Career Clarity, with Jamie Lieberman – TPW260

Using even difficult experiences to find clarity on what matters to her has helped Jamie Lieberman build a career and life she loves.

Using experience to develop career clarity and autonomy

Jamie Lieberman is a practicing attorney of 15 years, podcaster, and entrepreneur dedicated to making legal stuff accessible to entrepreneurs and to sharing the message that legal stuff does not have to be scary. As the owner and founder of Hashtag Legal, she leads an all-female virtual team focused on providing clients with advice on a wide range of subjects such as intellectual property, contracts, privacy, FTC and general business law as well negotiation strategies. Aside from her professional endeavors, Jamie is the wife of another lawyer and mom to two active boys.

Not long after her first son was born, she came to the realization that it would be challenging to see her son and practice law in the traditional sense. She refused to accept that it was impossible to do both, and that is where her own practice was born. While launching her practice, she had her second son.

Her team and staff are all women with flexible schedules to enable them to enjoy family lives, personal lives and have balance.

She got her start in the influencer space when she started to freelance after leaving her job working for the U.S. federal government. Her freelance work started off as writing briefs for other attorneys using her background as a litigator. At the same time, she was running her own blog, writing about life in NYC and later, parenting. When she started this endeavor seven years ago, the word "influencer" didn't even exist in the social media world, and bloggers were just starting to make businesses out of their blogs.

About 6 years ago, Jamie was working for a company that ran conferences for bloggers, writing about legal and non-legal matters. One day, the owner of that company approached her and asked if she would give a talk about legal issues for bloggers. After the talk, several bloggers approached her and asked for help because they were struggling to find lawyers who understood the blogging business. That is how her practice was born.

As she worked with influencers, agencies, and brands, she realized there was a natural extension of her work into designers, creatives, online professionals, app developers, service professionals, which then turned into entrepreneurs. This area was very underserved by lawyers. Jamie saw this opportunity and structured her legal services so that clients are not intimidated by them. She and her team are transparent in their costs and have open communication. She is able to empathize in her clients' experiences because she had run and sold other businesses.

She got clarity on the type of law she wanted to practice based on a podcast she was on called "The Happy Lawyer." The host of this podcast asked her, "Is it the work, or is it the client?" She realized it was her clients that got her up every morning. It's the counseling and helping people that is her driving force, not just in her career, but in life in general.

Her experience of running her own practice was completely the opposite of working for a large law firm or the government. In the latter, there was very little room for creativity because things were simply done a certain way. There was no opportunity to distinguish yourself or do anything that would change the way a project was viewed. Having no autonomy was stifling for Jamie. She wouldn't take back her experience for anything, though, because it was through this experience that she was able to figure out that autonomy is very important to her.

A typical day

Jamie tends to stay up very late and starts her day...