Joshua Troy ’07 helps lawyers succeed as a talent management director

Joshua Troy ’07 has been director of talent management at the law firm Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton LLP since October 2022. It’s not what he set out to do when he embarked on his legal career. In fact, he hadn’t even heard of the job title when he first joined a law firm—as a litigation associate—after graduation. But, says Troy, his current role of providing comprehensive career support, professional development, and mentorship to the firm’s approximately 700 attorneys and various staff members is one that perfectly suits his own ambitions.

In this Q&A, Troy discusses what he’s learned after switching professional gears, reflects on how NYU Law helped to prepare him for his position, and explains why he’s optimistic about the use of AI in the world of professional development.

What are the responsibilities with your position?

First and foremost, supporting our attorneys and professional staff as talent. We provide professional guidance to everyone, from the first-year associate and paralegal to professional staff members. And what makes for a successful talent management approach is that it reaches the organizational level and also meets individual needs.

In professional development, one thing that I’ve learned is that you want to avoid random acts of training. You want to make sure that if you are investing in it, it is tied to the broader goals [of the firm]. After we look at our objectives as a firm, we develop live programs to reach the broadest possible audience, and then we supplement that with on-demand learning and individual coaching, depending on the need. We are really focused on the continuum of learning. For some people, that first high-level course is enough, and then you [can] build on it. But then there are other people who need individual attention.

How did you become interested in law?

Law was something that I became interested in while I was in high school. On my mom’s side, my grandmother had been a judge in Brooklyn. And my maternal grandfather was also a lawyer in New York in various roles. That exposure, along with seeing lawyers on television, definitely influenced me. Once I enrolled at Brown University, I studied political science. But I knew that once I graduated, I would be heading to law school.

Why did you choose NYU Law?

I was actually deciding between a couple of places. But once I visited NYU Law for one of the Admitted Students Day events, I was just really impressed by the people. What I found were smart, talented people who were interested in learning as opposed to competing with one another. Those were all core values of mine. After attending that one event, it was clear to me that NYU Law was an academically rigorous and prestigious environment.

Tell us about your experiences at NYU Law.

One of the things that NYU Law prepared me for really well was how to handle a mix of priorities, competing responsibilities, and different personalities. It translated to building a skill-set that I have been able to carry forward—in my career as a litigator and in my talent management role. What it taught me is that by no means is there only one pathway to success.

A core part of my NYU story is the Career Services team. They were so helpful to me in identifying the right opportunities and setting me up for success. As students, we were assigned Career Services professionals. I was randomly paired with Irene Dorzback, the former head of the department. She was integral to me and my own professional development.

What did you experience after graduating?

At NYU, I was fortunate to get an opportunity to work as a summer associate at Willkie Farr & Gallagher. When I graduated, I started my career there as a litigation associate. In that position, you don’t specialize. I ended up working on a variety of cases, including white-collar investigations involving the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and bankruptcy litigation.

At one point, I was paired with a senior associate mentor, whom I worked with on a couple of bankruptcy litigation matters. Eventually, she left to pursue a career in professional development. And that was really an a-ha moment for me of, “Wait, what is this other career for a lawyer at a firm that does not involve practicing?” She and I had a great relationship. And I was very lucky that she went to a firm that shared an office building with Willkie. We got to stay in contact, and that’s how I started to learn about the business side of the law firm and about this role in which you’re cultivating, retaining, and developing talent.

Why did you change course to pursue professional development and how did you go about it?

While I was still practicing as an associate, Willkie had a professional development committee in which you could participate. I did that for a little bit and networked. What I discovered was that the people who were doing the work came from all sorts of backgrounds. Some were lawyers and some were not. [In the fall of 2013] I decided to take a vacation and paid my own way to go to a professional development conference and really immersed myself to see what the field was like. And I was just blown away by the level of talent.

One of the first people I reached back out to was Irene Dorzback. She helped to connect me with other people in the field. And she also allowed me to build up some of my professional development experience by doing mock interviews of 1Ls and 2Ls at the Law School. By the start of the next year, I took a leap of faith, and I left the firm.

As a lawyer transitioning into the space, I was full of questions for myself—“Why do you want to do this?” and “Are you burnt out?” But I could honestly answer that I wanted to pursue it as a career. I was looking to make a change, and making this change just felt right. I spent the next month doing informational interviews and networking, and I was fortunate that someone I practiced with at Willkie had joined Blank Rome LLP on their professional development team. They were looking for someone to come on board on a temporary three-month position to help lead a trial skills training program, which I did. And that led to an almost 10-year role at the firm, where I eventually became its director of Attorney Professional Development.

What is the value of talent development?

Success looks different for everyone. And I think that’s where having people in the professional development and talent management space is so critical, because you can help someone identify what success looks like for them personally and align it with the organization. It’s great when I work with someone whose goal is to have a 30-year career at the firm, and we figure out how to make that happen. But then for other people, it’s how do I help them find what the next opportunity is.

When I look back, there are multiple experiences where I’ve had conversations with associates who either weren’t sure if they were on the right career path or were addressing challenging feedback they had received. And now they are partners at law firms. If I can play a small role in helping people work through challenges and get to a place where they can be successful, whether inside the organization or another one, it feels great because I immediately added some value to their experience.

How do you envision the use of AI in your sector?

You have to integrate it in a responsible way. One of the nice things at Kilpatrick is that we are focused on identifying ways to incorporate AI organizationally. You have to educate people as to what it is, what it isn’t, what’s ethically responsible, and what’s client appropriate. Ultimately, it’s a tool in the tool kit. Yet there are very few things that we’re doing right now in the professional development space in which we’re not exploring how to incorporate AI to either streamline the process or add another dimension to the thoughtfulness. We’re definitely identifying different practice areas and technical skills that can be augmented by the use of AI.

Given your experience, what piece of advice would you give to current law school students?

Build relationships with your classmates and with faculty. It’s going to be invaluable to you, even if it just tells you what you don’t want to do. But build those relationships, because work—whatever your job is—has its challenges. And having people that you can turn to is so important.

Also, make use of the professional development and talent management staff, whether it’s inside a firm or an organization. Those are people you can turn to for support. Whenever I meet with new hires at our firm, I always close with, “If the only thing you take away from meeting with me is that you know I’m someone you can reach out to for help, that’s a perfectly good takeaway.”

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Photography by David Beyda.