Lessons From A Prior Life

Don’t worry…this post isn’t all woo. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Before Anthology Travel was born, I spent about fifteen years working in corporate law (not as a lawyer, I hasten to add for not-representing-yourself-as-a-lawyer-if-you-aren’t-one reasons, but as a senior paralegal and project manager on complex competition litigation).  

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how those years shaped me - it’s a demanding work environment, filled with impossible deadlines, brilliant colleagues, and intensely creative problem solving. I’ve tended to focus on the more challenging parts of that experience and the behavioral hangover they caused. Today, I want to address all the fantastic ways those years made me better equipped to be an amazing travel advisor.

More than ever, the “advisor” portion of travel advisor has become so important.

It’s all about details

It’s a job where you get really good at reading rules and regulations and parsing out details.

Every judge gets to declare their own preferences for how they like to receive materials.  Some judges prefer to get exhibits in three-ring binders, for instance, tabbed a certain way.  Others have very strict preferences regarding typefaces and the size of font used.  

So the culmination of months or years of work usually ends up with a lawyer and a paralegal in a conference room at 11:30 pm, reading the rules one last time to make sure everything conforms exactly to those preferences before submitting as close to midnight as possible.

How does that relate to travel?

More than you might think, lately.  

Absent any international agreement on what constitutes a “safe” way to open borders, each country is making up its own rules for admittance.  

Those rule-parsing mental muscles have sprung back to life as I try to figure out whether “72 hours prior” means you have 72 hours from having the sample taken?  Or 72 since the results were received?  And prior to what?  Your flight departing?  Or your arrival in your destination country?  It’s complicated. Luckily for my clients, discerning those differences is second nature for me.

You can’t always get what you want

A law firm, particularly a Biglaw firm, is by nature a rather hierarchical organization. The main line is drawn between lawyers and non-lawyers, with gradations of power on both sides of that equation.

As a non-lawyer, I was on the wrong side of the hierarchy.

But, as a senior non-lawyer whose time was billable (as opposed to other aspects of the administrative staff), I was afforded certain privileges that other employees didn’t have.  I certainly had more power to push back than a junior paralegal or someone working in the mailroom or copy center.

So I got really good at telling Ivy Leagues lawyers “you can’t have precisely what you want; here are the options for what we can do,” or “actually, the best way we’ve found to accomplish X is Y,” or “X is a [behavioral] thing that we try to be conscious of - I’m sure you didn’t mean to come off like X but Y might be more effective going forward.”

Direct, but polite.  Non-confrontational but clear about the whys as well as the whats.

If you ask for something I can’t deliver on, I’m not just going to tell you you can’t have it…I’m going to outline alternatives and present the pros and cons as well as my thinking on which way I think you should go. Again, this isn’t really a sales job for me. It’s far more important to me that you get exactly what you want.

High Standards

Ethically speaking, lawyers can be sanctioned if they present an untruth in an argument to the court.  So every argument we made was premised on both “is this persuasive?” and “is this true?”

That thinking colors all of my client conversations to this day.  I’m probably a little slower to get options to clients than some other advisors, because I’m double-checking the truth of what I’m telling you.  I’m not, for instance, going to send over a bunch of options for review unless I also know that they’re available for your dates. A lot of travel operators will just send you an itinerary with a selection of their favorite hotels, but then when you go to book, you find out the hotel isn’t actually available.

I’m never going to bullshit you…if I don’t know something to be 100% true from my own knowledge, I’ll tell you I don’t know and then get back to you with what you need once I’ve ascertained the facts.

In addition, law firms require an exceedingly high level of attention to detail - both the content *and* the format of the work product matter.  The best lawyering in the world won’t matter if your brief isn’t accepted because it was submitted an hour too late.  

My job required me to be able to spot the difference between a regular period, a bold period, and an italicized period.  In documents hundreds of pages long.  I’ve still got that copy-editing eye, and now I turn it on every detail of your trip.

Making decisions with imperfect information

Notwithstanding the prior point about never bullshitting you, if we’re in an emergency situation - for example, if you need a flight connection changed while you’re in the air - I’ll make that decision with the best information I have available.  

I’d rather you were upset with me because the connection wasn’t ideal than have you spend the night in the airport because I was timidly waiting for your flight to land so we could talk before I make a change. I can deal with you being mad at me. What’s going to keep me up at night is if you miss a connection because I was too timid to just make a decision.

Time is money

Literally.  You time is valuable.  My time is valuable.  Therefore, I charge for my time.  That was a no-brainer for me, right from the start, even though it wasn’t the industry standard.

And there you are…we never really escape the lessons of the past; they just layer on each other to make us the people we are today.