Counseling Students in the Lower Half of the Law School Class

I can’t tell you how many times I have seen law students simply outwork their Law Review colleagues and land the job (a paraphrase) . . .

·         Craig Raynsford, Esq. Legal Advisor, DHS, Office of General Counsel, NALP/PSLawNet Mini-Conference, Washington DC, October, 2011

           

 As the economy continues to struggle and law firms and public service entities search for new hiring models, law students find themselves in an extremely competitive employment market where even top students are finding it difficult to find jobs. Moreover, the current climate has led to recriminations regarding law school transparency and lawsuits against law school by their own students. In such a poisoned atmosphere – with law students already anxious and frustrated -- law school career counselors are faced with a specific set of unique employment challenges for all law students. However, employment concerns are far more acute for a group of students who are becoming law school’s version of the “silent majority” – students in the academic lower half of their class. . . silent” as in: feeling helpless and no longer bothering to visit their career services offices for advice.

We in Career Services need to identify these students and set to work on specific strategies (some new, some not so) to get them, once again, engaged in enthusiastically looking for work and careers. That may require more time and effort on our parts, i.e., more follow-up sessions as part of the norm. Moreover, the counseling may extend past assisting with job strategies and spending more time than in the past dealing with the students’ anger, frustration, and self-worth profile.

How to start? Get them together as a group. . . How about starting with a “Let’s Get to Work Session?”. . .

Have a general strategy session inviting students in this group to a general panel (perhaps an event discussing how to counterbalance the grade component of law school for purposes of making for a stronger resume). From such an initial session, more individualized meetings can be scheduled. 

Assist the student in a realistic self-analytical process.

First and foremost, be an “Encourager.” For example, tell the student about the quote from Mr. Raynsforth used as the introduction to this article. Students need to hear the positive and how recruiters still leave the door open for hard working students who show initiative and can demonstrate that they can “fit in’ and contribute.

Next, help the student with some self-evaluation. What has he/she exactly been doing to narrow career choices? How have they conducting their job searches? To what success?  What may be needed are realistic career course changes and new strategies that help the student to redirect their employment course. Walk the student through all job applications, and interviews that were unsuccessful and work with the student to try to determine why the job was not offered and how to proceed from this point forward. This process would include polishing interview skills through mock interviews and other “socializing skills” events that you may host through the career services office. Furthermore, try to identifying areas of deficiencies and coordinating academic support, if needed, through the appropriate channels at the school (i.e., working with tutors and/or the professors, the writing team, etc).

Build an Appropriate Resume

Help the student of build a resume that is solid in practice legal experiences. One that sets out a solid skill set from which the student can present him/herself confidently in a positive light that present experiences in legal research; writing and drafting of legal memoranda; client contact; and trial worthy experiences. In today’s completive market unpaid volunteer (or positions providing funding via law school stipend money) are examples of positions to obtain practical work-related experience. A frequently overlooked student job is that of being a Research Assistant for law school professors. Such a job will give the student the research and writing skill set needed to strengthen a resume.  Of course, participation in writing competitions, moot court, and journal write-on activities would also fit the bill. 

I try and remember that there is no “one size fits all” and that law students struggling to raise their GPA’s may need to be focused on their studies and not be involved in too many extra-curricular activities. This is the delicate balance that must be worked out with each student during consultations.

Work the Network

For students in the lower half of the class, networking becomes a critical component of a job search. Students should be encouraged to join local bar associations, alumni groups (attorney mentors for students in the lower half is a valuable tool), and attend attorneys law school events. Additionally, given what I have seen in my own experiences on Twitter and LinkedIn, students can find tremendous networking opportunities through connections made through blogging and social media.  I watch in amazement as law students on Twitter reach out and connect with industry leading lawyers who are more than willing to assist law students (In-house counsel to the Los Angeles Angels, and an In-house counsel at Warner Brothers Studios, to name just two). Plus, these types of connections are not based on GPA and class rank considerations.

In conclusion, many of our “best and brightest” lawyers are late bloomers. We should never forget that and, certainly, keep encouraging and pushing our law school late bloomers to the finish line. Make them feel just as important as those in the top ten percent of the class!

(Special thanks to Gary Greener, Esq., Associate Dean for Career Services, Southwestern Law School for providing excellent resource materials that were so helpful in writing this article).  

LLM after Law School? It Sure Works Here!

Jason  M. Tenenbaum is a 2012 graduate of Hofstra University School of Law. He is a current LL.M student at the University of Edinburgh in Innovation, Technology and Law. He is also the co-founder of @lawschoolchat.

-------------

 I remember sitting across from the Dean of my law school, asking her if pursuing an LL.M. in this economy was a smart idea. She told me that normally she would advise against most LL.M. programs, except for programs such as Tax from New York University, but that in this case, it just might make sense. This case was an LL.M. in Innovation, Technology, and the Law from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

 I have always been interested in technology, and in law school I found a way to focus my studies on the interaction of technology and the law. Going to conferences and taking classes like e-Discovery and Privacy in the Digital Age solidified the notion that I wanted to spend the rest of my career practicing in the field, focusing on data privacy and information security. The question, however, was how to best prepare myself for my career and how to get my first job. Many of the issues I wanted to work on, and the clients who had those issues, were handled by big, multinational law firms. The same multinational law firms that are currently re-evaluating their hiring processes and have significantly limited the number of new hires. On the other end, many of the smaller firms who handled these issues simply couldn’t afford to hire and train new attorneys in both the field of practice and being a lawyer. I needed a way to set myself apart from other law graduates as Journal, Moot Court, and clinic work are no longer the differentiators they used to be. I needed a way to add value to a firm.

Given that privacy and data security laws vary across nations and that infractions can be significantly costly, I felt that a young lawyer, versed in both national and international data protection laws and familiar with current and new technologies could prove a valuable asset to a law firm, and therefore a client. The question, however, was how to gain that knowledge, at low cost, and in a struggling legal market.

Trying to think “outside the box,” I started looking for LL.M. programs in Europe that featured courses on data privacy, information security, and technology. I figured that I could best understand and develop a working knowledge of European laws by learning from experts who practice in the field everyday. Moreover, the cost of an LL.M. in Europe is noticeably cheaper than it is in the United States.

However, I didn’t want to make a such a major decision without advice. I sought out the Dean of the law school, the head of career services, attorneys that handle international work, and even took to Twitter to see what the views on an American student obtaining an LL.M. from a European school were. The response was mixed. Many people were unsure if it would help, many people said to avoid paying more tuition fees without a guaranteed source of income, while others thought I was just plain crazy.

When I found the course at the University of Edinburgh, I felt comfortable making the decision to go. The courses are about law and new technologies, information technologies, and electronic evidence. The classes incorporate not only English law, but the laws of other countries. Furthermore, the University of Edinburgh has a very large international population, allowing me the opportunity to connect with students who could become experts in the field back in their home countries. As it turns out, my program is composed of students from the UK, Ireland, Thailand, France, and Luxembourg.

All of this is not to say, however, that everyone should be looking to go abroad for a year and study for another degree. Financial repercussions, of course, are a large concern. But also, not every field lends itself to the idea. For instance, property, criminal law, and torts law are all very local in that it is hard for a landowner in New York to be subject to EU law for property violations in the same way a credit card company would be liable in both the States and EU for a data breach. Therefore, a working knowledge of English property law may not truly add any value, especially at the cost of a year’s time and tuition. Finally, leaving your friends, family, and loved ones at home for any given time, let alone a year, and moving to a foreign country alone is never easy. Make no mistake, the decision was not easy. Hopefully, come a year from now, I can write again explaining how the experience helped me get my dream job. Until then, I hope I made the right choice.  

Post Script:

 LLM program studies are not for all. In fact, many in the law career community are of the opinion that the pursuit of such a degree may be counter-productive to career advancement and appears to be an effort to “duck” the current job market. Not so, in Jason’s case. Students need to take a look at areas of practice that are exploding and may ripe for new attorneys. That is exactly what Jason has done. Privacy issues in the Digital Age (and other ancillary areas of practice) are new and exciting avenues in our legal profession. One needs only to look at the Julian Assange WikiLeaks case to see the potential for the growth in this area of practice. Moreover, Jason has opened himself for opportunities not only in the United States, but throughout the world! Law Students: Are you thinking “out of the box” in considering your career options? If you have ideas and want to “bounce them around,” why not schedule an appointment with a Career Service counselor? Phil Guzman

How and Why I Went the Clerkship Route (and Life Beyond)

       

                    Alison Monahan is the founder of The Girl's Guide to Law School, which helps law students and prospective law students get in to law school, get through, and stay true to themselves. Alison is a graduate of Columbia Law School, where she was a member of the Columbia Law Review and served as a Civil Procedure teaching assistant. You can find her on Twitter at @GirlsGuideToLS.

--------------------------

 When Philip asked me to write about my clerkship, and the impact it had on my career path, I was delighted. Clerking is great, and I encourage anyone who’s interested to try to do it!

That being said, the process of obtaining a clerkship can be incredibly stressful, so it’s worth considering what you’re getting into beforehand.

Why Did I Decide to Clerk?

I knew early on that I wanted to clerk, because I was planning to be a litigator, and it seemed like a useful and interesting way to start down that career path. Like many wanna-be litigators, I hadn’t spent a great deal of time in court, so I was curious to see what it was really like and to take a peak behind the curtain to better understand how things worked.

As it turned out, I had more incentive to clerk than I’d expected, after getting a cold offer from my 2L summer associate position. Granted I had another option (from a 1L summer associate position), but finding a clerkship definitely took on renewed urgency after my 2L summer!

How Did I Decide Where to Apply?

I was fairly certain I wanted to clerk in a federal district court, because I thought it would be more hands-on than an appellate position, and more practical. I also thought it would be more of a change from law school – which was appealing, since I was tired of reading appellate cases and wanted to be closer to the action (or, at least, to real people and their stories).

Not surprisingly, I encountered some resistance to my plan from certain professors and mentors. In their minds, clerking on a district court was a step down and they encouraged me to reconsider and apply for federal appellate clerkships – which they perceived as “more prestigious.” I have no doubt they were basically correct (although some of the competitive districts I applied in were probably harder to land than a lot of appellate clerkships), but I ignored their advice and applied only for district court positions.

As for location, I applied three places: New York City (where I went to law school), San Francisco (where I’d lived before law school), and Boston (where I had a romantic interest). Applying in multiple locations definitely complicated matters, particularly because judges in the Southern District of New York move very quickly – many of them fill their rosters within hours of the “official” interview window opening (or sooner, if they hire off plan). Given that NYC wasn’t actually my first choice location, this made for some sticky situations when I had to tell judges I couldn’t accept their offer on the spot because I’d agreed to interview in a different city the next morning.

(As an aside, people tell you that you can’t turn down a clerkship offer. Ignore this advice. If it makes sense for you to hold off on accepting an offer, do so. Just realize that the position might be given to someone else before you get around to accepting.)

What’s Clerking Like?

Clerking is a great job. I can’t really speak to how other chambers were organized, but my Judge was fantastic, and he’d been on the bench a while so he had his system down.

Every two weeks, I would get a new substantive assignment for an upcoming hearing or trial. Usually, it was something like a summary judgment motion or a motion to suppress. I’d gather all the papers, read everything, and try to figure out what we should do. Obviously the Judge made his own decisions, but he’d rarely tell us in advance which way he was leaning. He wanted another pair of eyes on the case, and he encouraged us to argue for our position, if it ended up being different from what he thought.

In addition to the main project, we might have smaller research assignments, or we might be asked to come to trial and weigh in on evidentiary questions. (If you want to be a district court clerk, definitely take Evidence, and pay attention! Analyzing whether something is admissible is one of the rare times when you’ll be called upon to make a snap determination and defend it.)

Some clerks are required to be in court whenever the Judge is there, but we generally had the option whether to go or not. I went to most trial days and hearings, but not all of them. The third day in a row of testimony about whether a particular white powder has a certain chemical composition is less exciting than you might imagine!

Working as a district court clerk is useful for a number of reasons. One of the less obvious ones is that it makes you feel better about your own skills. After law school, most people feel pretty beaten down, but – once you see some of the colossal screw-ups actual lawyers make on a daily basis – you’ll realize you can do at least as well as many of the people who appear in court regularly. (For example, I had a case where it became apparent there was no subject matter jurisdiction. The Judge pointed this out to the two lawyers in court, they looked at each other, and one said, “Well, Your Honor, I think we’d be willing to waive that requirement.” Suffice it to say that didn’t happen, and the case was tossed out to be re-filed in state court where it belonged.)

What Did I Do Next?

Midway through my clerkship, it was time to think about getting a job. Lacking imagination, I only really considered large firm jobs. I’d decided I hated Boston and didn’t want to work there, so initially I applied to firms in New York. I almost took an offer there, but then had a moment of clarity and realized I’d be miserable working as a lawyer in NYC. (And I was really tired of the cold East Coast winters.)

So I set about getting a job in San Francisco. This was complicated by the fact that a) I’d never worked as a lawyer in San Francisco, b) I wanted to do litigation, and c) I wanted to be in San Francisco, not in Silicon Valley (where most BigLaw litigation practices are based). In my favor, however, was a tech background (I worked as a web developer before law school) and a willingness to do patent litigation, which was booming. I interviewed a couple of places, got an offer, and took it.

There’s no doubt that my clerkship was a big plus in landing my BigLaw position. The firm I worked for loves to hire clerks, and I got much more substantive work because of the experience. Sure, I did a bit of document review when I started, but not very much. Pretty quickly, it became apparent that my skills were better used elsewhere, and I was pulled off the doc review projects and assigned weightier tasks. 

That’s one of the great advantages of clerking in a district court – you have a much better understanding of how things really work, so you tend to get more responsibility in your next job, sooner. And, because you’ve spent lots of time in court and reading court documents, you actually feel confident that you can handle more responsibility! It’s a win-win, as long as you ignore the immediate financial ramifications (which are partly offset by firm clerkship bonuses, in many cases).

In short, clerking is a great experience, and – in the end – it’s worth the hassle of securing one.

Best of luck! If you’d like more of my thoughts on the matter, check out Judicial Clerkships 101.

A Crazy and Unexpected Post Law School Bar Exam Results Story

                                 This is an old picture of me waiting for my bar results to arrive.

 The North Carolina Bar results have been out for over a week now. We here in our Career Services Office have been elated with all the students who have popped their heads into the office to share the exhilaration of passing the bar.  But, what about those students who were devastated and disappointed in having received the crushing communication that they had not passed?? . . or those still who are still nervously awaiting their results? It is a nerve-racking time indeed.

Let me share my own rather bizarre and humorous story about bar exam results in the hope that it just may break some tension for some who are currently awaiting with baited breath.  Those of you who are regular readers of “Law School: Success and Careers” (what? . . you are not ???) may recall my article  “The Frustrations of Studying for the Bar Exam”The Frustrations of Studying For the Bar: A Regular Routine Will Get You Through  when I spoke of having taken the New York Bar in Albany, New York. After those two grueling days, I started my first career legal job as an Assistant District Attorney in Brooklyn, New York (Kings County) at the beginning of September. The bar results would be out in mid-to-late November of that year (days before I was to sit down for my first turkey Thanksgiving dinner with my soon-to-be in-laws in their Hartford, Connecticut home – obviously, waiting for bar exam results was not enough pressure for me, so I decided to “turn it up a notch” with in-law stuff – bam!).

The deal at the District Attorney’s Office was that we could practice in court until the bar results became public in that week’s publication of The New York Law Journal. Those ADAs who passed would continue in the regular courtroom rotations, those how did not would be “re-assigned” to other jobs (writing complaints, appeals, shining shoes for the respective heads of the division, and other such meaningful endeavors).  If one didn’t want to wait for the results on the day that the Journal was published, he/she   could call your judicial jurisdictions (I was in the Second Judicial Department)  and ask –over the phone – if you were on the “yea” list for passage. So, that’s what I did. With a little hesitation (and a lot of trepidation!), I slowly picked up the phone at lunch one day and called:

“H-H-H-ello! My n-n-ame is P-h-h-h-i-i-l-lip Guzman and I’m calling about my bar results.”

“Just a minute please, let me check……”

(. …eternity transpires…)

“I’m sorry, Mr. Guzman, your name is not on the list.”                                                   

To this vey day, I do not know what I said, or what transpired later that day as I did the afternoon docket in AP Part #3. I was too numb. I simply knew that I had failed the bar exam after all the work that I had put into it and would be soon sent to Siberia with everyone laughing at me (my paranoia at work).  As the pending day of the publishing of the names in the Law Journal approached, I went through all my duties (reviewing files, contacting witnesses, trying cases, and negotiating pleas) in rather mechanical fashion.

My colleagues were simply great. They all offered both encouragement and support the whole time. But I, nevertheless, felt like a “Dead Man Walking” with my execution drawing closer by the day. On the Thursday of the release of the results, I took a rather sever beating at the hands of a judge in the morning session who, as the session ended, told me “Every time you open your mouth, Mr. Guzman, you are just confusing the matter all the more!” . ..  Exactly what I needed to hear as the “guards” would soon be walking down to my cell to lead me to the “chamber.”  . . Was I “depressed?”  (No, try “devastated” How many feet was it from the Brooklyn Bridge to the water??)

As I walked out of court that morning, I was called to my supervisor’s office (By then, I had decided that I would not wear a blindfold. . . Moreover,  I would be a “man” and smoke my last cigarette defiantly as I stared into his eyes!)

As I entered into his office, my supervisor had his desk chair positioned toward the window. His back was to me and a copy of the Journal was on his desk. He continued to look out of the window, even knowing I was there. Could this possibly get any worse????, I thought to myself. Finally, he spoke:

“I thought that you said that you failed the bar” he said to me – more as a statement than a question.

“I-ah- I did,” I finally replied. . . With that he whirls his chair around, stands up and dramatically points to the paper and says. .

“Then WHAT’S THIS!!??”  . . It was my name. Never one to be at a loss for words – I was speechless. I had passed the New York Bar Exam!! . . Now on to the new in-laws! (gulp!)

Postscript

I had actually called the wrong judicial department and, of course, they did not have my name. These days, when I tell a colleague who was not successful the first time that he/she took the bar that “I know how you feel” . . I do.  I can assure you that I have been much more thorough and prepared in the rest of my legal career!

If I may get serious now, let me say that waiting for bar results can be very stressful. It will be worth the wait if you pass. If you do not succeed the first time, it’s ok to feel bad for a bit. But then pick yourself up, hold yourself high and get back into the game. You have always wanted to be a lawyer – and that you will be -- if you are persistent and continue on the path. Some of the very best lawyers that I know took the bar two and even three times!

“Don’t give up! . . don’t ever give up”

·         Jim Valvano, coach of the 1984 NCAA Champion North Carolina State Wolfpack basketball team, September 28, 2008  weeks before his untimely death to cancer.