EmplawyerNet: LawPath Newsletter

- EmplawyerNet: LawPath Newsletter

What Color Are Your Briefs?
Career Issues in the News
Feature Article
Career Counselor’s Corner
Don’t Do This
Practice Tips
Trivia
Lighter Side of Law
Resource of the Month

By William Seaton

Welcome to the inaugural issue of LawPath, the legal careers e-newsletter published by EmplawyerNet (www.emplawyernet.com).

As a lawyer or law student, you probably think you need one more thing to read like you need another Latin phrase to impress your friends. Time, if not exactly money, is valuable and often in short supply. So why this new demand on your schedule? We think it's simple. There's nothing more fundamental than your job - getting one, keeping one or finding one that's better and more satisfying. Your career, after all, is why you became, or are becoming, a lawyer in the first place.

So, once a month we are going to weigh in on the state of forging a life in the law. We'll stay on top of career issues in the news, drop some career tips, present a Q&A session with a top career counselor and throw in some lighter notes just to keep our perspective.

In this column, I'll make some observations drawn from twenty-five years in the legal career business and try to touch on the keys that make for a satisfying life as a practicing lawyer or, perhaps, as an ex-lawyer looking for a career change. There are many roads to career nirvana, though the right path for you may not always be clear. They don't teach a course in careers during law school, so think of this as CLE for one of the most important decisions you will ever make, that being where and how you'll spend your working hours.

We welcome your comments and suggestions as we go along. Have a topic you'd like addressed or a suggestion for making this newsletter more useful? Feel free to email me at willsea@emplawyernet.com and we'll incorporate the best ideas and suggestions to help make LawPath as useful a piece of reading as possible.

Being a lawyer and finding satisfaction is not always an easy marriage. The practice of law can be exhilarating, infuriating, difficult and, at times, the noble pursuit you always thought it would be. Finding your way through the myriad of choices to the career setting best for you is what LawPath is all about.

There is no one way to travel, but out there somewhere is the right path for you. We'll do our part to help you find it.

New York Considers Aid to Public Interest Lawyers
Low pay and high student loan debt have long been a deterrent for lawyers interested in pursuing a career in public interest law. Now, there is an effort in New York State to do something about this. Specifically, legislation has been introduced in the New York Legislature to grant as much as $36,000 of debt forgiveness to individual lawyers who take positions with public interest entities. Such amount would be paid over a six-year period. It is estimated that as many as 4,000 lawyers would qualify for assistance if the legislation becomes law. The initiative which would be funded, in part, by increasing fees for the New York bar examination.

Law Job Market Lagging Behind Economic Recovery
A survey of 600 law firms by the National Association of Law Placement has found that lateral hiring of lawyers fell by 25 percent between 2001 and 2002, the last years for which figures are available. At the largest law firms, lateral hiring fell by almost a third. Smaller firms reported declines ranging from 18 percent to 21 percent. The NALP study also found that entry-level hiring at law firms decreased 6.8 percent during the same time period. The executive director of NALP noted that the legal market traditionally lags a recovery in the national economy and that more encouraging numbers are expected for 2003 and this year. The survey results are published by NALP in book entitled "Patterns & Practices: Measures of Law Firm Hiring, Leverage and Billable Hours."

Bankruptcy Remains Hot Practice Area
Even while the economy improves, the bankruptcy market for lawyers is hot and experts expect it remain so for the foreseeable future. Last fiscal year, personal bankruptcies in the U.S. rose 7.8 percent. During that same year, more than 1.6 million bankruptcy petitions were filed nationwide. Some districts have seen as much as a twenty-five percent increase in filings over the last two years and Congress recently proposed adding 36 bankruptcy judgeships to handle the load. Joblessness and consumer debt continue to be blamed for the increase in numbers. Other explanations offered for the increase in filings include high medical expenses and the proliferation of gambling in local casinos.

The Passive Job Search: Keeping Your Options Open

What do all lawyers have in common? One thing is that they don't want to be lawyers. Or at least it seems that way. Better put, it seems like most lawyers are at least interested in exploring career options.

Even attorneys who hold what most would consider very desirable positions are usually at least willing to entertain other possibilities. It seems like most of us think there might be something better out there than what we currently do for a legal living.

Even if you are content in your current position, there are ways to keep your eyes and ears open without much effort. One way is to keep your contacts active. While you certainly don't need to actively “network” as career consultants are likely to advise, but do keep in touch with former colleagues, law school classmates, etc. They are likely to hear of positions right for you or you might even be interested in their jobs as they move on looking for greener pastures.

An excellent tool for the passive job search is EmplawyerNet's JobMail. JobMail notifies you whenever a position meeting your criteria enters the EmplawyerNet database. You can set filters for geographic location, practice setting and area of practice. Then, simply review open jobs as they come across your email.

If you're at a firm looking to move to an in-house position, providing good service to your clients could be your ticket to working for a company. You won't be actively pursing a job but, when the time comes for a client to hire a lawyer, those already serving the company is the first place they will look.

Q: Dear Career Counselor:

I have been practicing for about five years and absolutely hate my current job. I signed up for this site about six months ago, looked at the openings, sent out some resumes, and got a couple of interviews. One didn't go anywhere. The other did, but I turned it down. Since then, I haven't been able to get within a mile of an interview. And it's not as if I don't try. I look at the list of openings on EmplawyerNet regularly. If I am even remotely qualified for a position, I send a resume. My resume doesn't have any typos; I even had a friend proofread it just to make sure. It seems that the more resumes I send and the more openings I respond to, the worse I do. And seeing hundreds of openings I am not qualified for makes me wonder if I will ever be able to get out. Am I doing something wrong?

Feeling Stuck.

A: Dear Feeling Stuck:

Your letter suggests several reasons to be hopeful. I don't know about your specific situation and, I haven't seen your resume, so I can't tell you if it could be improved. Almost all can be, but your resume has been good enough to get you at least two interviews, so it is probably not the primary problem. And you have done fairly well during interviews. So it appears that the problem you are facing is how you are using the resume to try to get interviews.

I have two suggestions.

First, be more selective. At a singles bar, someone who hits on every person seems desperate. And desperation doesn't sell. The same is true with job searches. Employers may not know you are responding to every posting you're remotely qualified for, but you do, and that smacks of desperation. This can and does comes across at an interview. There isn't enough time to do a proper research for every position, so focus on those that seem to be the best fit between your skills and interests and what the employer appears to be seeking. That may help you feel less bothered by seeing lots of advertised positions in which you are not interested or qualified.

Second, your letter does not indicate that you have been trying to contact employers you are interested in regardless of whether they have a posted opening. Looking for a job by looking exclusively at posted positions is like knowing you need a pair of size 8 shoes, and walking by display windows hoping your shoe size is there. The alternative is to walk into to stores that are likely to have shoes in your size regardless of whether those shoes are on display.

Career Counselor's Corner questions are answered by Gideon Grunfeld, President of Successful Career Strategies, Inc. (www.scslawcareers.com), which specializes in helping lawyers take control of their careers in and outside the practice of law. You can submit questions to Mr. Grunfeld at gideon@scslawcareers.com

If you go on the tour of Franklin Roosevelt's home in Hyde Park, New York, the tour guide will tell you how the future President of the United States was a lousy student in college and never finished law school yet was hired by a prestigious New York City firm. How was that done? Well, according to the guide, Mr. Roosevelt was well-connected and a call from a well-placed relative landed him the job.

While connections have long been assumed the best way to get a job, don't assume this is always going to work in your favor. Sometimes, it might be counterproductive to be known as the friend or relative of a partner at the firm or one of the firm's important clients. Using connections could be seen as a shortcut to the job.

Don't assume your contacts are your ticket to the job and that you should automatically milk them. Weigh the situation and try to get a sense of how a word on your behalf is likely to go over at the firm. You might not need the extra help. Or, if you have absolutely no chance based on your own qualifications, you have nothing to lose.

Flying Solo: Looking for a Place to Land

At one time or another, you may have thought about starting your own firm. Maybe you're about to make the move now. In any case, one of the issues you have probably considered is where you will have your office.

Many excellent law firms have been started out of a spare bedroom. Especially with all the tools now available to lawyers, such as voicemail, email and word processing programs, you can run a pretty robust practice in your slippers.

The only problem with a home office is that it's a home office. You will probably eventually want to get out of the house and stop having to meet clients in hotel lobbies and bars.

There are several other options.

Rent your own space. The advantage to having your own private office is just that -- it's all yours. On the other hand, you will need to furnish the place yourself and might also need to hire someone to greet clients. Then there's office equipment, prints for the wall and the other things that come with setting up shop in a vacant space.
Executive Suite. Another option is to rent a room in a shared floor. You might know these as Barrister Suites and a couple of the prominent national companies in the business of leasing such spaces are HQ (www.hq.com) and Regus (www.regus.com). You'll have all your office needs taken care of but most everything is shared, including the hallways and you may need to lock your door whenever you leave the office. These sort of arrangements also have a certain look and feel that will tip your clients off that you are in a shared suite. Many lawyers use this type of office for the first year or so before moving into more permanent digs after they get a better sense of their needs.
Sublease. Perhaps the happiest alternative for the new solo practitioner is subleasing space from a law firm. The biggest advantage is that subleasing offers a turnkey solution. With the sublease comes a law library, furniture and real live people who will provide the interaction you may miss working out of your bedroom.

A tennis court at Pepperdine University in Malibu is known as "The Supreme Court." Why? (answer at end of newsletter)

Police in Los Angeles had good luck with a robbery suspect who just couldn't control himself during a line-up. When detectives asked each man in the line-up to repeat the words: "Give me all your money or I'll shoot," the man shouted, "That's not what I said!"

MegaLaw (www.megalaw.com)
Founded by two law firm associates, MegaLaw positions itself as a comprehensive, one-stop shop for lawyers. The site includes more than 10,000 law links, federal and state law, news, stocks, weather, traffic, books and more. Everything lawyers use everyday.

Trivia answer: William Rehnquist was playing tennis on the court when he received the call announcing he would be appointed Chief Justice of the United States in 1986.

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