Have a J.D. and a Dream? Persevere through Troubled Times

The news about the legal profession has been unseasonably grim lately, with reports of underemployed lawyers, unemployed law schoolgraduates, and a shrinking profession marked by increasing competition. For those fresh-faced young lawyers looking to save the world, think grand thoughts, and swagger through courthouses, marketplace realities might sometimes get them down. No matter what the profession or the times, it can be a long slog through some personal torment to achieve any goal. Remember wannabe doctors who had to go to the Caribbean to get their medical degrees because they couldn’t get admitted to a school in the United States? Well, those graduates are practicing today. How about the glut of teachers, or of M.B.A.s, in previous decades? Those folks are still around. Sure, legal competition is intense today. Even a top-tier law school grad may not be able to sashay into a big-firm job in Manhattan.

Reality getting you down? Think about a few others who endured career challenges: Ruth Bader Ginsburg couldn’t land a job as a big-firm associate despite attending Harvard and Columbia. Thurgood Marshall couldn’t get admitted to his first-choice law school not because he wasn’t qualified but on account of his race. Those two were going up against far more than a crappy economy and still managed to land pretty high-caliber gigs as justices of the Supreme Court.

No one is going to hand you a career. There will be challenges in good times and bad. Some might be universal, others might be self-inflicted, many will likely be due to plain bad luck. But if you have a diploma and a dream, do something with it. Don’t let a few, or a hundred, closed doors deter you. Sure, you might have to take an alternative path. Your accomplishment might be that much greater for it.

—Lori Tripoli

Need a Law Job? How to Make Sure You’re One of the 55%

If I were enrolled in law school right now, all the doomsday articles about post-grad employment statistics (like “An Existential Crisis for Law Schools” recently published in the New York Times) would, no doubt, have me hyperventilating. But obsessing about getting a job doesn’t actually help someone get a job. I’d turn some of that fear into action to increase the odds that I’d have a gig in the legal field upon graduation. To paraphrase Sally Bowles, what good is sitting alone in your law library? Start planning now for a job as a lawyer.

• Make yourself more marketable. Take law office management classes while you are still in law school to understand how to run a legal business—and possibly how to start one if you can’t land a job as an attorney at a firm after you graduate.
• Identify hot practice niches and take courses in those areas even if you loathe the subjects. Me, I would take classes on Intellectual Property, Patents and Trademarks, and Bankruptcy.
• Get experience: Work part-time, temp as a paralegal, or get an internship. If all else fails, volunteer for an organization. Start beefing up your résumé, meeting people in the field, and staying in touch with contacts.
• If you’re not on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn for professional reasons, you should be. Follow law firms and other organizations that hire lawyers. Interact with them.
• Get published.
• Start a blog on something substantive and build a readership.

Truthfully, when I was in law school, I wasn’t too keen on doing things for free. The market has changed, though, so I would not be cruising around with that attitude today. Don’t sit around your law campus fretting about the future. Take action to make sure that you’re in the percentile with jobs in the field upon graduation.

 

—Lori Tripoli