How You Make People Feel Is Your Real Professional Capital.

By: Christine E. Ohenewah, J.D. | December 7, 2025

---

---

Christine E. Ohenewah is a Lawyer, Humanist, and Professor building a university that transforms how people understand and claim power. She is the Founder of The Elizabeth Tweneboah Foundation, where she is creating a new model of higher learning that builds creators over consumers and empowers individuals to construct lives aligned with their potential. Her flagship initiative, Men's Rea™, uses legal reasoning to help men build self-governance systems that drive them toward purpose. A graduate of Cornell Law School, Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and Macalester College, and former White Collar Investigations lawyer, her interdisciplinary work in legal and humanistic thought, power, and gender has been featured in Business Insider, USA Wire, and New York Weekly. She writes and speaks on masculinity, legal thinking, and the future of education, and serves as faculty at three universities in Criminology, Sociology, and Law and Ethics.

There is an old adage that people may not always remember what you said, nor what you did, but they will always remember how you made them feel. I invoke this adage because within law school, there exists an unsettling tendency to treat fellow peers as a means to an end––as transactional relationships. With competition everywhere, I understand why this tendency exists. I do not stand by it, however.

Befriending others on the basis of what you stand to gain is a strategy that is most certain to backfire in the long term, if not with any immediacy. The weighted moral and karmic implications of this strategy may not be as compelling to delineate here, so I will elect to explain its professional downsides.

You see, people know when they are being used, undermined, and disrespected. The person whom you dismissed as irrelevant in 1L? They are the same person who will be sitting on a hiring committee five years from now. The classmate whose success you envied and tried to badmouth or sabotage? They are now recommending candidates for partnership. The stressed peer to whom you extended a helping hand? They remember you, and they are now in a position to return the favor.

Your classmates do not just become opposing counsel or people you bump into at bar association events; they become voting members of hiring and promotion committees, partners deciding whom to staff on a matter, or friends whose casual comment in a group chat quietly closes or opens a door for you. Those impressions harden into stories—”she always made room for others,” “he only reached out when he needed something,” “they had my back when no one was watching”—and those stories follow you into every room you have not yet entered.

In law, your network becomes your professional capital. Thus, as a matter of power and principle, it is simply prudent to accord respect to fellow peers regardless of what you stand to “gain.” When it comes time for hiring and professional advancement, and one is asked to provide their impressions on a candidate whom they have known in familiar circles, their opinion could either make or break the candidate’s promotion. It could go one of two ways: either the candidate is spoken of glowingly, or they are not spoken of at all. How you treat someone will be remembered and will shape their incentive to help you professionally and even socially.

Always, it is better to form connections on the basis of mutual interests, aligned aspirations, and sheer, genuine camaraderie. Think of it like this: nothing beats a rehearsed testimony like an off-the-cuff testimony that comes across as genuine and credible. In the same way, nothing beats a forced connection like two people who genuinely value each other’s talents, insights, and company, and who can credibly attest to it. Relationships grounded in mutual curiosity and genuine admiration have a way of resurfacing at exactly the right moment: the 3L you helped during exams is suddenly the associate asked whether you would be a good fit on their trial team; the classmate you dismissed has become the one person in chambers deciding who gets an interview.

To all law students reading this: your peers will remember how you treat them, especially if you are using them for personal gain. This means that if you are someone who undermines the success of others for your own benefit, it will not go unnoticed. If you are someone who shares your notes with a struggling section mate, it will be remembered. If you are a person who readily sacrifices those whom you claim to call “friend,” it will be etched into memory. And if you are someone who celebrates others even on their lowest days, you will never be forgotten.

In a profession already warped by prestige hierarchies, pedigree, and bias—where the “right” journal, school, or last name still buys unearned credibility—how you treat people is one of the few levers you actually control. A reputation for integrity does not erase the profession’s inequities, but it quietly rearranges the incentives of those around you: people are more willing to vouch for you, to bring you into high trust work, to give you the benefit of the doubt when you make mistakes. In a field obsessed with resumes, the most enduring line on yours is the one other people write in their heads every time your name comes up.

---

Connect on LinkedIn.

Subscribe to YouTube Channel.

Visit the Elizabeth Tweneboah Foundation.

#christineohenewah