This week on the Legally Speaking Podcast, our host Rob Hanna is joined by Anjie Vichayanonda, a trademark and copyright lawyer turned entrepreneur who is changing the industry through mentorship.
Having worked at Under Armour, Kelly IP LLP and Haynes and Boone LLP, she founded Leg Up Legal in late 2018. The firm has revolutionised mentoring and networking for prospective law students in the United States.
The decision to start her firm was partly based on her own personal experience as a first generation Asian American, whose initial lack of connections and insider insight slowed her progress in the industry. In this episode therefore, we learn more of Angie's story, including how she overcame these challenges, succeeded in the industry and now devotes her time to supporting ambitious young Americans.
In this episode, Angie covers:
This week on the Legally Speaking Podcast, our host Rob Hanna is joined by Anjie Vichayanonda, a trademark and copyright lawyer turned entrepreneur who is changing the industry through mentorship.
Having worked at Under Armour, Kelly IP LLP and Haynes and Boone LLP, she founded Leg Up Legal in late 2018. The firm has revolutionised mentoring and networking for prospective law students in the United States.
The decision to start her firm was partly based on her own personal experience as a first generation Asian American, whose initial lack of connections and insider insight slowed her progress in the industry. In this episode therefore, we learn more of Angie's story, including how she overcame these challenges, succeeded in the industry and now devotes her time to supporting ambitious young Americans.
In this episode, Angie covers:
Robert Hanna (00:00):
Welcome to the legally speaking podcast. I’m your host, Rob Hanna. Today I’m delighted to be joined by Angie Vichayanonda. Angie is the CEO and founder of Leg Up Legal, an online mentoring community, a mobile app that connects prospective law students, including college students and working professionals to attorney mentors. Angie is also the proud host of the Law Live Project podcast and a podcast which sheds light on the early careers of lawyers. So a very big welcome, Angie.
Angie Vichayanonda (00:35):
Thank you so much, Robert.
Robert Hanna (00:37):
A real pleasure to have you on the show. Before we go through all your amazing work and what you’ve achieved thus far, we must start with our icebreaker customary opening question on the legally speaking podcast. So on the scale of one to 10, 10 being very real, how real would you rate the reality, the TV series suits in terms of its reality?
Angie Vichayanonda (01:02):
I say maybe a strong four.
Robert Hanna (01:07):
Four. Okay. Any particular reason why?
Angie Vichayanonda (01:09):
I mean, I think it does a good job of capturing a lot of the dynamics that goes on between, you know, associates and partners and different types of people in law firms to a certain extent, but always around a pretty sensationalized problem or issue that not, I think most people don’t face every single day in the legal profession, at least I would hope.
Robert Hanna (01:29):
Yeah. I think when I was asked the question a little while back now, I actually gave it a four, so great minds think alike. So let’s start at the beginning, Angie, tell our listeners a little bit about your family background and your upbringing.
Angie Vichayanonda (01:43):
Yes. So I am a first generation Asian American specifically. I am a Thai-Texan, so my parents were born in Thailand and they immigrated here at separate times and I was born and raised in Dallas, Fort worth, Texas. So, uh, I grew up in the United States. Um, even though, you know, my parents were immigrants, they had never done the whole graduate school, um, program here in the States and they didn’t apply for colleges here in the States. So they really didn’t know anything about the college admissions process or the law school admissions process. And so when I was going to university, I really didn’t know that I wanted to be a lawyer. I thought I wanted to be in advertising. So I got a degree in business administration and focus in marketing. And then I went to work for a marketing agency in Dallas for two years, and then the economy tanked. And I had to figure out if I wanted to continue trying to get another job in advertising or if I wanted to pivot my career. And at that time I decided I was interested in law school, but I really had no idea how to learn about this world. It just seemed like so broad and vast, and I didn’t really know anything about the law. Um, so I thought to myself, what sort of skills do I have that I could start learning more about the law and, and different possible legal career paths? And I said, cold calling. I’m really good at cold. I don’t mind being ignored. I don’t mind if people just tell me no. So I started cold calling lawyers in Dallas. And so I literally flipped open a phone book and flipped open to lawyers. And I just started calling just asking them, you know, “Hey, I’m interested in going to law school. I really don’t know this is the right path for me, but I’d love to hear a little bit about your path and how you became you. And would you mind sitting down with me for, you know, 15, 20 minutes to tell me more about what you do”. Out of the 50 cold calls that I made, I only got to talk to three lawyers and that wasn’t actually a bad thing. You know, it wasn’t too bad talking to them, to just only three because honestly 6% is a pretty good cold calling number. So, um, so I talked to these three lawyers and, you know, one of them, um, listened to me, tell him about my advertising background. He said, you know, I think he might be really interested in corporate or business law, but he wasn’t a corporate and business law lawyer. And so he said, one of my friends is an in-house lawyer. Why don’t you connect with him? And so he put me in touch with this person and his friend took me out to lunch and talked to me for a little while. And I told them about my aspirations to go to law school. And he said, you know, listen, I really, really want to help you. Um, I’m so shocked that you called all these lawyers and you weren’t able to talk to very many. And so, uh, why don’t you come work for me as a legal assistant while you’re applying to law school. And however long that takes, if you decide you want to go this year, you know, six, seven months, or if you decided you want to go the next year, you can, you know, work for me for a year or so. And I said, okay. So I went to go work for him. And, um, he introduced me to dozens of lawyers, dozens. I mean, lawyers. I had no idea how many career paths even existed for lawyers. Um, he introduced me to people who were litigators, who were transactional lawyers. He introduced me to folks in employment, law, bankruptcy, real estate, um, criminal law. Um, he had some friends that were clerking for judges and all sorts of different career paths. And so it really opened up my eyes to how broad this world was and how in over my head I was. I just, I really didn’t know anything about this field and you know, my parents, they were terrified for me because, uh, they’re engineers. Um, so my parents divorced when I was very young and they remarried other engineers. So I come from a whole line of engineers and I think they would have been really, really happy for me to be an engineer. Um, but I think they were really scared when I chose law because it was one of those areas that they really couldn’t help me. They really didn’t know any connections or anyone who could help me. And so it was really up to me to go find out what this was all about and how to succeed.
Robert Hanna (06:16):
So, you know, you definitely did succeed. So it sounds like you definitely didn’t want to be a lawyer from the outset, but I love that sort of hunger, desire, cold calling. That’s just amazing. Just sort of getting on with it, getting yourself out there. And that’s a great example of being proactive and then getting a positive response from it. Um, so you had a tremendous career. Tell us more about that sort of your career as a trademark and sort of copyright attorney.
Angie Vichayanonda (06:39):
Yeah. So while I was going to talk to all these lawyers before law school, I had applied to a bunch of law schools based on their initial rankings. You know, in the United States, we have, um, a company called US News and World Report that releases all these rankings for law schools. And they, uh, they always warn you that the rankings are not the best thing to go off of it, honestly, there’s really not that much else to go off of. And so when I started researching law schools, I wanted to apply to the ones that were the best ranked. But as I started talking to all these lawyers, they started telling me about the law schools that they went to started realizing that, you know, there’s a great many law schools that can provide you a really, really sound legal education without breaking the bank. Um, because if you go to one of these top tier law schools, um, in the United States, it can cost an incredible amount of money. I mean, you could be easily over $200,000, $300,000 of student loan debt at the end of the day. And that’s just an incredible amount of money, especially if you’re not making very much money. And so, as I started talking to all these different lawyers, I started realizing that in certain career paths, yes, lawyers make a lot of money in other career paths. Lawyers don’t make that much money. And so it’s really important to sort of figure out what, what practice area are you interested in? What’s the earning potential for that practice area? And then how much are you willing to invest in a law degree in order to go make that a reality? And so, as I was talking to all these lawyers, at some point, I connected with a trademark and copyright lawyer, and he was actually an intellectual property lawyer in one of the largest law firms in America. And he was a partner and he did a lot of hiring for the group. And so he asked me which law schools I had applied to and I gave him my list and he was shocked. He said, this won’t work. You know, we only do, on-campus interviewing at a couple of law schools because not all law schools teach intellectual property law really well. And he said, we only go to eight law schools, um, to do on-campus interviews because we believe that these eight law schools really teach it well. So he gave me his list of eight and I realized I had only applied to one of those. So I frantically went and applied to the rest of them, but this was already really, really late in the game. And so, um, the admission cycle here in the US runs pretty much from September, August all the way to about March or April. And I was already, I think this was already in February. So when I applied, I had no idea if I was even going to get into these schools, but surprisingly I did get into a lot of these schools. And on top of that, since they were lower ranked on the US news list, but they were higher ranked in intellectual property. I actually, not only did I get in, I got really good scholarship offers. So I ended up getting a really, really great scholarship offer from the university of New Hampshire School of Law. And it, it could not have been farther from where I thought I would go. I mean, I grew up in Texas. New Hampshire is pretty much the opposite border. I’m close to Mexico. New Hampshire is close to Canada. And, um, it was, it was so far away. I had never lived in the North. I had never even seen that much snow before. I had no idea how it was going to survive, but it was really, really good IP school. So I thought, okay, I’m going to try to make this work. And I’m so glad I made that decision because my law school really did give me so many experiences that I think would have been really difficult to get at other law schools. We had so many practice-based classes. Um, we had a class and actual trademark registration, and that actually taught you how to file trademark applications and, and prosecute trademark applications, which is really unheard of. You know, when you get into law school, if you have intellectual property classes, they’re usually these doctrinal theory classes. They don’t really teach you how to practice law most of the time. Um, and so these classes that my law school had were really, really beneficial and teaching me how to actually practice, I was useful during my internship. So when I started working at the law firm, you know, they could give me an assignment and I can just run with it right away. And that’s not the experience that you’ll have at most law schools. And so I was really thankful for that. And then on top of that, my law school had a tonne of alumni in the intellectual property space, trademark and copyright space. And so, um, there were many more opportunities for us to connect with our alumni and do internships for them go work for them during the summer. And so that’s what I got to do during the fall semester of my third year in law school, I was able to go work for one of our alumni at Under Armour in the in-house legal department. And that really catapulted my career. Not only was this lawyer a great mentor, but you know, having Under Armour on my resume and being in-house while I was in law school was really unheard of. And so it was really, really neat experience for me. And I ended up after graduating. Um, the plan was to actually work for under Underarmour’s outside counsel, which was a really large intellectual property boutique in Washington DC. And at the time that year, the year that I was graduating, that particular office was about to implode and five of their partners were about to take off and create their own boutique. And that’s exactly what happened. Um, so I actually ended up going to work with the five partners who launched this new innovative boutique. And so they did on trademark work for Disney and Marvel and ABC and Harley Davidson and some of these huge, huge brands. And I just loved it. And, um, that I feel like trademark and copyright law is one of the best kept secrets because it’s such a fun practice area. You’re working with people who are very creative. If you’re working with in-house folks, they’re the business, people who want to get things done, and they’re very, very creative, and they’re very excited about what they’re doing and it’s not sort of just your routine run of the mill legal work, I guess, it’s things that you’ll see on the news. You’ll work on projects that you’ll see in everyday life, you know, and I think that’s what I really loved about it. You know, when I was working on Disney matters, like it would be that we were working on protecting some sort of property that was related to a show or a movie or something. And then you’d see that movie debut. And you feel like you were, you know, a little bit of a part of that. So, um, so I really, really enjoyed that practice area. And I was very, very lucky to have really great mentors at my first firm as well. I mean, they were the top notch that you could learn trademark law from two of them had authored one of the textbooks that we used in my law school. And, um, you know, one of the lawyers, um, was a former trademark trial and appeal board judge. Um, so she just knew everything about TTAB practice. It was really a fantastic firm to start off with and to really train at. So yeah, really enjoyed my career until I decided I wanted to do this.
Robert Hanna (14:14):
And that’s, that leads very nicely. So what did sort of spark, I guess you wanting to make that career change to become an entrepreneur and a mentor?
Angie Vichayanonda (14:24):
Yeah. I had been mentoring people all throughout my legal career. Um, I realized how important it was to have a mentor when that first lawyer hired me to be his legal assistant before law school. And he took me under his wing and he became my mentor. I mean, he never formally said, Angie, I’m going to be your mentor, but he definitely, that’s the role he took on. And he taught me how to speak to lawyers. I remember he dragged me to this networking event, like in the very first week that I was working for him. And, um, he said, we’re going to go to a networking event tonight. And I said, okay. And so he brought me along and it was a bar association event where the first half was a continuing legal education course, um, with lawyers presenting about updates in the law, in their specific area. And then the second half was a networking event. And so during the first half, I’m sitting there watching these lawyers present and I’m not understanding a single word that they’re saying, and I look around the room and I realized I’m the youngest person in this room by probably two decades. I mean, everybody in this room had white hair and they were all way older than me. And it was very clear that I was probably the only non-lawyer in the room too. I mean, everybody was dressed up in their suits. They all, um, many of them had plaques in front of them saying who they were and what their law firm was. And so I was just getting very, very intimidated looking around the room and not really seeing anybody even remotely close to my age or that looked like me. Um, you know, here in the United States, uh, the legal profession is actually not very diverse. And so I was looking around this room and that was probably pretty representative of our profession as a whole, you know, I maybe saw about four other women in a room of about 60 or so lawyers. And there was only about a handful of minorities in the room other than me and they were all men. And so it was really intimidating for me, but by the time that we got to the networking events, I felt like I was ready to cut and run. I just felt like I didn’t belong there. And my boss, you know, he encouraged me and he said, “no, no, you should stay”. You should take advantage of this opportunity. And even if you don’t feel like you belong, you belong. And so he said, give me your elevator pitch confidently and tell me who you are. And so I said, okay, and hi, my name is Angie. I’m interested in going to law school. I came here to learn more about this practice area and that’s all I got. And so he said, okay, fine. Now The very end of that say, and I came here with John I’m his legal assistant. And I was like, okay. And so I didn’t know who he was or how did he know all these people? But that’s what I said. So I went out and I introduced myself and I would tell them that I was coming here with John and I was a legal assistant. And he was actually the chair of that section or the Dallas Bar Association. And so everyone in the room knew him and everyone, once they knew that I was his legal assistant, they were willing to just, you know, bend over backwards to talk to me, to help me. And so I realized right away that it’s really important to have someone who’s willing to leverage their network for you, and to really introduce you to all these other people. And so he not only did that, he taught me exactly what to say to them. He gave me a list of questions to ask lawyers when I really didn’t know what to ask and really showed me how to develop relationships. Long-term um, how to follow up with lawyers, what to say in a meeting with a lawyer so that it would naturally lead to something that I could follow up with them later and keep that relationship going. I mean, these are all skills that they’re extremely important, but they never teach this in school. So, um, so you really need somebody to teach it to you. And, and my mentor did. And so when I got into law school, I tried to teach those things to every single person that I could. I just felt like this was the first time I had ever heard it articulated how to actually network with people and build relationships with them. And I thought that that was a really important skill that I needed to just spread as much as I could.
Angie Vichayanonda (18:38):
And so I taught some of my other classmates had a network. And then once I was a young lawyer, I started mentoring law students. And really over time I realized that this is what I really love doing is I love mentoring law students. I loved teaching them about our profession and love teaching them how to network with other lawyers. Um, but if I kept on billing 2000 hours or 2,400 hours a year, or whatever crazy amount that I needed to build, um, the best I could do is maybe mentor one or two people at a time. And I just felt like there wasn’t anyone out there really doing this on a scale that I wanted. And so I thought, you know, I’m going to build it myself. I’m going to find a way to take off and build this mentoring program and this platform for other people.
Robert Hanna (19:29):
And then when I was building it, um, I realized, you know, very quickly once I launched into the world of entrepreneurship that always a little in over my head. So I went and joined this accelerator, a startup accelerator at a university, actually, it’s my undergraduate Alma mater, um, had a very, very good entrepreneurship program. And so I went through this startup accelerator for female founders. And, um, through that, I learned a little bit more about the different facets that you need to build a business. And they really challenged me to think about who we’re supposed to be. My potential customers. Was it really law students? Was it young lawyers? Should it be even earlier that should it be college students? And what we realized was there was way more of a gap at the college level and pre law. Any time, any point up until you get into law school, I would consider pre law, even though that’s sort of a misnomer, because I think a lot of people, when they think pre law, they think about university students who have designated themselves a pre-law major.
Angie Vichayanonda (20:33):
But I really think of pre-law as prospective law students, anyone who’s thinking about going to pursue a legal career. And so we realized that there were no mentoring programs on a nationwide scale at the pre-law level, none at all. There were a couple of pipeline programs out there and by pipeline programs, I mean maybe fellowship programs or internship programs that would allow college students to get experience at law firms. But there really weren’t that many, and even the ones that were out there only took about five or six students. Um, so there wasn’t that much opportunity for people to really learn more about different practice areas and what the legal profession was all about before they made that decision of, yes, I want to go to law school. So that’s what we set out to build.
Robert Hanna (21:19):
Great. And you’ve, you’ve, you’ve obviously been so successful. Um, so let’s talk a little bit more about sort of, you know, leg up legal, as I mentioned, you know, tell us more about how people can get involved.
Angie Vichayanonda (21:30):
Sure. So Leg up Legal has several different customers, I would say, so we have legal employers, law firms and attorneys, um, if they want to get involved, they can partner with us and join the program as mentors. The attorneys participate for free, of course, because we, all we want is their time. And we already know how much we’re asking to get, um, a little bit of their time to mentor the students. Um, so we partner with law firms and then individual attorneys can actually just sign up on our website to be an attorney mentor if they want, whether or not their law firm is even involved. And then we also partner with universities and their pre-law advisors to sign on pilot programs of students who participate in the program. So in that case, the university pays for the program, the students get it for free, and they’re able to just plug into our community just like anybody else.
Angie Vichayanonda (22:24):
And then we also have individual subscribers. So if you are thinking about going to law school, but you’re not connected to an undergraduate institution, that’s partnered with us and you want to participate in our mentoring program. You can just subscribe individually for 1999 a month. You just go onto our website, sign up and boom, you’re put into the mentoring community and you get to take advantage of all the same things that the university students do. So, um, we have a mentoring curriculum. So when you first come in as either a mentor or mentee, you’ll go through an video orientation series. And after you watch that video orientation, that explains everything that you need to know about the program. You set up your profile. So you download the mobile app and you get onto our mentoring platform. And it’s almost like a dating app. Like you set up your little profile and you’re able to match with either your mentor mentee through the app.
Angie Vichayanonda (23:17):
So you can search through all the available mentors or all the available mentees read through their profiles, figure out who will be a good match for you. And then you request a match inside the app. And once you’ve matched in the app, the messaging functions become available. So you can message each other back and forth. You can schedule meetings, you can set up video chats and everything is meant to be self-contained within the app. So you can meet with your mentor and mentee completely 100% virtually. There’s no need to be in person. We designed it that way from the start, because we really wanted people who were interested in being mentored by lawyers from different geographic areas to have access to lawyers in those areas. So if you have a student who’s going to school in Texas, but eventually they want to practice in New York. Uh, we want them to be able to connect with a lawyer in New York who can teach them about the legal market there, and what’s the best firms are there and what the different practice areas that they’ve have experienced in AR. And so we really, really wanted to make it geographic agnostic and it’s worked out great for us because when COVID happened, we were already a hundred percent virtual. So there was no need to adjust the program in any way. And that was actually a fantastic thing for us.
Robert Hanna (24:33):
And may I say, you’re doing such a fantastic job and I would encourage people definitely to, to check it out. So congratulations on everything you have achieved with the leg up legal. It is highly, highly impressive, and it doesn’t stop there. Angie, because I mentioned also the law lives project podcast. Um, so tell us more about that and what inspired you to set that up?
Angie Vichayanonda (24:55):
Yeah. So part of our mentoring program is teaching people, as I said, how to network, how to build their first professional relationships. Many of the students who participate in our program, especially the very young college students. They may not have ever had an office job or a job where they’re interacting with a lot of professionals. So there’s just very, very basic skills that they need to learn about how to talk to lawyers. And so, um, part of our mentoring curriculum was to teach people how to do these informational interviews. Like the way that I was calling up these lawyers and learning more about their career paths. That’s what we teach our students to do. And many of our students were having these great experiences connecting with these attorneys. And I thought to myself, well, how do we leverage, um, these experiences that these students are having to help everyone in our community?
Angie Vichayanonda (25:44):
And I thought, okay, if each person is conducting an informational interview, every single person who listens to that interview can benefit from it. So why don’t we create a podcast completely around this? Why don’t we create a podcast where we have, you know, students interviewing attorneys and learning more about their career paths and allowing all the other students to listen to that as well. And so that’s how we started the LA lives project. And as we started doing these informational interviews, many of the attorneys, you know, they started talking about very, very personal issues, you know, setbacks that they had early on in their careers, things that nobody really wants to talk about. Things that people, most people would feel like are really sensitive topics. And like, what do you do when you fail the bar exam? And what do you do? Um, when you get fired from your first job and what happens if you get into your first job and you feel like it’s not a good fit, or what if you’re trying to come back to after having kids.
Angie Vichayanonda (26:44):
And you’re having a really tough time breaking back into the legal world, you know, all of these topics were so important. And I hadn’t heard many of these stories told before, because I think a lot of attorneys are really worried about their reputation and they really don’t want to release that kind of information. And so we thought if we make this podcast anonymous, there’s podcasts that have this style, like this American life on NPR, and there’s podcasts that, you know, have this styles to the people can share really, really raw details about themselves without having to worry about so much of the repercussions. And I think that it’s way more important for students to hear these stories about how people actually navigate the most difficult parts of their careers. How did they even get started in their careers? Because that’s the stuff nobody ever wants to talk about.
Angie Vichayanonda (27:34):
Lawyers really like talking about once we’re all important. And once we have our ideal dream job, right, we always like talking about that, but we don’t really like talking about all the mistakes we made along the way. And so I really wanted to have a podcast that was focused on those very early career steps. You know, how did you even decide you wanted to go to law school once you picked your law school? Did you even feel like that was the right decision? Well, what did you do when you got your first horrible grade? What did you do when you were trying to find a job? You know, all of us struggle with these issues, but nobody really talks about it and that’s what the LA lines project was supposed to be all about. And it’s been really, really great, you know, we’ve had so many lawyers volunteer to come tell their stories and we’ve lined up a ton of episodes. So I’m really, really excited. And we started having, um, more and more students volunteer to be guest hosts. So yes, if there’s any attorneys out there listening to this and they want to come to tell their story, please connect with me. If there’s any students out there who want the opportunity to be a podcast host, we will give you all the materials that you need and teach you how to do it. So, um, so come be a guest.
Robert Hanna (28:47):
There you go. And how can people listen to the, uh, the podcast generally on the main platforms?
Angie Vichayanonda (28:53):
So it’s on all the main platforms. Um, we also have our own Libsyn page, um, but you can find it on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Amazon music, everything,
Robert Hanna (29:01):
Great stuff. And I’d love to say it stops there, but you and I are also both big fans of LinkedIn. So why don’t you tell us a little bit more about the real lawyers of LinkedIn series too?
Angie Vichayanonda (29:14):
Yes. Another thing we started doing was featuring lawyers that I had been talking to on LinkedIn at the very start of COVID 19. I completely changed the way that I use LinkedIn up until then. I used LinkedIn probably the way that most people do as a glorified resume. Um, I had had, you know, all of my work experience on there. And, um, my about section was probably three sentences and it said something like Angie is a trademark and copyright lawyer, and these are the clients he represents. And these are the firms that she’s worked with. But after a while, I started realizing that people want to see the human behind the profile I’m on LinkedIn. So I completely changed my approach to using it. I, you know, changed my profile to write my summary and in a first person, very personable way. And then, um, I started really engaging with people on LinkedIn.
Angie Vichayanonda (30:10):
I found a community there. I started attending these zoom meetups that people were doing at the start of COVID-19. And one of them that I attended was Alex Sue’s meetup. And, um, he does a meet up for lawyers and I started connecting with all of these other people there. And I started really being able to make friends online through LinkedIn, which was really crazy to me. I mean, I never thought I’d be able to use LinkedIn in that way. And, um, I started following their content and seeing them post everyday and started getting inspired. And I started posting. And then I discovered a group of lady lawyers that were all in, you know, sort of this group together where we, we help each other, you know, promote our content. And we talk about different subjects and we partnered together on many different webinars and things at this point.
Angie Vichayanonda (31:00):
And, um, so we all are very much building our online presence. And I started thinking about ways that I could leverage LinkedIn to help our mentoring community. And one of the ways was I was like, listen, I’m talking to all these lawyers right now and getting all these wonderful nuggets of wisdom and really loving all the things that I’m learning for them. How do I highlight these lawyers and allow the rest of LinkedIn to discover how great they are? And so I started the real lawyers of LinkedIn theories, and it’s a post theory. So you just need to follow that hashtag and every week you’ll see a new post about different lawyers. And we actually highlight two lawyers a week. And we talk a little bit about who that lawyer is, what do they use LinkedIn for and what do you want to follow them for?
Angie Vichayanonda (31:45):
What sort of content did they create? And, um, how can you benefit from their content? And so it’s been awesome because all these lawyers have come out of the woodwork to, you know, reach out to me about the series and then I get to know them better. And then we feature them. But it’s, it’s a really, really great way if you’re just breaking into the legal community on LinkedIn and you don’t really know who all is out there and who really is a thought leader on different topics. Uh, if you follow this series, you’ll start to discover lawyers and all sorts of different areas. So that’s what it’s about.
Robert Hanna (32:19):
And I love the series I’ve been following it very, very keenly over LinkedIn. I think that’s how you and I first got connected as well. Angie. So for anyone who’s listening to this, please, please engage, get involved with LinkedIn. It’s such a wonderful, fabulous platform that has so much to offer. What else can people get involved with?
Angie Vichayanonda (32:36):
Yeah, so we started hosting zoom events for pre-loss students, current law students and young lawyers every single week during COVID-19 so that people could actually bond together and learn more from each other. And we could connect all the people in our community, but also invite others who aren’t familiar with our community to get to know us. So we host these events every Tuesday and Thursday at noon, central time and their lives and meetups that are free. And we bring in lawyers and other legal professionals every week to talk to all of our audience for about 30 to 45 minutes. And then they do an open Q and a at the end where you can actually ask them questions. And we also host a biweekly virtual happy hour every other Friday. And that one is really interactive. So we really wanted everybody in the community to be able to get to know each other.
Angie Vichayanonda (33:29):
So if you come to one of the bar virtual bi-weekly happy hours, we’ll spend the first few minutes doing introductions. So everybody gets to know each other, then we’ll break everybody out into breakout rooms. One-on-one so you get to know one other person for about 15 minutes, and then we’ll mix everybody up and you’ll get to know another person for about 15 minutes. Then we all come back into the main room and, um, we all share something that we learned about the person that we, the people that we met with so that everyone gets to know each other. And it’s been great. I mean, we’ve got pre law students who have connected with law students who are at the law schools that they wanted 10. So they get to pepper them with all those questions. We’ve got lost students who have been able to connect with lawyers to learn more about the, your practice areas and everything in between. So come hang out with us on one of our events, we would love to have you.
Robert Hanna (34:21):
And listen Angie, as we look to wrap up, I’m sure you would have inspired so many sort of future aspiring legal professionals and people currently practicing in the law that we’re probably going to want to reach out, get in touch, follow you, ask questions. So if people want to do that or anything we’ve discussed today, what’s the best way best platform for them to do it.
Angie Vichayanonda (34:39):
Absolutely. We’re actually we’re on every platform. I would say I’m on LinkedIn the most often. So feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, reach out, DM me. We’re also on Instagram and Facebook. So you can look us up, um, like a legal, or you can look up my pages on Facebook and Instagram as well. And Twitter I’m on pretty much every platform except for Tik TOK and who knows maybe even take dogs one day. So, um, but yeah, uh, reach out in any way as possible. And, um, if you’re interested in coming on to the Law Lives Project Podcast, they can email us at info at leguplegal.com and we will set it up.
Robert Hanna (35:13):
Brilliant. Well, thanks an absolute million Angie for coming on. It’s been a real pleasure having you on later, listening to your journey and what you’re currently doing and going to continue to do for the legal community. So wishing you lots of continued success with Lego legal, but for now a massive over and out. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the legally speaking podcast. If you enjoyed the show and want to help support us, remember to leave us a rating and review on Apple iTunes, you can also support the show and gain exclusive benefits bonus content, uh, much more by signing up to our Patreon page, which is www.patreon.com/legallyspeakingpodcast. Thanks for listening.