Every career has a different roadmap for success, and every industry has its own unique challenges, pitfalls, and disruptions that professionals need to account for. However, regardless of industry, every professional, from the most niche subject matter expert to the most ambitious entrepreneur, needs to be resilient enough to adapt to sudden changes and disruptions if they want to succeed. This is doubly true for attorneys and other legal professionals, as the legal space is famously detail-oriented and prone to sudden, massive changes as new laws are passed, reformed, or stripped away.
Fortunately for Chris Randle, senior attorney and U.S. Army Reserves Lieutenant Colonel, such resilience and adaptability is second nature. With nearly 20 years of experience serving in both civilian and military legal fields, and a comprehensive background spanning criminal law, family law, military justice, and civil settlements, Randle is well-equipped to handle whatever legal challenges his clients (or the industry) throw at him. His combination of legal expertise and leadership experience gives him a unique perspective on professional success and serves him well in his private practice.
Chris Randle often takes on work involving complex litigation and high-level felony cases across multiple jurisdictions, but he represents clients across a wide array of legal matters ranging from family law to criminal defense. In order to do his job effectively, Randle has to be both resilient and adaptable to new developments and changes in each case, or the laws regarding them. His strategies for maintaining these professional qualities combine strict discipline with a learning mindset that establishes him as an eternal student.
Working With Integrity and Discipline
Leading and serving clients effectively in the legal field requires discipline and integrity beyond the baseline expected of any professional. Clients are trusting their attorneys with money, valuable information, and, in no small way, their futures—it’s the basic duty of any effective legal advocate to earn that trust through strong core values and integrity. Chris Randle does this by adhering to his personal and professional values every day, and backing that commitment with military discipline.
“I try to live as a Christian and treat everyone the way I would hope to be treated,” Randle explains. “I take every case with every client and try to remember that they are coming to me in a very difficult time. I believe everyone, no matter who they are or where they are from, has value and importance in the world.”
To other attorneys, or professionals in general, Chris Randle has the same advice he’d give his younger self: to remember your core principles every day, not take anything for granted, and to protect the separation between work and personal life. It can be easy to get caught up in the stressful day-to-day of working life, but part of being resilient and disciplined in work is knowing how and when to put the work down and rest. For attorneys specifically, it can be easy to let a client relationship develop into a friendship; these situations are where professional discipline is required.
“Keep your distance and be a professional,” he says. “Be caring, open, and honest but be an advocate and not a personal friend. Many times as the lawyer and a friend, they reflect back and think that you were the problem and focused more on being a friend then being what they hired.”
Keeping Sharp
Any professional that wants to succeed in their chosen career needs to be able to keep up with changing industry and market conditions, with no exceptions. New technology, new laws, and new consumer trends change the game on a regular—and accelerating—basis, which means that a keen professional needs to be constantly learning to be able to adapt. For Chris Randle, this looks like a consistent and disciplined daily routine powered by set goals, ready reviews, and dedicated time for learning. It’s not a novel idea, but it really does all start with getting up on time.
“Getting up on time keeps your day rolling right, and staying task oriented helps me make it more productive,” he says. “Also, being on time for things like the gym helps a lot; the more you procrastinate, the less likely you are to work out.”
Randle keeps sharp through a combination of continual learning, novel skills acquisition, and regular workplace reviews. A steady diet of news through publications, online forums, and various news platforms helps keep Randle abreast of new industry trends and emerging technologies. Specifically for technology news, he prefers Google News, and leverages both Android and iOS platforms for research.
Learning new skills and making hard decisions is part of being a career professional, and both of those things are part of Randle’s daily life. He is licensed to practice law in Kansas, Washington, Missouri, and Texas, and one of his specialties is family law—which he taught himself from scratch. The secret to picking up new skills, aside from doing the requisite reading, is finding trusted peers and mentors to bounce ideas off of and develop greater understanding with. This kind of learning can be done anywhere with almost any skill, whether personal or professional. The relationships built during these learning moments can last a lifetime, and Randle knows that for a fact.
“No matter how experienced you are, there is always something to learn and you are not a subject matter expert on everything,” he says. “Listening to people who I respect and who know their craft has driven my success more than anything. My wife, parents, and some very good mentors in the military taught me forgiveness, resilience, and hard work. They also have taught me the difference between fair weather friends and those that would never leave your foxhole.”
Defining Success and Owning Mistakes
It’s easier to work with integrity and overcome challenges if there’s a concrete goal and definition of success to work toward. Having a guiding star for a business project, career, or personal improvement plan is incredibly important when adapting to change and weathering hardships. Equally as important is the ability to take stock of the current conditions of a project, acknowledge mistakes, and learn to move on.
Chris Randle, like any professional of more than a couple months’ experience has learned both of these lessons well. Success is easy for him to define: financial security and the ability to make his family happy. If his family is happy, then he is happy, and that is his condition for success. To get there, he has had to make many tough decisions in his legal career, and learn from each and every one of them.
There is no crystal ball that shows the outcome of every decision. There is only the luxury of looking at past decisions, accepting the judgments and decisions made, and learning from the mistakes. Especially in the legal industry, resilience demands that professionals accept that they made the best decision they could given the information they had at the time, even if that decision turned out to be wrong. To Randle, consistent success in this field means being resilient in the face of failure and adapting your strategy in order to do better next time.
“Making case decisions that affect the lives of people is always tough,” Randle explains. “I try not to think of what I would do differently because that type of thinking is a waste of time and energy. So I use past failures to grow into better decisions tomorrow.”
