The most valuable person in a lawyer's network may be someone who can't give you work yet.
They might be a trainee. A junior associate. Someone sitting across the office who'll leave in three years and disappear into a company you've never heard of. At the time, none of this feels particularly important. There are emails to answer, deals to close and presumably, a client somewhere expecting results.
Russell's spent enough time in private practice to see the flaw in treating relationships as transactions. They're people whose careers are moving, usually in directions you can't predict.
That makes the long game rather more interesting.
Tax isn't a standalone practice.
Russell advises private capital and financial services clients throughout the life of an investment: raising capital, structuring it, deploying it, managing portfolio companies and eventually selling them. He also advises the institutions financing those structures.
At King & Spalding, Russell sits among the lawyers he works with most often. He wants to know what they're working on, what they're pitching for and where he can add value.
He calls these lawyers his "internal clients".
The traditional image of success is the rainmaker partner charging out into the world to win business, then bringing it back for the team to work on. That can be true. But much of modern private practice doesn't work like that.
The client doesn't need five brilliant lawyers operating independently. They need five brilliant lawyers who can operate as one team.
So when K&S pitches for work, the whole team is involved from the outset. Not at the eleventh hour, when somebody sends an email saying: Russell, can you just have a quick look at this?
The problem with that approach is that tax lawyers tend to discover things that need fixing.
Specialists who've seen enough deals can add value before a problem has become a problem. The tax context matters. So does the experience of knowing which questions should be asked at the beginning.
Russell moved to K&S partly because of the emphasis on collaboration.
The message has been repeated through recruitment, onboarding and daily life. More importantly, it's not lip service or simply stencilled on the office wall. He can feel it in how people work.
That matters because law firms have personalities.
London has an absurd number of them. UK, Magic Circle, US, international, specialist boutiques. For lawyers, the abundance creates an unusual luxury in that you can choose an environment that fits the way you want to practise.
For Russell, as a tax lawyer working in private capital, collaboration isn't just a cultural nice-to-have. It's essential.
Which raises an uncomfortable point about professional services more generally.
Culture isn't merely about whether people enjoy coming to work or playing ping pong. It determines how effectively expertise moves around an organisation.
A brilliant lawyer surrounded by people who don't involve them until the last minute is less useful than a very good lawyer who's brought into the room early.
The same principle applies to business development.
When he moved from a tax team of around 30 to a London team of two, he wanted his existing clients to know where he'd gone and what he was doing now. He could email people. He could meet them for coffee.
Or he could speak to a much larger audience.
LinkedIn gave him a way to demonstrate expertise while also showing some humanity and humour.
His best-performing post wasn't a technical explanation of a tax development. It was about his wife telling him off for how he was presenting himself online.
Technical content demonstrates your skillset. Personal stories demonstrate the person attached to it. Russell's trying to combine the two.
And in a world where technical expertise is abundant, the personal angle becomes the differentiator.
Clients want to know whether you're good at your job. That's assumed. They also want to know what you're like when things become difficult or a challenging email comes in at two in the morning.
Humanity is not a substitute for professional credibility.
It's part of it.
Lawyers should start building that reputation early.
Not because a newly qualified lawyer needs to generate business tomorrow. They don't.
But because careers compound.
The trainee sitting beside you today may eventually become a partner. The junior client contact may eventually become General Counsel. The colleague who leaves the firm may eventually run a company.
Of the 25 trainees Russell started with, only two remained at the firm when he became a partner roughly a decade later. Many of the others had moved into businesses and positions where they could give out work.
None of that was particularly obvious at the time.
The mistake is to interpret networking as a hunt for immediate commercial value.
Russell's view is almost the opposite. Build relationships. Stay in touch. Keep talking to people after they leave. Don't turn every conversation into a sales exercise.
The commercial value arrives later, if it arrives at all.
That sounds less predictable than a carefully managed business development strategy. It probably is.
It's also more effective.
The most commercially useful relationships are often the ones that weren't built with money in mind. People remember the person who took the time to understand their issue and advised them before asking for anything in return.
That's why "business development" is a slightly misleading term.
You aren't really developing business. You're developing a reputation that can survive long enough for business to find you.
Russell's career in tax, private capital and his approach to LinkedIn all point towards the same conclusion: the value of a lawyer rarely sits inside their technical expertise alone.
It sits in the people around them.
You don't know who will eventually matter.
And you don't need to.
The sensible lawyer doesn't try to predict exactly where everyone will end up.
They just make sure they were worth knowing when they crossed paths.