselves that is narrower than their real capabilities. They are a litigator. A transactional attorney. A big law person. An in-house lawyer. The box feels safe because it’s legible. But legibility has a cost, and the cost is that the label starts to function as a ceiling.

The thing the box obscures is everything you actually know how to do.

The skill is never what you think it is

Think about what a litigator actually does for a living. They walk into a new case — a new industry, a new set of facts, a new cast of characters — and they become an expert, fast. One case might be about ebooks, the next about binder clips, the next about potatoes. The substance is irrelevant. The skill is the capacity to absorb enormous complexity quickly, synthesize it, and translate it for an audience that doesn’t share your knowledge. That’s not a narrowly legal skill. It’s a foundational cognitive capability that happens to have been trained in a legal context — and it transfers into almost any domain that involves ambiguity, which is to say, almost every domain.

Melissa Fan, Chief of Staff to the Chief Legal Officer at Intel, built that skill over years of antitrust and commercial litigation at a large firm. She left when she realized that litigation, by nature, puts you at the end of the story — the dispute has already happened, the relationship has already fallen apart. She wanted to be upstream of problems, not cleaning them up. She went in-house, moved into cybersecurity and privacy, an area she hadn’t practiced in, and found that the capabilities she’d built transferred completely. “Expanding into different domains and building additional expertise has really only helped me,” she says. “It’s built up my cross-functional credibility. It’s given me a reputation for solving problems, no matter what the shape of the problem.”

The shape of the problem is, in fact, the key phrase. Beneath every domain-specific challenge — a data breach, a failed software implementation, a contract dispute, an AI adoption strategy — there is a shape. You gather facts. You identify risk. You figure out what the different stakeholders actually need and find a path that threads between them. You communicate clearly under pressure. Those are lawyer skills. They work everywhere.

What happens when the deck is stacked against you

This becomes vivid in a story that Mickey Newt, Associate General Counsel and Head of Legal Strategy and Operations at Pure Storage, tells about a moment a few years into his tenure there. His chief legal officer had transitioned into a dual role as chief people officer and inherited an HR team mid-crisis: a major tool implementation had gone badly wrong, employees were in distress, and the whole thing needed to be unwound fast. She turned to Newt — not because he had any HR background, but because she trusted him.

“I looked at her and I said: I have never done that before,” he recalls. “I want to be very clear and transparent that this particular thing, I’ve not actually done before. So I’m gonna bring to it what I know and how I know to problem-solve. I might not do it in a way that HR people are used to.” She said she trusted him, and that was the whole conversation.

He walked into a room where nobody believed he was credible — the original project lead had just been replaced, the deck was stacked against him — and he succeeded anyway. Not because he’d suddenly acquired HR expertise. Because crisis management is crisis management. You gather the facts, assess the risk, communicate clearly, get people aligned, and move. He doubted himself every single day. It worked regardless.

The lesson isn’t that domain expertise doesn’t matter. It’s that the skills underneath the expertise — the ones that got trained in the process of becoming good at your last job — are more portable than most people realize, and most people drastically underestimate them because they’ve been describing themselves by subject matter rather than by capability.

The label that becomes a cage

The fear that stops people from making moves like this one isn’t really about competence. It’s about identity. And the two have a way of fusing together in ways that are hard to unpick.

There’s real comfort in a strong professional label. It makes networking easier, makes the career path feel legible, makes it simple to answer the “so what do you do” question at a party. But somewhere along the way, for a lot of high-achievers, the label stops being a description and starts being a constraint. I’m a litigator, so product work isn’t my domain. I’m a transactional attorney, so strategy isn’t really my thing. These sentences get spoken as though they’re objective assessments. They’re actually just habits of self-description that have hardened into convictions.

Fan’s diagnosis of this is sharp. “A lot of that pigeonholing,” she says, “is self-limiting. You’re the one saying: I’m this kind of lawyer. I haven’t done that before. I’m just not built for this.” The practical reframe she offers is almost embarrassingly simple: inject the word “yet” into that sentence. I haven’t done it yet. It sounds like semantics. It isn’t. One sentence closes the door; the other leaves it open.

More importantly, it changes how you approach the transition. You don’t need a long runway to reinvention. You don’t need to become a different kind of person before you start doing different kinds of work. “Who you are — a technology lawyer, product counsel, privacy expert — it’s really just a collection of the things that you do,” Fan says. “So just start doing these things in small ways.” Offer to cover for someone in a different practice area. Raise your hand for the project nobody else wants. Be the sabbatical backup. You don’t announce a reinvention. You accumulate one.

The calendar problem

What makes all of this hard in practice — beyond the identity question — is that the people most capable of reinvention are usually the people with the least room for it. The calendar is full. The deliverables are real. The idea of carving out time to think about what’s next feels like a luxury that serious professionals simply can’t afford.

But there’s a quieter cost to staying heads-down indefinitely. The experimentation that feels optional in year five is actually preparation for the crisis in year fifteen — the moment when a leadership change, a restructuring, or an industry shift forces a transition that you haven’t practiced navigating. The muscle of looking up and around, of getting curious about different shapes of work, doesn’t develop on demand. It develops from use.

The practical answer isn’t to wait for white space that will never come. It’s to schedule thirty minutes, decide what to do with them, and actually show up. Newt is direct about how unglamorous this looks from the inside — he describes himself as actively fighting, right now, for space to think about his own next chapter, even while running legal strategy and operations at Pure Storage. “It’s not easy,” he says, “when you’re working so hard and you feel like the list never ends. You do have to fight for yourself and fight for that time.”

Learning to speak a different language

There’s one more piece of the transition that tends to get underestimated, and it’s about language rather than capability. Moving from one context to another — most acutely, from outside counsel to in-house — requires not just different skills but a different way of framing everything you say.

Outside counsel talks to in-house counsel. It’s lawyers all the way down, and the conversations reflect that: indemnity caps, liability frameworks, risk allocations. But in-house, your clients are business people who don’t care about the indemnity cap. They care what the company is buying, what they’re going to do with it, and whether it’s going to create a problem. Singh tells a story about early in her in-house career, describing a procurement matter to her team in terms of the legal issues involved — who wanted uncapped indemnities, what the liability exposure looked like — and being pulled aside by her manager afterward. “Nobody cares, Jasmine. They care what the company is buying and what we’re gonna do with that service.” The legal analysis was correct. The framing made it useless.

The lawyer who can make that translation — who leads with the business objective and works back to the legal implication — becomes indispensable almost immediately. And becoming indispensable, Fan points out, is ultimately how you earn access to the conversations you want to be part of. “Most executives are drowning in inputs,” she says. “If you can be the person who is framing an issue clearly, giving the right visibility to the right things, moving things forward — then you become indispensable. And it’s that indispensable nature that really grants you access.”

The doubt doesn’t go away. Go anyway.

None of this is a promise that reinvention is comfortable. Newt doubted himself every day of that HR project. Fan still has moments of feeling like she’s bitten off more than she can chew leading Intel’s AI innovation initiative. The doubt doesn’t disappear when you make a successful transition. It comes along for the ride.

What changes is your relationship to the feeling. The first time you’re in over your head, it reads as evidence that you don’t belong. The fifth time, it starts to feel like a familiar signal that you’ve moved far enough past the edge of what you already know to be learning something real.

The question isn’t whether you’ll feel unqualified. You will. The question is whether you can locate, underneath that feeling, the actual capabilities you’ve already built — the ones that have been quietly accumulating since the first case you worked, the first deal you closed, the first time you had to explain something genuinely complicated to someone who didn’t share your expertise and make them understand it anyway.

Those skills are already there. The box you’re standing in is smaller than they are.

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Ironclad is not a law firm, and this post does not constitute or contain legal advice. To evaluate the accuracy, sufficiency, or reliability of the ideas and guidance reflected here, or the applicability of these materials to your business, you should consult with a licensed attorney.