Monthly Archives: August 2011

Nancy Mackevich Glazer is the manager of Legal Launch LLC. The goal of Legal Launch 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. For more information, visit LegalLaunch.net or e-mail Nancy@LegalLaunch.net.      

The author dedicates this writing with appreciation to Marianne Deagle, Assistant Dean of Career Services at Loyola University of Chicago School of Law. Without Marianne, this writer/career counselor would never have discovered her real passions in law.

The first thing I ask a lawyer or law student who seeks my help in a job search is whether they have contacted and exhausted all possibilities with the counselors in their law school career office (“OCS”). Actually, I dig further. I also ask them if they have contacted the career counselors from their undergraduate or graduate schools. Career services from all of these institutions should be open to students and alumni, and their help shouldn’t cost a dime.

Your law school career counselor should be your BFF

In fact, I think it is impossible to “exhaust” all possibilities and opportunities with one’s law school or undergrad OCS. An attorney/ law student should be having ongoing conversations with her (a) career counselors, (b) their staffs, (c) their constantly-updated websites, (d) their alumni-bolstered job boards and (e) their alumni databases. (A jobseeker must be sensitive, however, that OCS staff are quite busy in the fall.)

Lest you answer that your OCS is unhelpful … After I cringe, I would respond, “Huh?” 

Don’t ever dismiss what the OCS folks can do for you. They are there for you and should be there for you years past your graduation date. Remember, these overworked and finely-tuned- in- to -the-market advisers weren’t the ones who brought on the recession; they didn’t promulgate the rules about your student loans; and they weren’t responsible for the glut of lawyers looking for legal work.  They are there, helping those who need it.

As jobseekers well know, all the rules of employment changed in the middle of the recent law school game. The OCS staff is learning and playing by those new rules too.

What can the OCS staff and their resources do for you? Not only does the staff become aware of openings in the market and post those positions, but the team also sees new hiring trends in changing practice areas, and they keep apprised of new hiring models for attorneys.

In addition, your alma mater has a vested interest in YOU. If you look good, so does your law school.

Bottom line — doing what’s best for you

If you badly need a job, you have to do what’s best for you, no doubt. Once you have made use of some of these valuable resources, I suggest you take it even a step further.

A novel thought … Help the OCS when you can; it will come back to you in spades

Your OCS counselors know the market. I suggest that you do what you can to become a part of that office. If you really want to benefit from the ever-alert eyes and ears of the OCS staff, create a relationship that travels a two-way street.

Maybe they need a speaker on a panel who has been out there, volunteering at the Daley Center or accepting ongoing temporary work. Maybe one of your counselors has a son interested in attending your undergraduate university; possibly you can offer her son some first-hand advice.

If you haven’t been utilizing the resources of the OCS in the best way, I suggest that you start now. The more you give, surprise, the more you may receive in return. Once you get to know these folks and they get to know you, perhaps an opportunity with your name on it will land on one of their desks. I’ve seen it happen over and over again.

You may discover that it pays big to remember from where you came …

 J. Nick Augustine J.D. is the principal of Pro Serve PR, a public relations firm serving law and professional service firms. Nick advises and assists attorneys in transition based on his experience in legal marketing, public relations, and practice management. Nick shares career growth experience and innovation with legal job seekers.

Avoid applicant apathy by practicing confidence and discipline. Apathy is a consistent problem facing job applicants. If you really spent an eight-hour work day job hunting, you would find a position. Too often, I hear people tell me they found a document review position and are not actively looking for work. Happily underemployed are we? Discipline and confidence are your best allies when looking for a new position or a new client.

You think it is tough landing an interview or a call back? Try working in sales or running a business that needs a steady stream of new clients. The process of researching a lead, pitching a meeting, presenting and eventually closing a deal, is quite similar to a professional job search. Do you know anyone who works in client engagement? I would find someone who is experienced in capturing opportunities to meet and earn the interview. Ask people and learn about the flow of business and follow custom and practice.

The great threat to losing clients or a job is apathy. We often get comfortable and take relationships for granted. Try picturing your competitor pitch a current client. Consider the job seekers sending resumes to apply for your job. When we become apathetic, others notice. By exercising a healthy level of fear of loss we exude commitment.

Discipline in job seeking ensures better success. When you treat your search like a paid job you will likely keep better track of leads, organize your follow up and make your best presentation. When you sit you rust; the longer you are out of work, the more comfortable you present. Don’t be too comfortable. A winning candidate must present as eager, confident and sharp. While job seeking, continue to maintain a daily work schedule, dress for success, attend networking meetings and keep the energy level up.

The confidence game is often tough to play. We are often our worst enemy when it comes to having the confidence to execute our plans and shoot for goals. At some point you ask yourself, what does the next successful person have that I don’t? How easily your positions could be reversed. Simply, if you are confident you can execute, you will. If you doubt your ability to deliver, you won’t.

The people in job search mode know the market is competitive. Do the employers know? Don’t they just hear the word on the street? Most employers have some idea about employment rates, and I think many of them think about it frequently. Where it is business as usual for many, applicants should likewise act as if nothing is wrong and it isn’t odd that this is their 500^th interview. Don’t wear job terror on you like a stink. If you have paid job gaps, talk about the pro bono at the law center.

By exercising discipline, confidence and a bit of common sense you too can fight apathy and keep your head in the game. Your next job could be just around the corner, just make one more call, send one more resume. How many fishermen land the big one on the last cast?

Jill Rorem, Esq., is senior manager, legal staffing at Blackman Kallick (www.blackmanstaffing.com). Jill oversees the successful recruitment of attorneys, paralegals and contract legal professionals. Jill (and the Blackman team) staffs document reviews using qualified contract attorneys and thus, works with attorneys-in-transition daily. You can follow her at twitter.com/roremlegalstaff.

Today’s post is a rant and I apologize. I try to be positive in these posts but today, I am angry!  I work in a popular “non-traditional” and “transitional” attorney industry: document review staffing. As a staffer and not a reviewer, I ride the rollercoaster of looking for reviews, staffing the review, looking for reviews, managing the teams, ending reviews and looking for more reviews.  It is a fiercely competitive industry. Frankly, I love it but, it’s exhausting and uncertain.

I, along with my team, constantly strive to stay above the bar not only when it comes to working with clients, but also with regard to working with our contractors. Our contractors are essentially our “product.” Without them, we have nothing to sell. It has been our policy to treat our contract attorneys like gold.  I’d say, based on our reputation and the reviews I’ve seen on other blogs about us, we’re succeeding. In addition to Blackman staffers being kind people who generally treat people nicely, we also know that happy and well treated contractors have loyalty to their agencies and therefore perform strongly on document review projects.

My colleagues and I have solid relationships with our attorneys and as a result, we’ve learned a lot about the goings on in our industry. It is possible that I will rant in future posts because I learn many things that disappoint me. It is very tough to be a contract attorney. Coding documents day in and day out is tedious and many contractors saw themselves in different positions when they went to law school. They are tremendously underpaid, often shoved into crowded offices with little personal space and threatened within an inch of their lives if they leave a project early -though if a case settles that they were counting on, they can be let go without warning.

So what is getting my goat today? What is making me so angry that I am discussing it publically?  This time it’s rate. I recently learned the bill rate and the pay rate of one project going on at a law firm and the agency is taking a whopping 110 percent mark-up. When I began in this industry, most agencies paid contract attorneys $35/hr + time-and-a-half for any overtime worked. The industry standard for the mark-up was 65-80 percent and it accounted for profit, taxes and insurance costs etc.  Now, overtime pay is rare and the market pay rate has dropped to a mere $27-$29/hr. We thought that the right thing to do was to drop our margin below the industry standard so that we could still pay a decent wage on our projects. Like I said, we’re firm believers that a well-paid contractor does the best work so if they had to take a hit, we did too. Rate is only one contributing factor to a successful project, but let’s face it, it’s at the top of the list.

Others didn’t take that attitude and stuck with a super high margin and simply significantly lowered the attorney pay. In fact, we’ve heard of document review projects paying as low as $20/hr (they had insane turnover). But in this instance, the agency is billing an hourly rate comparable to what we all used to get in the good ole days and did not pass the benefit through to the contractors. Rather, they took a 110 percent mark-up. It’s unfortunate for both the contractors and the client of whom they took advantage. As temporary document review teams become more prevalent in the legal industry, it is important that agencies adhere to best practices so that we can improve the quality of our industry.  That did not happen this week.

J. Nick Augustine J.D., “The Law Publicist,” is the principal of Law Publicist Communications, an ALR/PRA Inc. agency. Nick advises and assists attorneys in transition in legal marketing, public relations and practice management. Nick shares career growth experience and tips for legal job seekers.

The legal job market remains bleak yet there are steps you can take to add value to potential employers. Efficiency consultants offer outsourcing and software resources to help reduce law firm staff. Contract attorneys have taken the place of many associates. If you want an associate position today, you need to be all in – adding value every hour.

Adding value, every hour of every day, requires a level of entrepreneurial effort that associate attorneys had not previously considered until launching solo firms. So long as you are a credentialed match for the position, you have a good chance of receiving an offer if you prove you will not be an overhead drain.

Hiring partners often look for contract attorneys because they are project-based and there is no drain during periods where there is no work. Sure, you might work as an associate and have non-billable time, but if you can add value during that non-billable time, you become valuable.

Adding value during downtime requires planning and organization. I suggest you make a list of tasks you performed at your last job. Maybe you performed a market research project. Possibly, you managed client contacts and communication. Consider software upgrades and efficiency efforts. Make a list of things you can do and remember them in an interview.

Approaching the value add proposition in the interview is easy. Simply ask the interviewing member of the firm if there is ever a lack of work or down time for associates. In today’s economy, this is hardly an insulting question, and nobody will be surprised to hear you ask. You set yourself apart from other position candidates because you are the potential hire who really wants to earn the position and keep busy, adding value to the firm every hour and every day you come to work.

Nobody wants to continue checking in with associates to make sure they are on the right track. Have you heard about the associate who finished drafting the motion to strike and dismiss then spent an hour on Facebook, waiting for her supervising attorney to review her work? Managing attorneys prefer employees who are going to know what to do and when to do it. If you finish a task and need to wait for next steps, work on your list of projects, maybe some marketing.

Communicating to your management that you are working on some non-billable matters is important. For all you know, there could be cases with deadlines and emergencies, and you do not want to be the one who spent all day reorganizing a filing system while others scrambled. Remember, a key component to adding value is working in a team environment and “calling it” when the ball is coming your way.

Angie Robertson graduated from Loyola University Chicago School of Law in 2010. She has experience with public interest law, family law, legal document review and sales.  When she is not reading or writing about law, she enjoys live music, exploring Chicago, watching roller-derby, and spending time with her husband and her dog.

Last month, I re-experienced rite-of-passage stress through my friends who were taking the bar exam. My bar exam wounds were fresh, having taken it just one year ago. My four years of working full-time (or two part-time jobs) while studying law in the evening, participating in moot court, writing for a student publication, volunteering, being a public interest intern and working in my law school’s clinic were grueling. Just prior to my 3L year, I applied for and was awarded a two-year nonprofit fellowship which was to start after the bar exam. My goal of having long-term public interest work motivated me to study 10 to 12 hours a day for the bar exam. I was nervous about the bar exam, but focused on the prize: a career I was passionate about.

I appreciated the new reality for legal hiring and that public interest legal work was even more difficult if not nearly impossible to come by for recent graduates. The opportunity I had earned was extremely rare and somewhat unconventional. Surprisingly, a matter of weeks after the bar exam results were released, my fellowship program was cancelled due to changes at my host organization that were outside of my control. The proposal I wrote became impossible to execute. Meetings were held, conference calls were made, but there was nothing else to be done. I was suddenly unemployed, after being under the impression for the previous 10 months that I was secure in a terrific start to my public interest career.

I became another statistic of unemployed law graduates, people who could only find temporary, part-time, clerking, or nonlegal work. I have applied to hundreds of positions since then, legal and nonlegal, nonprofit and for-profit. I go to networking events, I continue to volunteer. I was lucky to get document review temporary work in January and I have been doing that fairly consistently ever since. It is not mindless work. Each assignment requires mastery of a new, complex knowledge base. It can be mentally draining because it is repetitive, but demands constant attention to detail. Moreover, doing document review during the day can make it difficult to find motivation to work on cover letters, writing samples, applications, etc. on weekends.

Coping with temporary employment has been challenging in a way I was not prepared for. Some recent graduates have responded in anger, suing their law schools and writing angry exposés about law school career centers. While the methodology for reporting law school employment data is not innocent, anger and disappointment will not pay the interest on student loans, nor will they create meaningful work. I remain upbeat about my future by using the present as an opportunity to develop my other skills. I began taking Spanish lessons this winter with the goal of becoming fluent. When I can, I continue to volunteer for pro bono projects. I recently quit my habit of collecting news articles about downward trends in legal hiring and posting them on Facebook and Twitter, in hopes that my nonlegal friends and family might better understand what I’m going through. At the end of the day, I am just a person with a professional degree who has worked very hard to get the job I want, but it is taking more time in this economy than I anticipated. Many things make me and my life unique. This, however, is not one of them.