brecher

The Food Judge guest blog part 3

August 27, 2015 By // by DigitalJenIPC

This is part 3 of a 3 part guest blog by Nicky Richmond.

Nicky combines being a joint managing partner for Brecher with being a restaurant critic, and is a property and property finance lawyer with over 25 years’ experience. She is The Food Judge and writes a regular column for The Lawyer magazine. As a Foodie myself as you can see from our food themed LLClub web site, I am inspired!

In case you missed them, here are the links to part 1 & 2.

Part 1:
https://liberateyourtalent.wordpress.com/2015/05/16/an-edible-portfolio-career-1/

Part 2
https://liberateyourtalent.wordpress.com/2015/06/04/the-food-judge-nicky-richmond-2/

The rest of this blog are in Nicky’s own words.

Who or what helps you to manage your portfolio career?

No-one helps me to manage my portfolio career, but having a supportive group of partners in my firm who appreciate the good publicity that can come with raising the profile of any individual partner whether by way of restaurant reviews, opinion pieces or being involved with charities.
Not having to go through endless layers of bureaucracy to get my pieces approved is also a help and being an owner of the business means that I have more leeway than lawyers in larger firms where they may not feel entirely comfortable with a lawyer actually having an opinion.

How do you approach marketing your portfolio career?

In terms of law, through the conventional channels, attending industry events and writing in the legal and professional press. For the restaurant side, Twitter has been a great source of networking and contacts.

What if any, is the personal brand used for your portfolio career?

The Food Judge is my brand for the food blog. In general, my approach is straightforward advice with a sense of humour, whether it be legal/restaurant/charity work

What skills/experience/qualities would you say lawyers possess which makes them well suited to having a portfolio career?

Lawyers can work to a deadline, they are task driven, self-motivated, and having an outside life, in my view, makes them better lawyers

What advice would you give to give to someone considering a portfolio career?

Choose to spend your time on something you love and which makes you feel good about yourself

Your top 5 tips about portfolio careers from having one yourself?

1. Don’t be scared of trying something new
2. Put your head above the parapet – it doesn’t matter if it fails
3. Don’t expect instant success
4. Ask for help
5. Believe in yourself

Also – don’t wait until you have been in the law 25 years, like me, try something new. I look back and regret all that time I spent in the office at weekends or until silly hours of the night. There are times when that is unavoidable but if I’m honest with myself, I am allowed the job to take over and if I had had other interests/commitments earlier on, I may not have committed so much time to it and I would have had a more balanced and no doubt more enjoyable life.

Very few law firms will tell you that you are working too hard – you need to decide what is too much and how much you are prepared to give to the day job, they certainly won’t decide for you.

Allow yourself to do something for yourself that you enjoy.

More about Nicky Richmond

Nicky Richmond, Joint Managing Partner, Brecher:
http://www.brecher.co.uk/people/nicky-richmond/

The Food Judge – never knowingly underfed.
http://thefoodjudge.com/

Blog – Not Entirely Legal
http://strictlylegal.me/author/nickyrichmond/

More about portfolio careers:

Could a portfolio career give you the variety you seek? Download our free report ‘Discover Portfolio Careers’ and find out:
http://www.llclub.org/discover-portfolio-careers/

The Food Judge – Nicky Richmond #2

June 4, 2015 By // by DigitalJenIPC

This is part 2 of a 3 part guest blog by Nicky Richmond. Nicky combines being a joint managing partner for Brecher with being a restaurant critic, and is a property and property finance lawyer with over 25 years’ experience. She is The Food Judge and writes a regular column for The Lawyer magazine. As a Foodie myself as you can see from our food themed LLClub web site, I am inspired!

Here is part 1:
https://liberateyourtalent.wordpress.com/2015/05/16/an-edible-portfolio-career-1/

The rest of this blog are in Nicky’s own words.

When people ask you ‘what do you do?’ – what do you reply?

My day job is a lawyer but what I really love to do is to review restaurants.

To what extent did your portfolio career happen by chance/luck and to what extent was it planned?

My portfolio career was not planned at all and I fell into it and only realised how much it gave me once I have been doing it for quite some time. Doing the reviews didn’t feel like work and it was easy to combine it with my work life as whilst I will never willingly attend a sporting event, I will happily take a client to a food event and I have to do client entertaining as part of my business.

What do you most love about having a portfolio career?

Finally managing to incorporate my obsession with food into my day-to-day life other than just by way of eating it. Meeting a whole new group of people and getting to understand another industry, which has been fascinating. Feeling that I’m using all parts of my skill set and that there is still a lot to learn. Getting stale is so dull.

What are the challenges of having a portfolio career?

Realising that you can’t do everything that you want to do because there are not enough hours in the day. You have to really plan and be disciplined about the time you spend on each thing that you do and you have to be equally committed to the non-core aspects of your portfolio career.
The temptation with law is to let it take over – I certainly did for the first 25 years and I ended up being tired, and a little bit jaded. Doing the charity work is good for the soul however much of a cliché that might appear, and the upside is that you get to meet a whole new group of people from different walks of life. The sort of people who volunteer are the sort of people that I really like to spend time with.

Part 3 of this 3 part guest blog coming soon.

More about Nicky Richmond

Nicky Richmond, Joint Managing Partner, Brecher:
http://www.brecher.co.uk/people/nicky-richmond/

The Food Judge – never knowingly underfed.
http://thefoodjudge.com/

Blog – Not Entirely Legal
http://strictlylegal.me/author/nickyrichmond/

More about portfolio careers:

Could a portfolio career give you the variety you seek? Download our free report ‘Discover Portfolio Careers’ and find out:
http://www.llclub.org/discover-portfolio-careers/

Interested in finding out more about whether a portfolio career is to your taste? Come along to The Law Society Portfolio careers event on Friday 12 June. See link for more details:
https://events.lawsociety.org.uk/ClientApps/Silverbear.Web.EDMS/public/default.aspx?tabId=37&id=1077&orgId=1&guid=eb63cc9e-13ed-45c4-8b66-4b52db7a0c94

An edible portfolio career #1

May 16, 2015 By // by DigitalJenIPC

This is part 1 of a 3 part guest blog by Nicky Richmond. Nicky combines being a joint managing partner for law firm Brecher with being a restaurant critic, and is a property and property finance lawyer with over 25 years’ experience. She is ‘The Food Judge’ and writes a regular column for The Lawyer magazine. As a Foodie, I think Nicky’s portfolio career is wonderful and I hope to accompany her soon to a restaurant……………!

The rest of this blog are in Nicky’s own words.

What are the components of your portfolio career e.g. study, paid freelance work, part time job, volunteering etc.?

My day job is as managing partner of a law firm, a role that I have undertaken for seven years. In my free time, I write weekly restaurant reviews for The Lawyer magazine and I have a restaurant review blog called The Food Judge. I also write articles for various publications and my other blog, Not Entirely Legal. I am also a trustee of a children’s charity, Kids Out and have recently become involved in Action Against Hunger which seems a good counterbalance to all that eating out.

How did your portfolio career come about?

I have always been a little bit obsessed about food and eating out; in fact I thought that I was going to be a lawyer for about 10 years then open my own restaurant. Real life got in the way. I started writing in a non-legal sense when I wanted to do some publicity for my firm and because I had only written like a lawyer for the previous 25 years.

I wanted a little bit of practice and to try and find my own writing voice, so I started writing restaurant reviews for myself. The Lawyer magazine tweeted that they were looking for restaurant reviews and it seemed like a gift. After a little bit of stop/start, I ended up being their weekly reviewer. The charity work came about because I have always had a strong interest in giving something back. I never quite found the right charity but then I think I never really looked properly, or hard enough. You have to find something that chimes with you and where you can really empathise.

How has your portfolio career changed over time?

For about 25 years I did very little other than law, partly because I was simply too busy and partly because I didn’t actually make the time to do anything different. When I started doing the restaurant reviews, I had no idea that they would take off in the way that they did, or that I would meet a whole new network of people through doing it. And whilst I always did pro bono work for charities, that was under the banner of a law firm and the charity work that I do now is nothing to do with the law firm although my legal/management expertise is useful.

Part 2 of this 3 part guest blog series coming soon.

Nicky Richmond, Joint Managing Partner, Brecher:
http://www.brecher.co.uk/people/nicky-richmond/

The Food Judge – Never Knowingly Underfed.
http://thefoodjudge.com/

Blog – Not Entirely Legal
http://strictlylegal.me/author/nickyrichmond/

Interested in a portfolio career and liberating more of your talent? Get in touch with Rachel Brushfield, Talent Liberator.

Rachel is doing a talk about Portfolio careers on 12 June 2015 at a Law Society Women Lawyers Division Portfolio Careers event in London.