The New Risky Business - Shinyung Oh's E-Mail Strategy

Shinyung Oh's email sent to everyone at Paul Hastings represents the new kind of must-do career risk. My hunch, having taken similar risks over the past four years, is that this move will pay off nicely for Oh.

Many know the story: Oh was canned on April 30th, supposedly for performance reasons.  Instead of disappearing, she outed herself to other associates, litigation partners and top management at her former employer Paul Hastings in San Francisco. 

She claims her motivation was to prevent other associates who will get canned from feeling that they had failed.  She told them that more likely it was the law firm that had failed, in a number of ways.  Those could include not developing the right kinds of business and bringing in more of it, evaluating associates in ways to improve their performance, and being honest about their financial goals of boosting profits per partner via cutting headcount.

Her motivation, though, is irrelevant.  No one cares why.  What does matter is the leverage she could gain from this.  It's plenty, so much so that she has almost an infinite number of fresh career options, within and outside law.  Here are just some of them:

• Law firms which position themselves as Not-BigLaw in organizational culture would hire her as symbolic of the brand.  She might not even have to do much litigation.  She could morph into a rainmaker, especially overseas where new opportunities are emerging.  Her South Korean origins could be an asset.

• Launching a legal-career counseling and/or coaching and/or placement firm. Her new high profile would serve her well in getting that off the ground fast.

• Becoming a paradigm-busting speaker on career vs. life to Gens X, Y, and Next.  We Baby Boomers could use some insight too.  This could be extended globally.  The youth in just about every nation, developed and developing, are not buying into the old paradigms.

• Letting it be known she wouldn't object to being an ambassador, lobbyist, or holder of some cabinet job in the next administration.  The lady presents herself well.

• Making her first documentary on Work, U.S. style.  Her brand could be the high-brow Michael Moore.

Being the good solider, girl scout or boy scout has no payoff in the current career marketplace.  Bold risks do.  I know. 

I dropped my careful corporate rhetoric in 2003.  Colleagues sent me stern emails warning me to stop while I still have a career.  The tone I took on was that of conversational, strongly opinionated digital communications.  Those who warned me are sitting unemployed in Starbucks.  They're on their laptops searching for career paths that have been gone now for several years.

Wild risk is the only secure path.

Comments

[Mark]

So, is it a joke, or not?

Most of those suggestions seem to have skill sets that she hasn't demonstrated she has, and most of them don't seem that lucrative, except after years of hard work and a lot of luck.

[Happy ex-associate]

To the previous commentators: your bosses certainly have you by the gonads, don't they?

This post is not ridiculous. Big Law firms encourage associates to play it safe. They try to hire only people who play it safe. Why? Because it makes it easy and risk free for them to chew you up and spit you out once they've wrung every last bit of value out of you, without fear of backlash.

So if you're already an associate, you are probably highly risk averse when it comes to your career, or someone in hiring made a big mistake. Because an associate who eagerly puts on the golden handcuffs and then becomes terrified of losing them is ever so much easier to manipulate.

But once you can see past the fears they work hard to instill, you will see that for most people the path to a truly rewarding career (i.e. one outside the soul-sucking environs of Big Law) involves taking risks.

[Smackier]

Maybe the comment is true - wild risk might be a very secure career path - to professional doom.

[Wow]

This post is ridiculous. I hope it was merely meant as a joke.

[CZ]

"Wild risk is the only secure path."

You're an imbecile.