Strategies to Revive and Strengthen Your Early Legal Career After Setbacks

Description

• Overcoming Setbacks: Harrison's recent Q&A clip addresses common setbacks in early legal careers, emphasizing that job loss is a common experience among attorneys.
• Diverse Reasons for Job Loss: The speaker highlights various reasons for job loss, ranging from economic factors to personal mistakes, and emphasizes that losing a job doesn't mean the end of a legal career.
• Strategies for Career Recovery: Practical advice includes applying to firms without job openings, exploring smaller markets or less prestigious positions, and networking to secure opportunities in major firms.
• Market Selection Tips: Harrison recommends targeting markets where you have connections or have previously lived and worked, making it easier to secure a position.
• Unique Approach: The speaker encourages mass mailings to firms, even those without advertised openings, citing success stories of law students securing jobs in competitive fields through this method.
• Communication Method Matters: Using letters for job applications is emphasized as a more impactful method than emails, as letters stand out and are less likely to be deleted.
• Proven Success: The clip concludes by asserting the effectiveness of applying to numerous places, emphasizing that this proactive approach significantly increases the chances of securing a job after setbacks.

Transcript:
 
Strategies to Revive and Strengthen Your Early Legal Career After Setbacks
 
I Work for the wrong person. I lost my position as a young attorney who was working very hard. But what the heck's that? And I'm in my first year of practice. How can I prevent my career from being destroyed?
 
And how can I get things back on track? Okay. Everyone, most attorneys, lose their jobs at some point. Lose jobs in their career. So sometimes they lose it once. Sometimes, they use it multiple times. But almost everyone loses their jobs at some point in their careers. It's just how it works.
 
You lose your job because the firm needs more work. You lose your job because someone doesn't like you, but you lose your job because you made a mistake, but you lose your job because the firm can't make you a partner. You lose your job because you do something wrong with a colleague. You may make a sexual, who knows?
 
People lose their jobs for all sorts of reasons. I've seen people lose their jobs because. They got drunk at a party. Who cares? When people lose their jobs, everyone loses their jobs. The first thing is that most attorneys, at some point, lose their jobs. Whether it's something they did wrong or something like that.
 
There are so many reasons you could lose your job. I wouldn't worry about it. Do you know if your career gets destroyed by doing that? Not. You can undoubtedly get fired and find plenty of jobs and people; the best way to get a job, and I talked about this earlier, is to apply for jobs that apply to firms that don't necessarily have openings because if you do that, you're more likely to get a job.
 
If you are competing with multiple people for a job, so if you're competing with multiple people for the same job, with multiple people for the same job, it's very, it's you, who would you hire? Would you hire, who would you hire? The person with a person fired, a person not working, or a person working. So you just have to ask yourself those questions.
 
So, who would you hire if you were an employer? So one of the things I'll tell you is it's fascinating. So when you get in, and this is your answer, your question about your career, getting off track. When you get into a law firm, no matter what the law firm is, you have to decide what market you are interested in and what size firm to choose.
 
So here's how it works. So if you are from a major firm in a major firm and you lose your job, your best option is just to lose your job in a significant firm. What is your best option? Your best option and best safe majority. It's possible to retain your job in a firm. The options are to do the following two.
 
You can go to a smaller firm, a smaller, less prestigious firm, which can work. They will often ask questions. May I was there a major city with no economics, but no economics, no procession, whatever. You just, it's pretty obvious. You lost your job for some reason, so you major firm, you lose your job in a major city with no economic slowdown.
 
You can go into a small, less prestigious position, which can work. You can also go into. You can go into the most minor shoe position. You can also go into another market, which is a good idea, a smaller market, or you can try to get a job in another major firm, or you can try to get a job in another major firm and another major firm.
 
But I want to explain a little bit about this quickly because I think a lot of people will miss a couple of points. So the first thing is if you lose a job in a major city with no economic slowdown, the problem with that is, is large law firms, especially in places like New York and Los Angeles and all those kinds of markets and Chicago and Houston, like them, what they, the, what they have is they have a vast number of attorneys to draw from applying to jobs.
 
So, if I were a law firm in Chicago, as an opening for a litigation attorney, they would have an incredible number of applicants from other significant firms in other cities. From circuit court clerks and all these sorts of things for any job they have. So the problem with that from your perspective.
 
If you're trying to get a job with one of those terms, they're going not to hire you because they're going to hire people who are employed over those who aren't. And they'll probably have access to people with just as good, if not better, qualifications. So that's your problem.

So, how do you get around that? One option is to apply to a smaller firm with a less prestigious position. So that can work, or you can apply to a smaller market and get a position that can work, or you can also try to get a job in another major firm, which can work if you have just very rare qualifications or if you somehow can network in and know a partner or something that can help you get a job there, that's it.
 
So those are your best options. What would I do if I were in a situation in LA, Chicago, or New York? I would probably do what I would do; the first thing I would do is try to market myself to a smaller, less prestigious firm. I would apply for jobs and also non-jobs.
 
So, I would apply for firms that have jobs and those that don't. I would try other markets, smaller markets, and large firms as well, large and small firms. But what I would also do, and this is something for everyone to think about, by small and large firms. And why would I do that? Because other markets might make it easier for me to get a job, the most accessible job place for you to get a job, by the way, most accessible place, usually where you grew up, where you grew up, where you worked for before lived in work, all that sort of things because you'll say, oh, I just want to work in this market, and I'm whatever.
 
That's the easiest way to get a position. And then finally, you always fly everywhere without a; that's what I would do. I would not in any way. And then I'm, and I'm not going to sit here and promote my own company. LawCrossing, I would use to find firms without advertised jobs, meaning public.
 
So that's how I would, and I would also use LawCrossing. And LawCrossing archive just means. All that is, those are firms that have had openings in the past. So that means they're likely to have a mean future. So, I would apply to those firms as well. That's how I would handle it. So those are your best options.
 
I bet anybody who loses their job can get a job. I used to own this company. I still own it, but it's operational called Legal Authority. What that company did was go out and do mass mailings using letters. To all sorts of anybody, your practice area, any firm that did it, if you chose a lot of places and applied to a lot of places, an incredibly high number of people, like a percentage, would get jobs.
 
And if you apply to enough places, everybody will get jobs. It just works, applying to a lot of places. I'll just give you one example. Anyway, people doing things were crazy. I saw I was not going to get too far into it, but I saw, and May told the story last week or a week before, but I had two law students that had gone to Thomas Cooley, which is not the most outstanding law school out there and maybe one of the lowest rank.
 
Two students graduated, and one brought his father to meet me along with the other attorney, another law student. These guys were in California, at the University of Nevada. They were from Michigan and needed to do better in law school. Both had jobs. Entertainment law firms are out of law school now in L.A. So they got jobs, not from being from L. A., no connection in an entertainment law firm, coming from one of the worst law schools in the country, doing mass mailings to entertainment law firms. How hard is it to get a job in entertainment law in L. A.? It's almost impossible unless you have connections because I don't think, maybe I have; I don't remember making any placements for entertainment attorneys because so many people want to do it.
 
It's just it's tough. Now, getting a job as an entertainment out of law school is even more difficult than when you're in law school because who will hire? It's hard to explain why entertainment is so hard to get into, but it's tough. And both of these guys.
 
Multiple jobs, they couldn't believe it, and all they did was send letters to every law firm in L.A. that did entertainment law, and they got jobs. How, again, L. A.'s entertainment law is impossible. I don't, again; I don't know of any placements I've ever made doing that I may have. I've certainly made hundreds of placements, if not thousands, of people in litigation, corporate, or I.P.
 
But that particular practice area, no, just absolutely not. I'm just telling you that. If you contact a lot of places and you do mass mailings, it's going to change your life and your career. No one does it. Works. I don't know how else to say it. If you're in law school, law schools often will tell you not to do it.
 
But that's the only reason: if everyone in their law school did it, employers would get hundreds of applications, maybe 50 per person. And the law firms need to be able to, and the schools need to steer certain people to the best jobs. There's nothing wrong with that. That's just how it works.
 
So if you get fired and have difficulty finding a job, the only thing you need to do, it's effortless, is just apply to every place you can find without opening. That works. The reason it works is those employers need to receive other applicants. So, for some, you'll be the only person who's ever written to them looking for a job.
 
If you send a letter, it's much better than just applying randomly than sending an email. Emails can be deleted. Letters come when they arrive on someone's desk. That's incredible. Same thing with faxes. You send a fax that arrives on someone's desk. So I'm just telling you, it's a much better way of applying for jobs than any other way.

It's just it works.