Description
Recommendatons on How You Can Go About Your Job Search
[00:00:00] What are your law firm job search recommendations for a 2020 law grad with six years of corporate governance experience who is pending bar admission to New York, but had to take a compliance job for financial reasons?
So typically your experience before law school isn't going to be that helpful.
For the most part, unless it's in technology, tax, or intellectual property, like patent law, it's typically not as relevant for attorneys that are seeking new positions because law firms are more concerned with your law school degree. There's nothing wrong with having done compliance. But one of the things is if you're trying to get a job in New York and you're pending there I'm assuming you maybe took the bar later, that's fine. And maybe New York is not the best market because again, New York is going to be a very competitive market to work in.
Maybe you're from New York and your whole families there. So you need to stay there. And there's nothing wrong with taking that compliance job. If you want to work in a law firm and if you want to do corporate-related work, it would be to try to find a position. Probably to start with a smaller firm, where you can do corporate work and then move up from [00:01:00] there. And try to do work that's as specialized as possible. That would be my recommendation.
If you're not in New York City, then I would look at as many firms as you possibly can around the market you're in. If you are in New City city, I would look also in long island and suburbs, and many different places. But I guess I'm assuming that you want to do corporate-related work. That's how I would approach that.
If you are in upstate New York or whatever market, I would apply to multiple different parts of New York to do it. I would go over there and I'm assuming, if you want to work in a law firm, you want her to corporate. I think you probably can't find a corporate work-related position, but my recommendation would be to try to find a smaller firm. Since, you're getting a little bit late, start on this and go from there. Or even a medium-size firm, but the big thing is doing the most specialized work, that you possibly can. If you get specialized experience, that's going to be marketable later on to a large law firm. And also, if you want to do corporate-related work, work with a firm where you're working for the largest possible client. [00:02:00] It's because the larger firms are going to typically have much more sophisticated work.
The nice thing I'll say to you is that the economy is very good right now. I'm assuming it'll stay good for a while. So if you can get a position even in a smaller law firm, once you get two or three years of corporate experience and assuming the market for corporate attorney good-sized stays very hot, you shouldn't be able to move into a large law firm or a fairly good sized law firm fairly quickly.
I've seen graduates from third and fourth-year law schools, working for very small law firms that have three, four people doing kinds of general simplistic corporate work. And when I say general simplistic, corporate governance type things general corporate, formations and things. I've seen them move into major law firms so that typically isn't that difficult to do. If you get to experience.
The other thing too is if you do get a position in a smaller law firm it's typically easy to bring in clients in corporate because you're working for local businesses and so forth. Even with a smaller firm, you can build up a book of business doing all the work yourself. So that's what I would recommend. I think that [00:03:00] the more experience that you get early in your career doing at that practice area, the better, and I would not settle for in-house. I would try to work for private clients.
It's pretty easy to bring in business.
