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I'm a jr associate in a very small new satellite office of a big firm. I get pressure from the partner in charge here to do a lot of business dev (joining organizations, joining committees, bringing people in for events, trying to get the firm name out otherwise, etc.). How seriously should I take this, and is it appropriate to be asking a jr assoc to do all this business dev work? I dont actually work for this partner and get plenty of billables from a partner in our main office.

Anonymous User wrote:I'm a jr associate in a very small new satellite office of a big firm. I get pressure from the partner in charge here to do a lot of business dev (joining organizations, joining committees, bringing people in for events, trying to get the firm name out otherwise, etc.). How seriously should I take this, and is it appropriate to be asking a jr assoc to do all this business dev work? I dont actually work for this partner and get plenty of billables from a partner in our main office.

Networks take time to build. There's nothing wrong with joining organizations and committees as a junior associate. Is your firm the type where you'll be expected to bring in work to make partner, or is it mainly about pleasing the institutional clients? If the former, I think the partner in charge is doing you a favor - when you need to start bringing in work in a few years, you'll have the network to make that possible. If it's not interfering with your work, go out and meet people. It'll make your "partner in charge" of your satellite office happy, which seems important. If these networking events are making it so that you can't bill, that's a different story - talk to the partner giving you work about it, and see if he'd rather you bill or follow the partner in charge's instructions.