The Verdict is a rapid fire quiz that lets you answer questions to reveal what type of high achieving litigation associate you are. Take the quiz to find out which one of 5 paths to law firm success most aligns with how you think, work, and set goals.
What Type of High Achieving Associate Are You?
How Lawyers Used to Develop
Gone are the days when professional development happened through osmosis. A generation or two ago, you'd join a firm and spend years watching senior partners work. You'd learn what kind of lawyer you were becoming by inhabiting a stable community of practice, by seeing yourself reflected in mentors who had decades of institutional memory to share. The path was clear because the path had been walked many times before and the people who walked it were still there to show you the way.
What Changed and Why it Matters
The world has fundamentally changed. The economics and structure of legal practice evolved in response to market forces, client demands, and technological transformation. So, firms operate differently now. Partnership tracks look different. The relationship between junior and senior attorneys has shifted from apprenticeship toward something more transactional out of necessity in an environment where everyone is stretched thin.
The world associates live in today is marked by extraordinary technical demands and comparatively less structured guidance about how to meet them. You're expected to produce sophisticated work product immediately, often on matters so specialized or so sprawling that you only ever see your particular corner of the case. You're juggling multiple supervising attorneys with different styles, different expectations, different communication preferences. You're building expertise in research tools and practice management systems that didn't exist a decade ago, often as much through trial and error as systematic training. And you're doing all of this while managing productivity metrics that turn your professional development into a series of six-minute sprints.
The Questions You Still Have to Answer
What nobody talks about openly is that this creates a vacuum. You still have to answer the fundamental questions that everyone must answer: What kind of lawyer am I becoming? What does excellence look like in my practice? What working style actually serves both my clients and my own sustainability? What are my strengths and how do I develop them? Where am I going and how do I know if I'm on track?
These are practical concerns that affect your daily work, your professional satisfaction, and your long term trajectory. But the structures that used to help young lawyers answer them have largely dissolved. You're building your career in an environment where the old puzzle boxes are missing pieces, and new sets haven't been widely distributed.
The economic backdrop intensifies this challenge. Most associates are carrying significant debt from law school which means you can't afford to waste time figuring things out slowly or making expensive missteps in your career. You need to become effective quickly, but effectiveness requires understanding not just what to do but who you are as a practitioner. Different associates thrive under different conditions, excel at different aspects of litigation work, find meaning in different kinds of professional achievements. But without structured opportunities to discover and articulate these differences, you're left trying to construct your professional identity on the fly, between emergencies, without much guidance about what success might look like for you specifically rather than lawyers in general.
Fittingly, a Six Minute Quiz
This is where The Verdict does something genuinely useful. It doesn't pretend to replace mentorship or resolve the structural challenges of modern practice. What it does is give you language and framework for understanding yourself as a professional in ways that might not emerge organically in your current work environment. The quiz identifies archetypes that reflect distinct working styles, career orientations, and value structures that high-achieving litigation associates embody. These are patterns we've observed in how successful associates actually operate, make decisions, prioritize their development, and define what matters in their practice.
The archetypes serve as mirrors. When you see yourself reflected in one of these patterns, it does several things simultaneously. It validates that your particular approach to lawyering is legitimate, that there are multiple paths to excellence rather than a single prescribed route. It helps you understand why certain aspects of practice feel natural while others feel like swimming upstream. It gives you vocabulary for articulating your strengths and development areas to supervising attorneys which makes those relationships more productive because you're not starting from zero every time you work with someone new. And perhaps most importantly, it offers tailored guidance about how to develop your practice in ways that align with who you are rather than who you think you're supposed to become.
The Verdict also surfaces insights you might not have articulated to yourself yet about what you value professionally and why. Sometimes the most useful professional development comes from having someone hold up a framework and watching yourself react to it, noticing what resonates and what doesn't, using that reaction as information about your own priorities and goals. The quiz creates that opportunity in a structured way, asking questions that might not come up in your daily work but that reveal important reflections about how you think, what motivates you, and what kind of practice you're building.
Get Your Verdict
This matters because professional identity is foundational. When you understand what kind of lawyer you're becoming, you can make better decisions about which opportunities to pursue, how to position yourself internally, what skills to prioritize, and how to communicate your value to partners and clients. You can build a practice that feels coherent rather than reactive, one that develops your strengths and creates sustainable satisfaction rather than just checking boxes on someone else's definition of success.
Take the quiz. See which archetype reflects your approach to high achievement in litigation practice. Use the insights as starting points for conversations with mentors, for reflecting on your recent work, and for making intentional choices about your next steps.
