Personal Brand Special Report: 207 insights and ideas to grow your brand and career

In the summer of 2021, Eric Pacifici started living a double life. By day, he was one of thousands of associates at Kirkland & Ellis, one of the largest corporate law firms in the world. Outside work hours, though, he was moonlighting on Twitter as @SMB_Attorney, an anonymous account where he shared the kind of legal insight behind real multimillion-to-billion-dollar merger and acquisition deals that one wouldn’t typically find outside a law firm’s deal room. There, he was one of one. At first, the secret account was just a hobby. Within a matter of months, though, Pacifici’s inbox was flooded with the same kinds of requests: “I have a 2, 4, 6, 8, $10 million deal: Can you help me with it?” he recalls. Five years later, those same followers are the core clientele of SMB Law Group, Pacifici’s boutique M&A firm that’s doing hundreds of deals annually and has hit more than $1.9 billion in total deal flow since 2022. “Lawyers are risk averse by nature,” Pacifici says. “My big law mentor had an expression: ‘The nail that sticks out is going to get pounded in.’ Basically, wear your blue or white shirt, shut up, do your work.” Pacifici has found the opposite to be true. He attributes his…