Monthly Archives: April 2011

J. Nick Augustine J.D. is the principal of Law Publicist Communications, an ALR/PRA, Incorporated agency.  Law Publicist Communications is a public relations agency also offering coaching and consulting.  Nick advises and assists attorneys in transition in public relations, marketing and practice management.  Nick shares recruiting and staffing experience and tips for legal job seekers.

Attorneys in transition should consider hosting their own event.  At first glance it looks like a much bigger production that it needs to be.  I learned a few things from a New York lawyer who is successful inviting like-purposed professionals to social events.  Friendships and opportunities grow organically.

You too can host an event that your friends and colleagues will enjoy and remember.  You need to identify people you would like to group together.  Next, pick a venue that makes sense.  Events can be free with sponsor donations to cover costs, or you can host the location only and guests pay for their own entertainment.  Planning ahead and staying organized are important to your success.

When planning the guest list, consider already organized groups of people.  Alumni events can be easy to organize on small scales, and can be promoted in cities through social media.  If you want to hold an attorney-based event specific to your practice area, the invitees might include third party professionals with whom the lawyer makes and receives referrals.  If your event is a fundraiser or informational event your guest list can be broad and you can invite a mix of people who may hit it off.

Selecting a venue is as easier once you have a guest list.  Pick a venue that will appeal to your guests and the social atmosphere you want to create.  Events based around sporting events are good for competitive businesspeople; the group dynamic and team atmosphere causes people to remember your event and tell people about what a good time they had.  Contrast this with an event based around food and drink; where people are in comfortable surroundings and are eating and drinking, they are more likely to engage in a more interpersonal manor.  They will probably interact with fewer people, but spend more time and energy in each conversation.  When selecting a venue, picture the type of people at the event, consider how you want them to interact, and then select a handful of venue options.

Sponsor donations are a great way to fund the event.  The host looks great and the sponsors receive notoriety and should have signage at the event.  Professional networking events where, for example, the personal-injury attorney mingles with the surgeon, are often appropriate for law firm or surgeon sponsorship of the event.  A few sponsors who offer a few hundred dollars can easily finance your event.  Your other options can be negotiating group rates and discounts at the venue.  If everyone pays $10 to $20 to attend, and you have an early headcount, you have room to negotiate some deals.

A third option is to hold the event at a location where guests can pay their way for food, drink and entertainment.  This is a really good option if you want to host and invite people to a low key event where they can mingle as they see fit.  Pre-printed peel and stick name tags are a good way to identify who in the crowd is part of your event.

Planning your event in advance, and in stages, increases your chances of success and future event attendance.  If you approach event management in stages and allow yourself enough time to plan and promote the event you will enjoy the experience.  When promoting the event, consider a one page PDF invitation you can send by e-mail and follow up with a few phone calls.  Again, social networks are great event promotion tools.  When planning for the event date, make sure you have someone with a good camera who is ready to snap some pictures you can later share with attendees.  If you build hype into your events and plan to host them frequently, people will start talking about you and your events.  Have fun and make some new friends and build some new professional relationships.

Nancy Mackevich Glazer is manager of Legal Launch LLC.  The goal of Legal Launch LLC is to provide uplifting, career counseling for 3Ls, recent law school graduates and experienced attorneys.  Nancy offers her clients endless ideas and possibilities to help land them the right job in a competitive market.  www.LegalLaunch.net;    Nancy@LegalLaunch.net

Throughout your life, no doubt, you’ve heard people advise you to “be true to yourself.”   Even Shakespeare admonished, “To thine own self be true …”

From Shakespeare’s Elizabethan era, fast forward to now, April 2011.  I’ll bet that the following description sounds familiar to many of you:

• You’ve graduated law school, even passed the Illinois Bar Exam.
• You’re looking for a job in law that will provide sound footing to begin your career while also helping sustain you, your landlord, and your lender(s).
• You’ve sent out a ridiculous number of resumes, each with its own custom crafted cover letter.  (You don’t care to count how many.)
• Like so many of your law school friends, you haven’t had one response — not even a “Thank you, Mr./Ms. _________.   We have received your resume, and you will hear from us by __________…”   Nothing.

I take pride in a similar demoralizing experience I had as a 2L, back in the day.  I was active in a Chicago-based civil liberties organization.  This organization was honoring a man who had once served as a past president and who, in my eyes, changed the world as I knew it.   This man, high upon my pedestal, was also a name partner in his own Chicago law firm.

I wrote this nameless partner a congratulatory note for being honored, and he subsequently invited me to his firm to get acquainted.     As we discussed the state of the legal profession back then, in the Dark Ages, he explained to me that I would never stand a chance of being hired at his law firm.  The reason:  I wasn’t good enough.   I had not attended Harvard, University of Chicago, Northwestern or Stanford as an undergrad or as a law student.  Simply put, I wasn’t in “The Club.”

While I truly didn’t meet with him to prospect for a job, I was rather startled and somewhat offended.  Okay, if you go to law school, you have to be able to withstand blows of this sort.  So I did just that.  I picked myself up off the floor, smiled sweetly, looked him straight in the eye with appreciation for his time, and started putting one foot in front of the other again.

My point is this:  we’ve all been kicked in life and in our job searches.  No doubt, no one is getting kicked more than the graduates of recent years.

The key is:  How are you going to handle being kicked around?  Will you become a tougher, bolder person?  Or, will you become a tougher, more calloused person?

It may be extremely difficult, but if you do nothing else, take some comfort here:  Attorneys who approach me for help with their job searches have endured many blows.  I hear these stories repeatedly:

• How new attorneys and law students spend time crafting e-mails to lawyers, asking for informational interviews.  Even if there is a connection through family, friends or law school, often, these requests asking for only 10-15 minutes of non-billable time, go unanswered.

• About recent graduates sending time-consuming, customized cover letters and resumes (x 3.14) in response to posts of available jobs.   Responses of any kind are rarely inspired.

• How graduates sign on for temporary assignments to start on a date certain.  The coordinators for these projects string along their temporary hires week after week, explaining that the project continues to be delayed.  As a result of these attorneys’ loyalty and keeping of their word, they have missed out on 4-6 other temporary assignments.  Needless to say, these folks fear their landlords and their loan officers.

I repeat, take comfort here.

What I’m suggesting is that the legal world’s pendulum is off its center.  If you are reading this, nodding your head in agreement, you are the victim of simple oversupply v. no demand economics.  You’re smack dab in the middle of a lopsided scale of justice.

You knew this already, but here’s what you might not know: You’re not crazy.

Hopefully, you can look yourself in the mirror and know that market forces have taken over; what you’ve got is the mirror on the wall, your own good reflection and your gut telling you that this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.

My advice amidst the madness is, try to stay true to yourself.  Try to think about the reasons why you went to law school in the first place.  Put yourself above the imbalance, if possible.

While you’re out there pounding pavement, during or post- law school, know that it will not always be easy to hold fast to who you really are.  Today, you are considered fortunate to have a potential employer simply read your resume.  If you get a written response via snail mail or email , that’s huge (even if you were not accepted).  An interview?  An exceedingly rare event!

If you’re out there looking for work, no doubt your head has been lost in this familiar breeze of a pendulum-gone-mad.  You are probably accustomed to it.  Accustomed to no responses … Accustomed to being strung along …

Sadly, it is inevitable that job seekers today might lose a part of themselves in an unbalanced market runneth over.  If this sounds familiar, don’t do it.  Don’t forget yourself.  Don’t forget why you aspired to study law, even though the law school-to-profession model changed in the middle of the game.  This still isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.

*Back to that name partner. Funny enough in the following year, the hiring committee of this man’s very own firm ironically extended me an offer to work post graduation — summer stipend, bar review course tuition and a raise-before-I-even-walked-in-the-door, all included.  (This guy was obviously not on his own firm’s hiring committee)  For other reasons, I did not accept this offer.  Again, it was market forces causing the firm to break old rules and change the way the game had to be played.

In life, you have learned to be bigger than this.  You learned it in kindergarten, when you were admonished, “When you go out in the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together.”

The lawyers in our lawyers club, riding the supply-side pendulum, don’t seem to be watching out for us, holding our hands or sticking together.  There is no tattling, and no teacher is present.

Later in law school, the very core of the Socratic Method taught us to toughen up.  We have all learned how to take an intellectual beating in front of our peers.  As a result, we then showed up to class better prepared.  We also became more analytical, and eventually, better lawyers.

Job-seekers, you’re not crazy.  Don’t ever grow accustomed to the silence following the submission of a job application.  That’s not the way it’s supposed to be.

Even for those of us who never made it to the Ivy League, we lawyers belong to a very fine club.  This is true despite the lack of recognition I received from a once-highly–pedestalled civil rights honoree.   We’ve earned our membership.  We’re in, no matter how the pendulum happens to swing.

Bill Wilson spent over 20 years in legal departments at corporations large and small, from high tech to brick and mortar, and is writing about various topics while trying to find that next great career opportunity.

“Everything old is new again.”  How often we have heard that phrase, and how often we’ve seen that it’s true.  Things that languish in the back of your closet sooner or later re-appear magically on mannequins in stores as the latest fashion.  There are several implications for your job search in this truth.

I was at a seminar last week.  As I listened to the folks talking about “best practices” for FCPA compliance, they spoke of how in the last 10 years the field had come into its own and ticked off what the best and brightest were doing.  A strong sense of déjà vu permeated my thoughts as I listened, because in the early 80s, I recall talking with some of my law department colleagues about the same issues and the same recommendations and putting them into effect for my clients back then.  There are more, and some better tools now, and there is a different context to the overall enforcement milieu, prevailing law and level of emphasis.  Having said that, recommendation No. 1 is if you are a more “seasoned” candidate, don’t sell short what you know, as you may well find that you can teach the young whippersnappers a thing or two.  You may have to adapt it to new legal developments, and you should be honest about the current state of your knowledge (which hopefully you’ve kept current), but another old saying is equally true: “Plus ça change, plus c’est le même chose” (the more things change, the more they remain the same).  And I would also encourage employers to recognize this reality.

But more seasoned candidates need to understand equally well the flip side of this truism: Just because something didn’t work before doesn’t mean it won’t work now.  When you are interviewing, you may be asked to address a problem and how you would solve it.  It can be very dangerous to your success to be unwilling to re-examine old problems and shortcomings in light of new technology or attitudes.  For example, some more experienced attorneys will tell horror stories, back in the early days of e-mail and word processing, of sending clients draft agreements, only to have them re-appear in radically different and inferior form, but still allegedly as the attorney’s work product.  But the new realities of law department practice, of doing more with less and reducing transaction cycle time, have generally moved toward having routine agreements available to clients on law department websites or through various document assembly packages for direct use, perhaps in response to a short questionnaire.  The technology is now available to customize the templates more extensively and easily, and also to lock the documents down and limit how they can be changed once created.  While not foolproof, they have helped the problem.  To be unwilling to recognize those tools as a solution because of cobwebbed experiences not in tune with current developments, can brand you as the worst kind of dinosaur.

The next post will address how this aphorism applies to the less experienced candidate.

J. Nick Augustine J.D. is the principal of Law Publicist Communications, an ALR/PRA, Inc. agency.  Law Publicist Communications is a public relations agency also offering coaching and consulting.  Nick advises and assists attorneys in transition in public relations, marketing and practice management.  Nick shares recruiting and staffing experience and tips for legal job seekers.

Attorneys in transition should seek higher wages and negotiate compensation packages with greater earning capacity.  The economy may be rough, but the artificially decreased average salaries do not measure up to average profit per partner numbers.  I have heard so many people say that you can get associates for “next to nothing” and you can pay them law clerk wages and “get away with it” because “what else are they going to do?”

I understand that equity partners felt the bite of the recession; however, taking advantage of associate talent is only going to cause a backlash.  A quote from a colleague today read, “…does not understand companies that pay their employees next to nothing and are then surprised that the employees get disenchanted.”  Guess what, those disenchanted employees are kissing their low paying associate jobs goodbye and opening their own firms.

Younger and more technologically savvy attorneys seem to be more consumer friendly and don’t carry the stuffy attitudes that gave the legal profession a bad name for years.  Kinder and friendlier counsel who embrace technology are retaining more clients these days, while the high-priced and what some would call “stuffy” firms are losing momentum.

Many more firms are structuring compensation packages with base salaries and percentages on collected fees.  If the firm is providing billable work and paying you a percentage on billed and collected fees your base salary is likely smaller.  Other firms offer a larger cut of the fees billed for clients the associate brings to the firm.

If you are personable and are likely to attract clients to the firm it makes sense that you are compensated for your efforts.  If you hang your own shingle you need to find clients, and at some point in your legal career you will need to be the rainmaker.  If you have an associate base salary you get to learn the ropes and get experience.  If you also have a financial incentive to bring clients to the firm you really have an opportunity to show your abilities, as a lawyer and business professional.

Will your firm worry that you might jump ship after demonstrating client generation skills?  No.  Meeting client prospects and influencing referral partners is only one piece of a larger management puzzle.  The ability to bring in clients and earn referral relationships makes you worthwhile to the firm when the firm itself has the brand equity and credentials necessary to bring in good clients.

Negotiating better compensation requirements requires your acceptance that your value as a lawyer will vary depending on experience and position.  Consider and suggest employment with flexible terms and periods of review where you have an option to negotiate the numbers to match the real value of your contributions to a law firm.

Bill Wilson spent over 20 years in legal departments at corporations large and small, from high tech to brick and mortar, and is writing about various topics while trying to find that next great career opportunity.

(With apologies to the folks at “Saturday Night Live” who do such a wonderful job on their skits with this tag line…)

This post is going to be a little bit different, addressed not to the candidates, but to employers and those who serve them.  The reason for this post is simple: if employers are going to act like they have taken complete leave of their senses, no amount of advice is going to get some of the unemployed a job.

“The unemployed are really the people who weren’t any good in the first place”  I have seen variations on this quote in several places.  This statement is so arrogant, so elitist, so blind, so divorced from the facts of unprecedented massive layoffs in the legal field, with entire firms imploding, that no response is even possible – or necessary.

“Only top law schools and class rank need apply”  My hat is off to my classmates who were on Law Review.  I remember well the No. 1 in my class.  He was so smart that one of my professors commented that he knew his exam when correcting papers because he inevitably saw issues the professor didn’t realize were included in the question.  Not only that, he was poised, articulate and very much a nice guy.  Even today I would be a bit nervous if he walked in on the other side of a deal.  But only at first.

With all due respect, some of the other people in our class have actually done things that merit a mention.  There is a fairly respectable and growing body of quantitative and qualitative evidence that the correlation between class rank, journal participation and other traditional criteria employed by many employers have a far lower correlation to partnership, general counsel appointments or other indicia of legal success than the articulated hiring preferences of many employers and recruiters would warrant.

“You’re overqualified.”  Let’s see.  I have a chance to hire a) a newbie five years out of school who spent time at a large firm, but decided they no longer want to chase the partnership gold ring, or b) someone who spent 15 years in a legal department, with a diverse skills set, having responsibility for a major business unit that got sold in the latest version of corporate merry-go-round.  This decision requires exactly four seconds of thought, all other things being equal.  You hire the more experienced lawyer.  For the same amount of money in salary, you get “been there and done that” instead of “potential,” which anyone who follows the Cubs farm system knows is a curse worthy of a billy goat.  Their position as the responsible attorney for a major business unit means they were able to keep a senior executive happy, have a broad range of legal knowledge, and an understanding of the business side.  They have a tested maturity of judgment that isn’t likely to cause you to stay up nights wondering if/how they will adapt to a situation outside their comfort zone.  The perceptions that older workers don’t feel comfortable with computers and technology, lack flexibility, or don’t have the stamina to keep up with the “more with less” of today’s workplace environment usually don’t stand up to scrutiny.  Their experience and perspective often enables them to differentiate between the great new idea and the tried and failed miserably.  In addition, anyone who has been to a management 101 course knows that good managers hire people who are better/smarter than they are, so the older lawyer’s experience should not be a threat to a younger manager who isn’t terminally insecure.  As far as the old chestnut “But you’ll leave as soon as a better job comes along,” based on the resumes I have seen, most younger attorneys these days have three or four jobs on their resumes by the time they are ten years out of law school.  That trend doesn’t exactly scream “stability” to me.

The economy is still in the doldrums.  Hiring under the best of circumstances is going to be tough in this environment.  To create artificial barriers that, when examined in light of available evidence, bear little or no relationship to actual performance and often simply reflect the naked prejudices of those who employ them serves no one’s interests.  As we inexorably move from a “brick and mortar” economy to an “ideas and imagination” future, finding the talented people who will enable that process should be everyone’s number one priority.  But you can’t do it with your eyes closed.  Examine your conscience, and do the right thing.

J. Nick Augustine J.D. is the principal of Law Publicist Communications, an ALR/PRA, Inc. agency.  Law Publicist Communications is a public relations agency also offering coaching and consulting.  Nick advises and assists attorneys in transition in public relations, marketing and practice management.  Nick shares recruiting and staffing experience and tips for legal job seekers.

Attorneys in transition must never print misleading content on their resume.  Some people say that everybody lies a little on their resume and people anticipate puffery.  A lawyer in Massachusetts was recently suspended from practice for six months for misrepresentations on his resume.  “Wade Jensen never earned an LLM degree in taxation from Boston University, although he was enrolled and attended classes there.  Nor did the 1997 Purdue University graduate earn a Bachelor of Science degree from Tufts University in 1997.” ABA Journal. News. Legal Ethics (2011, April 11). Mass. Lawyer Is Suspended for 6 Months Due to Multiple Misrepresentations on Resume, Retrieved April 8, 2011.

The truth is often avoided in resume review and during the recruiting process.  Recruiters do not have time to check every reference and credential reported on a candidate’s resume.  When it comes down to a decision among candidate finalists, the past employers and listed references are often contacted for their comment.  When the references don’t exist and things are not matching up, the candidate might anticipate the kiss of death.  In the case of Wade Jensen, credibility may suffer indefinitely.

The discovery of one misstatement on a resume usually prompts additional inquiry into the candidate’s actual credentials.  Outsourced candidate auditing firms verify candidate representations.  A few verification phone calls would have quickly led to the discovery that Wade Jensen did not “…letter in hockey and lacrosse or even earn a place on the “dean’s honor list,” among other purported academic awards, according to a Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers summary of a Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts opinion.” Id.  While this may be a more egregious example of credential fabrication, any discovery of a material representation could earn a bar inquiry.

Recruiting and staffing professionals process resumes quickly and can easily spot something that looks out of place.  Most people have career path that follows themes and rhythms.  Generalizing and profiling is often necessary in vetting candidates.  Savvy recruiters can often spot a fabricated resume; it makes one wonder why someone who looks like a perfect candidate has trouble finding or keeping a job, which begs the question, what is really going on with this person?

Why do candidates assume they know what really puts their resume on the top of the pile?  Do the career services offices always know best?  Career services can offer examples, templates and tips, but they cannot anticipate specific employer queries.  When it comes to the employer’s preference, anything could be possible.  Consider that some employers want to hire talented candidates who sound like interesting people, as opposed to “perfect” people.

As you accurately portray your credentials on your resume, do not sell yourself short.  Things often happen in life and a truthful resume paints a picture.  How you paint your picture depends on your creative writing skills.  Most resume line items can be phrased to put the candidate in their best light.  Just be yourself and remember that your resume represents a career in progress.

Bill Wilson spent over 20 years in legal departments at corporations large and small, from high tech to brick and mortar, and is writing about various topics while trying to find that next great career opportunity.

Employers are being very careful about who they hire, looking at information sources that are new (social media), some that have dubious relevance (credit reports) and old – references.  I don’t think candidates often give sufficient thought to who these people are.

Generally if you are in an active job search as an attorney, you should have those who supervised you, those you have supervised, and those you have represented ready to serve as references.  Peers are also important, especially with flatter organizations reducing the opportunity to supervise people.  The people you select, probably from among many choices, should share several characteristics.  Most importantly, they should know you well and be able to respond to in-depth inquiries about you as a person and your work.  Ideally, your reference should be able to cite one or more situations in which you went above and beyond the call of duty, or produced a very favorable outcome in a difficult situation.  They should be articulate and persuasive, as they will be doing a sales job, and you are the product.  They should have as much stature in their field as possible.  Someone who was a SVP/General Manager is going to have a bit more gravitas than the IT help desk manager, even though he may also love your work.  But be careful: stature is no substitute for knowledge.  Recommendations from people higher up the management ladder who don’t know you well will inevitably sound a bit hollow, and may quite possibly hurt you rather than help.

The references should address what employers want to hear about: Who are you, how do you work as part of a team, what are your strengths and weaknesses, will you deliver in a crunch –these points are just some of the potential areas of inquiry.  If you have a blemish on your record, a good reference at that employer might be able to do some good explaining it away.  They can explain extenuating circumstances, put it in context, or give some insight into the internal politics of the organization that might have contributed to your less-than-stellar outcome there.  Your reference may be able to cure many ills with a phrase such as “I’d hire her again tomorrow, without hesitation.”

I think it’s essential today more than ever for your non-lawyer references to talk about how you helped their business.  You could be magna cum law review with a genius IQ, but if you can’t translate that encyclopedic knowledge of the law into actual results for your client’s business, and relate to business people in terms they can understand, it won’t be quite as impressive to a prospective employer.  While I think there is an unfortunate trend among corporate employers to look at the legal department the same way they look at manufacturing in terms of contributions to the bottom line, a client that can legitimately point to a situation where you saved the business a lot of money, or dodged a bullet, will be doing you a favor.  Although law firms do tend to rely far more on quantitative criteria such as class rank or billing dollars, the new paradigms that are being explored in the firm/client relationship demand a sensitivity to business concerns as well as top-notch lawyering.  As a result, these kinds of recommendations may serve you well in either the firm or in-house context.

J. Nick Augustine J.D. is the principal of Law Publicist Communications, an ALR/PRA, Inc. company.  Law Publicist Communications is a public relations agency also offering coaching and consulting.  Nick advises and assists attorneys in transition in public relations, marketing and practice management.  He shares recruiting and staffing experience and tips for legal job seekers.

Attorneys starting their own practice want to be able to build their name and reputation while earning money from “of counsel relationships,” as I will term them.   I suggest anyone looking for of counsel opportunities should first do their research, including a call to the ARDC and the ABA.  Knowing, and being able to demonstrate the finer points of an of counsel relationship, should help you when approaching seasoned lawyers with too much work on their plate.  Here are a few of today’s economic realities we need to consider.

Economic Reality #1:  We are practicing in a rebounding economy where seasoned professionals are cautious when approaching mergers and acquisitions of new associates.  There are two things lawyers generally dislike, turning away clients and terminating employees.  I may get some disagreement on turning away, or referring interested clients, but I doubt anyone enjoys terminating an employee.  Keeping associates with no scheduled work is a realistic concern for many lawyers in solo and small firm practices.  Having another lawyer as a back-up is a great proposition in a rebounding economy.

Economic Reality #2:  You never make more money working for others as you would on your own but bills need to be paid now.  If you establish an of counsel relationship with a firm who has work now but no promise of continuation, you can bring in money today to pay bills while building your own practice.  Along the way, you may just happen to stumble upon your very own client.  If you continue the of counsel relationship you will likely reach a point where the income from your main practice eclipses the value of the work being fed by the of counsel firm.

Economic Reality #3:  The clients who retained an of counsel firm are more likely to be loyal to that firm and won’t send referral clients to you.  If you have and market your own practice the chances of referrals are minimal compared to associates of a growing firm. People will assume the firm who hired you has a solid book of business and is less concerned about client generation. But don’t forget, you have bills to pay now.

Economic Reality #4:  The economy is rebounding, but remember, it will take some time.  If you are set up to accept those clients next year, the setup activity this year becomes well worth your investment.  Remember, an of counsel relationship doesn’t have to dissolve when you are well on your own.  You just might be in the position to hire an associate who you can feed with an of counsel workload.  Consider as well that you might be listed as an of counsel lawyer on another firm’s site.  They will probably keep all the work that comes from their own marketing efforts, but isn’t it nice to be found another place online?

With the caveat that young attorneys should always get help when practicing in new areas, I suggest losing the training wheels and take the solo plunge. The sooner you establish your own firm the sooner your value will grow among your colleges and clients.  Again, get help, don’t practice on your own without having co-counsel and of counsel plans in place.