The Shark

news! Orrick does like it said it would!

[Brian]

Some Shark readers may not regularly read Above The Law. Damn popular blog, yeah, but some days it’s also liable to scare you right out of your chosen profession. So if you missed it, bloggers there found it remarkable that, after announcing it would defer on-campus recruiting until mid-November, Orrick has started posting recruiting ads, right on time.

So much for all those whiners who say the media only reports when things go wrong. Read about Orrick’s return to campuses here.

Brian is a Cal Law editor.

would you like fries with that? the disconnect between career services and students.

[dennis]

Law Week reports that things are bleak in Colorado:

In 2009, more people passed the July Colorado bar exam than in any other year this decade. But the boom in the number of new lawyers is happening during a bust in the job market.

About 35 percent of the University of Colorado School of Law’s class of 2009 had jobs at graduation, down from 55 percent the year before.

The school’s Career Office is probably embarrassed; good thing that it does not view itself as a placement office:

“I think that we have out of necessity had to rethink our role in career development,” said SuSaNi Harris, assistant dean for CU law school’s Office of Career Development.

Most law schools no longer have traditional “placement offices” that line students up with jobs, she said.

“We got away from that because no office is staffed to place, one by one, each of their students. But what we’re exploring here is sort of a pseudo-placement effort.”

Details are in development.

There is an expectation gap at many law schools: law students expect job placement, law school career offices expect only to provide job hunting skills.

Students tune out when they hear that the Career Office doesn’t offer anything more than resume critiques and a mock interview. I think that the majority of law students had some form of interviewing experience during undergrad (or during their previous careers) so the services offered by the Career Offices are pretty useless.

A student at my coworker’s law school was told by her career office that her grades were so bad that she should not bother with OCI. She was told that she shouldn't even go for practice because she was unemployable.

The student was so offended that she contacted the OCI employers, arranged her own interviews, and scored a job. She then returned to the career office and told them exactly what she thought about them.

But most students don’t approach the career office and say, “Hey, you are useless!” – they simply ignore the office.

Read Dennis's tale of woe and ineptitude regarding an interaction with his career services department, after the jump.

superhero power of choice: signing that offer letter.

[cynthia]

From a National Law Journal commentary on fall OCI:

One of Northwestern's fearless leaders, William Chamberlain, assistant dean of law career strategy and placement, has the following nugget of wisdom for all you 2Ls entering what will no doubt be an interesting recruiting season:

"...accept your offer quickly. The key is to get a job for next summer. Smart students will not rely on NALP's 45-day guideline but rather accept their offers as soon as humanly possible. From the school side, we have dealt with all sorts of reactions by firms to the economy and are urging our students to be risk-averse. Any sense of entitlement will be fatal this fall."

Be grateful! Be conservative! Be inhumanly fast, if humanly possible! Be BigLaw.

OCI: spring fling?

[cynthia]

The AmLaw Daily is reporting that school administrators seem to be coming to a consensus about pushing back OCI to halfway through 2L. The National Law Journal is also reporting that law firm recruiters seem to be on board with this plan (but why wouldn't they?), so one might be able to assume that we're looking and not just a shift in the biglaw model pay structure, but also the big law recruitment techniques, in the coming months.

So who might not be down with spring recruiting? Faculty! According to Susan Robinson, dean of career services at Stanford:

"I agree that we could move to the spring [of a student's second year]. It's certainly not as desirable from a faculty standpoint because the truth of the matter is that while students are in the midst of recruiting, that's pretty much all they do. And so class work and the focus on classes tends to suffer."

Despite all that, all the administrators cited in The AmLaw Daily item seemed to agree that it would be feasible to push back OCI. This is in stark contrast to the recent trend of moving OCI up in the schedule, to avoid being left behind in a fall hiring rush that could see significantly fewer available positions. 

ABA gets very large and very slow accreditation review process rolling.

[cynthia]

The ABA, that has been working on changes to its law school accreditation standards for months, has announced, via the ABA Journal's site, that it will make some possibly controversial changes to how it measures a law school's fitness for accreditation.

According to the article, the ABA will start measuring a law school's "outcome" rather than its "input." Meaning, major factors that will be required for accreditation will relate more to what a law student gets out of their experience at a school than they will to what a law school puts into it. Examples of the latter are faculty and campus size, an example of the former is bar passage rates.

"Shifting to an emphasis on outcomes rather than input is essentially a done deal, said committee vice chair Margaret Martin Barry, a professor at The Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law in Washington, D.C. In an interview with the ABA Journal this week, she explained that a special study committee, backed by the council of the Legal Education Section, urged that the change in emphasis be incorporated into the accreditation standards."

Don't expect a massive overhaul anytime soon, though. The last accreditation standards review process took three years, from 2003 to 2006.

CMCP: law is relationships. oh, and hitting up career services.

[cynthia foster]

I spent this morning at a professional development event run by the California Minority Counsel Program. The panel discussion featured several speakers, including in-house counsel and attorneys from private firms, and centered around career development for women and minorities. The conversation drifted from tips and tricks-style advice-giving to anecdotes about personal experiences.

A lot of the advice, particularly when it came to talking about job searching, was pretty standard stuff. Disseminate your resume in as many places as you can. Start your own networking group, even if it's just a group of like-minded individuals having dinner and talking about your industry. Join professional associates, attend trade shows. Find companies that are in the news and gaining economic traction, and apply with them as they grow. One theme echoed throughout the conversation: law is relationships. Network, network, network.

Duane Valz, VP and Associate General Counsel at Yahoo, told the audience that the best way to ensure you don't get laid off once you've found a job is to "always give the impression [at work] that you're bringing good value" to your company. Jim Potter, a Sr. VP and GC at Del Monte Foods, went through quite list of tips including an interesting one of always having multiple versions of your resume on hand - he recommended the magic number of seven.

All pretty good advice. During the question and answer portion of the discussion, several junior partners stood up to ask for help on how to manage their book of business during rough economic times.

What I thought was the best nugget from the event, though, was something that might be a little less encouraging to you all. Theodora Lee, a shareholder at Littler Mendelson, encouraged junior associates to trek on over to the career services offices of their alma maters, saying that these offices have "opened themselves up" to unemployed alums.

As I wrote in my notes, "Yay for law students!" Not only is there a question of whether or not career services can offer a whole lot to job-searching students, but now there'll be competition for face time and resources with all your school's alumni! As Petra said in a recent Cal Law story about the rising levels of competition for public sector jobs, the "door of opportunity is getting jammed with feet."

know your enemy: biglaw to recover from talent gluttony by pulling the rug out from under you.

[cynthia foster]

Above the Law's David Lat has been quite the jet-setter of late.  He's in Berkeley at Boalt right now (HURRY!) and he was also in attendance at NALP's yearly conference. 

A couple of pretty interesting nuggets have emerged from his experience at the conference, including an item he wrote today on the "Recruiting During Recession and Recovery" panel.  The panel included Frank Kimball of Kimball Professional Management, who in another time advised students on how to nail the call back interview.   This time he addressed some pretty serious issues, including OCI, I thought you might like to be looped in on.  You can read the full ATL item here.

Lat distilled Kimball's advice to firms on how to handle OCI during the "downturn" to these bullet point facts. 

• Become more selective -- but don't just mindlessly jack up your GPA requirement.
  
• Instead, focus on candidates who have strong ties to your city.
  
• Place weight on a candidate's commitment to private practice.
  
• Select recruits based on their work ethic and people skills.
  
• Change the list of campuses that you visit for OCI. Prune it down to the schools that you actually get students from (as opposed to schools that are prestigious to visit, or schools that you recruit from because "we've always recruited from school X").

It's always good to know your enemy/prospective employer, so it might not be the worst idea to take this perspective to heart: law firms do not need you right now.  And they can't really afford you, either. 

Kimball and Lat both seemed to suggest (or, you know, outright say) that a law firm position straight out of law school is a luxury in these times.  And by that definition, most of you will probably be out of luck.  React accordingly.  Public interest, government jobs, alternative career strategies.  Oh, and limited debt.  Those are some take-home mantras for you.

Kimball advised firms not to engage in start-date deferrals, which he described as a "band aid" for a "cash flow wound."  Sounds logical, right?  Too bad Biglaw management doesn't agree (free reg. req.).

the land of opportunity, after all.

[cynthia foster]

On your way out of law school with nary a job in sight?  Here are two options you might not have considered: tournament poker player and JAG Corps captain.

usf career panel addresses changing outlook of legal industry.

[pam smith]

There’s a career panel going on in downtown S.F. tonight at 6, and a couple of big-firm people are supposed to be taking part: Perkins Coie’s Michael Gotham (director of attorney recruiting and retention) and Nixon Peabody’s Ann Miller (a San Francisco partner who’s served as hiring partner before). Lobbyist Meg Catzen-Brown is also supposed to be there, giving her point of view on legislative trends in D.C. and Sacramento that may hint at what areas of legal work might actually be growing.

The event, sponsored by one of the USF School of Law’s alumni groups, is open to the public. You don’t have to be USF-affiliated, but it carries a price: $15 for current USF law students, $25 for new-ish attorneys (2003-2008 law grads from anywhere) and $35 for more experienced attorneys. It’s taking place at the Academy of Art University building at 79 New Montgomery St. Registration starts at 5:30 and discussion at 6, with a reception to follow at 7.

We chatted up Jeff Brand, the dean at USF’s law school, who will be moderating, for a preview. He expects the audience to be a real mix of students, recent grads and more seasoned attorneys. “I can tell you we’re going to focus on what the outlook is, changes in the work environment in light of the crisis, and practical advice they [the panelists] would give, sitting where they sit.” 

got hope? no, actually. i'm headed for a "regular" job and my parents' couch.

[brian lauter]

Here comes the next installment of The Shark’s “got hope?” series. First, however, let’s take a minute to reflect on what we’ve heard so far.

We’ve talked to a wanna-be prosecutor, a wanna-be Biglaw attorney, and a wanna-be plaintiffs’ attorney. It’s been a fairly diverse group, but many of their answers have been similar.

They all say that over 50% of their friends are unemployed. None of them seem to have any ideas about how to get jobs or of what “alternative careers” they might pursue. All three have blamed the economy to some extent, and two out of three said that they would not recommend going to law school.

Next up in the series is “Bartleby,” an unemployed 3L who was considering work in both the public and private sectors, and really isn’t a fan of law school.

Ed. Note: If you are interested in participating in an email survey on your job search experiences, please contact us. 

Disclaimer:  To encourage candid responses we’ve used pseudonyms to disguise the interviewees’ identities.

Brian:  Why did you come to law school?

Bartleby:  I always enjoyed arguing and writing and I worked in an office with a bunch of attorneys who I admired and seemed to enjoy being lawyers.  People said I’d make a good lawyer and it seemed like a good fit for me.

Brian:  Can you give me a brief rundown of the jobs you’ve had in law school or the route(s) you’ve pursued?

Bartleby:  My first summer I worked for a judge.  My second summer I worked at a smaller class action plaintiffs’ firm.  I’ve also interned at the California DOJ.  I want to do consumer advocacy or environmental/land use work.

Brian:  Why haven’t these worked out?  (i.e. Why don’t you have a job now?) 

Bartleby:  Well, I took a job at a small, but well-respected, litigation firm where I knew I would get good experience.  I knew they might not have room to hire me, and they didn’t, but I still figured I could parlay my experience into a job at a similar firm that did have room or go into the public sector.  Nobody is really hiring anymore, though, so that hasn’t really worked out.

Brian:  Are you depressed/discouraged yet?  Do you feel like it’s the economy’s fault and not yours?

Bartleby:  I’m pretty depressed and discouraged about employment stuff at least.  I feel like it’s mostly the economy’s fault.  I guess I should have tried to just get a job at a big firm last summer instead of going for the experience.  I didn’t cover my ass very well there, but the reason I can’t get anything at all now is because of the economy I think.

Brian:  How has your search for a job impacted your personal life? 

Bartleby:  Earlier this year I spent a lot of time working on getting a job.  Recently, I’ve pretty much given up, so my personal life has been pretty much normal, just a little less carefree.

Brian:   What does your family think about you not having a job?  Are they freaked out?  Supportive? 

Bartleby:  My parents don’t seem too freaked out.  I mean, I think they’re worried that I will have problems paying back my loans and that I’m unhappy, but they’re supportive.  They even offered to let me stay on the couch if I don’t have a job after the bar.

Brian:  What are your plans if you get to the point, say you’ve taken the bar, and you still don’t have a job lined up?

Bartleby:  I guess I’ll keep applying, maybe try to substitute teach or get a regular job to pay the bills.

Read the rest of Bartleby's interview after the jump.