roll the dice: will you have a job after law school?

[julie anne]

The old adage that everything is bigger in Texas may not hold true for the legal market, at least for the time being.

Texas Lawyer recently talked to two recent law school graduates and one soon-to-be grad to get their perspective on the job market for newly-minted lawyers.

The article's finding after speaking with the three students?

"(N)o matter which school you go to and what grades you get, the search for a law job in 2009 takes patience, persistence and some luck."

University of Houston graduate Linda Nguyen graduated in the middle of her class and couldn't find anything in the field of law. She took a non-law job as a a project manager with Houston's Entergy Texas Inc.

Texas Wesleyan University School of Law graduate Matt Smid ranked in the top 10 percent of his class and is working as a paid intern at the Tarrant County District Attorney's Office. He doesn't have a guarantee that there'll be a paid position waiting for him at the end of his internship.

And Baylor University Law School soon-to-be graduate Cindy Yen ranked in the middle of her class and is still making calls to alumni and law firms. She has yet to find a job for when she graduates this August.

The group of students interviewed are not a representative sample of the law students in Texas, and are certainly not representative of students across the nation.

But based on previous stories that have appeared on this blog, (here's another one), and comments posted on law-related message boards, the experience of the three is not uncommon.

So where does that leave 0Ls like myself besides crossing our fingers, praying, pouring libations and giving blood sacrifices in the hope that the job market turns around?

We can take a cue from Smid, who said that even while in law school he aimed to distinguish himself with the job market in mind.

And I hate to keep bringing it back around to my journalism experience, but the journalism job market when I graduated in 2007 seems similar to the legal job market now: tons of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed graduates, very few jobs.

Based on that experience, I learned the value of not just having your ear to the ground, but also of having your foot in the door. (I worked as a news assistant at a local newspaper after graduation while waiting for a reporting position to open up.)

One of Nguyen's classmates is doing just that by clerking unpaid for a judge during the day and waiting tables at night.

Or, as Jack Hough of the New York Post suggests, rather than risk not finding a job after school, we could just forgo school and the debt that goes with it. Law school grads may earn more per annum, but, over the course of a lifetime, the non-law worker may earn more because they're not saddled with tons of debt.

Nah. I'll be different. But I'll keep my fingers crossed nonetheless.

Read the full article at Law.com.

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