On Ungatekeeping: A Career Big Sis Manifesto
There is a particular kind of conversation you have early in your legal career, or even earlier, during law school, that only reveals itself for what it was several years later.
Someone mentions something in passing, a clerkship deadline, an unwritten rule about how to interact with law firm partner, a frank assessment of which practice areas are actually resourced versus which ones look good in a graduate brochure and the information lands on you like it is completely new.
Because for you, it is completely new.
You have never heard it before. You had no reason to know it existed. Around you, a handful of people nod along as if this is simply common knowledge and something anyone would know. Maybe they do know. Maybe their parent is a lawyer. Maybe their older sibling went through this firm two years ago and gave them the download over the holidays. Maybe they went to the right" school, attended the right orientation, sat in the right café with the right person at the right time.
The information was never secret. It was just shared with some people and not others.
That is not a system that operates on merit. That is a system that operates on access.
I spent 15 years inside the legal profession, including as APAC Head of Legal at a global US technology company, before leaving in 2025 to build Counsel Media full time. In the years since I started talking online about careers in law, I have heard versions of that conversation from thousands of lawyers and law students across every level of seniority and every corner of the profession.
In coaching calls, in DMs sent at 11pm and in the questions that surface every single time I speak at a law school. The details change but the shape of the thing does not. In building Career Big Sis from the ground up, and in the hundreds of one-on-one conversations that have happened inside it, I have developed some strong views about why this pattern persists, what it costs and what it would look like to do things differently.
This piece is my attempt to explain what I mean when I use the word “ungatekeeping” and why I will not stop using it.
The culture of withholding
Gatekeeping in the legal profession is rarely dramatic. There is no committee that votes to keep certain people out. There is no villain in this story, which is partly what makes it so persistent. The most common form of gatekeeping in law is simply this: information that would change someone's trajectory is treated as social currency, shared casually within existing networks and withheld from those outside them, not out of malice but out of the unremarkable human tendency to share things with people we already know.
It lives in the lunch conversation where a partner tells the graduate from a particular university which practices are genuinely worth joining. It lives in the informal advice that flows freely to the children of lawyers and is simply never offered to those who arrived without that kind of map. It lives in the mentorship that happens organically for some people and is formally, imperfectly, retrospectively constructed for others through programs that feel like they are solving a problem the mentors do not fully accept exists.
The legal profession is particularly good at this because it is built around the idea that expertise is rare, that not everyone can do what lawyers do and that access to the inner workings of a legal career should, on some level, be earned.
That idea is not entirely wrong but somewhere in the translation, "expertise is rare" became "information about how to build a career should also be rare". Those are not the same thing. One protects the quality of the profession. The other just protects the people already inside it.
The genuinely useful thing about withheld information, though, is that it is not destroyed information. It exists and it can be shared. The cost of sharing it is essentially nothing while the benefit of sharing it is enormous. The only thing standing between the withholding and the sharing is the decision to do it and decisions can be made differently.
Who gets left outside
The people most affected by the culture of withholding are not randomly distributed across the population. They are, with depressing predictability, the same people who face structural disadvantage in every other area of the profession: first-generation law students, regional students, students from non-prestige universities, students whose families have no legal connections and no framework for understanding what a legal career actually involves beyond what they see on television.
I was one of them.
I was the first in my family to study law. I did not arrive at law school with a sense of how clerkships worked or what a commercial practice looked like from the inside. I arrived with hard work, determination and a fairly significant gap in the kind of insider knowledge that, as it turns out, is not just nice to have but genuinely determinative of outcomes.
I figured it out eventually, in the way that most first-generation students figure things out: by making expensive mistakes, by being confused in rooms where everyone else seemed confident, by arriving at the right answers years after the students who had the information earlier.
The profession speaks constantly about diversity. It publishes statistics, announces initiatives, runs programs. What it does far less often is acknowledge that the gap between the people who are in the room and the people who are not is frequently an information gap and information gaps are not complicated to close.
You just have to want to close them enough to start sharing what you know. That is not a radical proposition. It is the most basic form of professional generosity and it is available to everyone with seniority and a willingness to use it.
What the profession loses
The cost of the culture of withholding is not only borne by the individuals it excludes. The profession pays a price too, even if it does not always recognise the invoice.
When access to career-shaping information is filtered through existing networks, the profession ends up recruiting, retaining and elevating the people who were already well-networked, rather than the people who are best suited to the work.
Talent is not distributed equally across socioeconomic background, geography or family connection. Opportunity is. When the two are misaligned, the profession loses lawyers it could have had, retains some it perhaps should not have and continues to look remarkably like itself, year after year, despite the diversity statements.
There is also something quieter at stake.
A profession that withholds information from its own entrants signals, clearly and early, that not everyone belongs. That signal lands. Some people absorb it and leave. Some absorb it and stay, carrying the cost of it for years in the form of “imposter syndrome”, over-performance and a constant sense that the rules are different for them, because actually they were.
The psychological cost of entering a profession that did not think you needed to know how things worked is not trivial. It does not just affect early career confidence. It shapes careers, it shapes retention rates and it shapes who makes it to the rooms where decisions get made.
If the profession is serious about being different, it has to be serious about the most basic form of belonging: telling people what they need to know in order to succeed.
Why I use the word and why I will not stop
Ungatekeeping is not a content strategy. I want to say that clearly, because the word has started to migrate into marketing and it deserves to be used with some care. Ungatekeeping is not "sharing tips on LinkedIn”. It is not a content pillar. It is a commitment and commitments look different from content.
I use the word because I was on the other side of the gate and I remember exactly what that felt like. I remember the rooms where I caught up, quietly, on information other people had held for years. I remember the specific exhaustion of doing extra work that should not have been necessary, the cost of it in time, in confidence, in the compounding effect of arriving late to knowledge that was always available but never offered. I did not leave the legal profession to build a content business. I left to build something that would give the people who came after me the information I had to find the hard way.
Every briefing I publish, every coaching conversation, every episode of the Counsel Podcast and every DM I answer at unreasonable hours is, at its core, the same act: sharing what I know with people who need it. Knowing something useful and keeping it to yourself, is something I made a decision about a long time ago and that decision is not complicated.
Ungatekeeping is a conviction about what information is for. It is the belief that knowledge about how the legal profession works belongs to everyone who is trying to build a career inside it. It is the refusal to treat what I know as competitive advantage to be held and deployed strategically. The word exists because the thing it describes needs a name and because named things can be advocated for in ways that unnamed things cannot.
If you have information someone needs
This part of the piece is addressed directly to the practitioners, the senior lawyers, the partners and GCs and heads of legal who are reading this. There are quite a few of you and I am genuinely glad you are here.
You know things. You know which practice areas are genuinely rewarding versus which ones look better from the outside. You know which firms are functioning well and which ones are having a year they would rather not discuss. You know which moments in a legal career matter most for future optionality and which ones feel more significant than they actually are. You know how hiring decisions get made, what referees actually say and what the real criteria are behind the ones written in the job advertisement. You know the names to mention, the mistakes to avoid and the questions to ask at the offer stage that no one ever tells you to ask.
Most of that knowledge is sitting inside your head, being shared casually with people you already know.
I am not asking you to publish your entire mental model of the profession on LinkedIn, though I would read it enthusiastically if you did.
I am asking you to think, once a month, about whether there is a person earlier in their career who would benefit from something you know. Someone who is not already in your network. Someone who would not have thought to ask you, because they did not know the question existed. Someone who reminds you, a little, of the version of yourself that did not yet have the map.
The profession does not change in a single act of radical generosity. It changes in a thousand small ones. It changes when a partner takes a call from a first-year student at a regional university. When a GC writes honestly about what in-house work is actually like. When a senior lawyer tells a junior one the thing that took them a decade to figure out, not because they were asked, but because they remembered how it felt not to know. You have already earned what the profession has given you. You do not need to protect it by keeping what you know to yourself.
There is room here for everyone who is good enough to do this work and good enough does not sort neatly by background. Most of you already know, if you sit with it for a moment, what it would have meant to have someone like that in your corner earlier. This piece is simply an invitation to be that person for someone else.
Mel
💖
Mel Storey is the host of the Counsel Podcast and the founder of Counsel Media. She spent 15 years in corporate law, including as APAC Head of Legal at a global US technology company, before building a full-time media and coaching business for lawyers and law students. Find her @careerbigsis across the platforms.
