Category: Uncategorized

A long time ago, I was told what was likely an apocryphal story about a 3rd year law student who was waiting in line at McDonalds. The small child behind them started talking to them and they ended up in a friendly conversation with the child. The father of the child then started talking to the law student and asked if they were a student at the university nearby. This led the law student to tell the child’s father that they were a soon to be graduating law student, but that they weren’t sure what they were going to do since they had no offers as of yet. It turned out the father was a federal judge, and he looked at the law student and offered them a clerkship, right there in line at McDonalds. There were more details to the story, but whether the story was true or not, the point is that you really never know where you will meet the person who will hire you; it could be at McDonalds. Be open to the possibilities.

I always feel slightly smarmy doing it, but every time I meet someone new, I work into the conversation some iteration of ‘I am a lawyer looking for work’. It’s the tentative probing to see if the person takes the bait and might give you a worthwhile contact or even offer up a job. But to continually be exposed to new people you have to go out and search for them. I show up at more meetings and CLEs of things I have no interest in, just to try to drum up a conversation or two with the other attendees and drop the statement that I am looking for work.

So last week I showed up to a job fair organized by my current city. I knew it was likely going to be a futile endeavor, but I had nothing else planned for the day; and… well… you never know who is going to be there. The advertisement for the job fair claimed that the companies showing up were hiring “at all levels”. So, I figured I would put that to the test and see what the ‘at all levels’ really entailed. I printed off a couple dozen copies of my resume, put on a nice suit and headed out to the job fair. Turns out ‘all levels’ entailed low level sales and manual day laborers.

The job fair was held in the concourse of a sports arena. You know that ring of cement walkway under the seats in a baseball stadium where you go to buy your hotdogs? Yeah. It was there. I seriously wonder who decided it was a good idea to have an event where many people were going to be showing up wearing suits, effectively outside in near 90 degree weather. Mind you, people wearing suits were definitely in the minority. The outfits ran the gamut down to a tank top and purple hot pants (nothing but the best for interviewing I guess). The vast majority of the job fair was depressing at the best, but there were a few memorable moments. 

Probably the strangest thing about the job fair was: without exception when I spoke to the HR reps who were there, they might have a list of jobs they were hiring for, but they would all say “Everything we’re looking for is listed online, and you have to apply online for any of these positions.” So everyone showed up, to be told to go home and apply online. What exactly was the point of the job fair then? No one got hired at the fair… no one was taking applications at the fair. The best you could do was to hand your resume to someone with the hope that they might call you back later. But you showed up in person, only to be told to go apply online. It was ridiculous.

As it happened a few of the local universities were there. I stopped by the table for one and asked the HR admin about open legal positions. There had nothing, as expected since I had already looked online at their career page previously, but then I thoroughly confused them when I asked if their tech-transfer office had any openings. Blank stare, “tech transfer?” they seemed utterly confused. I tried again… Technology capitalization office…. same confused reaction… I rattled off two or three other possible names for the office and finally just explained what they did. “The office that sells and licenses the research and discoveries made by your faculty’s research.” I kid you not, they looked at me and said “I don’t think we do that.” Right. Because research never leads anywhere… I gave up and wandered off.

And wandered right over to the table run by the HR dept of the university from (non)-Interview #22. They had a single sheet of paper on an otherwise empty table, printed off from their own website listing the positions they were hiring for (that you had to go home and apply online for.. of course). But I had a quick thought and asked the HR manager “Who would I talk to at your university to find out about being hired as an adjunct?” They said I would have to contact the departments directly because each department handled such things internally. But then, they helpfully added “But we don’t pay our adjuncts.” Now it was my turn to pause and stare. I had to make sure I understood that correctly. “I’m sorry, you don’t pay them anything?” The HR drone seemed slightly uncomfortable because there were at least a half dozen people milling around the table who heard. “Correct. I think we might be one of the only universities that doesn’t.” I put the only copy of the job listing paper down onto their completely empty table and said,”So I guess you aren’t hiring adjuncts.” She seemed a little flustered and said “well, we do but…” and I cut her off and laughed “Not if you aren’t paying them you’re not.” And I ambled off to another table.

I spoke to someone from a hospital HR dept who had no open  positions but wanted a business card from me to prove that there was an attorney at the job fair looking for work. (this was truly the high point for the morning).

I spoke to someone from a veterans affairs office who said I should contact him for a potential networking opportunity but wouldn’t give me his business card (from a stack he was holding in his hand) because I wasn’t a veteran. I’m not sure what game was going on with him… it was weird; he was weird. I made the vague promise to get in contact and wandered off into the crowd wondering ‘what the hell…’

I think of the 100+ employer reps who had tables, only 2 showed any interest and took my resume.

Generally the story was always the same… Ooo we’ve never seen an attorney at one of these things. And we have no openings regardless. And even if we did, you’d have to go online and apply there and hope we get back to you. So thanks for showing up in person to be told to go look online, and damn I’ve never seen a professional show up to a job fair.

My ego can literally sink no lower.

If you believe the apocryphal statistics, 50% of jobs are acquired by the traditional resume / application / interview. The other 50% of jobs are gotten thru networking. Some even say that the percentage of jobs gotten thru networking is significantly higher. I think the relative percentage varies based upon your location and profession, but it definitely seems to be that a great many jobs are gotten by playing a very strange game of telephone and talking to a friend-of-a-friend in your industry.

Up until now, I had largely been ignoring the networking aspect of the job hunt. Why? Well, I’m not a social butterfly and it is somewhat painful to pull the mask over my face and play the networking game.

That all stopped 2 weeks ago. I decided to try to network with a vengeance and see how far afield I can run with the networked contacts I have, and have been given. I definitely believe that getting into a face to face situation gives you a much higher likelihood of getting a job. And using network contacts has the added benefit of skipping over the high school drop-out that is working as the HR admin who keeps tossing your resume because it has too many big words she doesn’t understand.

In the last two weeks, I have been having email and face-to-face conversations with General Counsels from huge multi-billion dollar corporations, large firm partners, small boutique firm owners, academics, you name it. If someone says, ‘Hey I know this guy…’ I’m going to call them and try to talk to them.

So far there have been no job offers. One of the big GCs revamped my resume and offered pointers. Several hand off many other names to contact to see if they can help. The information they pass out in the short interviews is actually really invaluable. Salary info, business contacts, who to avoid, what the latest gossip / firm breakup is going on… things you don’t see from outside.

I think the most interesting thing about running with this experiment is the Alumni connection. I never really gave much thought to actually contacting Alumni, even though every career service office ubiquitously mentions it. So I finally did it. I think I got a 90% response rate… every one of them was happy to talk and mentioned that no one had ever bothered to reach out to them as an alumni. It was a surprisingly good resource. I was shocked that the career office got one right for once.

I guess I will see where this experiment goes, if nothing else, it is absolutely fascinating.

Well I am moving away from the horrible city I live in, and going halfway across the country to a potentially better location. This of course required another bar exam, passed that one this February. Sadly, the nice guy who sat next to me whom I had been talking to before and after the exam was not so lucky. Fair warning to anyone taking the bar, the MBE has significantly changed. Barbri was less than useless for it, apparently they are woefully outdated and desperately need to revamp the course. Look elsewhere unless they change drastically. Nothing much interesting happened at the administration I sat through.

At this rate, I may pick up all 50 states before I become employed.

We do not offer a salary. Rather, we offer an office, experienced staff and all the latest software and equipment necessary to conduct business. Your name would be added to the letterhead, along with the other associate attorneys and you would be a part of the firm. You would be supplied with business cards.

*GASP* My own business cards? Really? Well golly gee whiz! I’m a gonna be gittin down to a real lawyerin’ now!

I fucking love these classifieds. It worries me that law schools are putting these up on their career sites as legitimate opportunities when a few years ago you wouldn’t see these ‘opportunities’ outside of Craigslist. I must admit though, I smile everytime I see them. I can’t help it. It’s the same bemused smile I get when I surf past the latest Nigerian Prince trying to transfer money to me in my spam folder. I wonder who could possibly be so gullible as to fall for one of these situations. But I suppose in the current market, the glut of new grads and the plummeting value of the ESQ will always push a few people to try their luck with the smarmy positions these advertisements offer.

I’m sure if you are a naive attorney or a non-lawyer you may be asking what is wrong with the office share situation? In theory, nothing. In fact, this is how many smaller law firm partnerships begin (or used to in a by-gone era). Which is why it is the perfect setup to bilk you out of some money before you figure it out. But what does this look like? Here… Watch this. This is a random video on the intertubes apparently from several years ago, but it gives you a taste.

So how does all of this work? The theory is, you, the aspiring new attorney has very little cache or cash and if you can’t get someone to hire you into a partnership firm as an associate then one of the few options open to you is to hang out a shingle and go solo. But that involves paying rent for officespace, furniture, office supplies, maybe a secretary if you are really going all out… In other words, money you don’t have considering you are likely floating pretty close to bankrupt anyway. So theoretically if you team up with other mostly broke individuals, you can pool your money and get all of the above.

I’ve seen it when it works, and when it works it is still horrible. The officespace is sparse because no one wants to invest money into making it look nice because everyone who is there is working solo on a shoestring budget. The offices are a revolving door of attorneys because once you have made any minimal amount of money you get the hell out and find a real office / job. I’ve also seen the whole imputed partnership debacle; I was in court when attorney #1 who was representing a husband and wife combo intentionally put the wife on the stand who then claimed responsibility for the husband’s crime. He knew full well that he was creating a conflict in his clients when he did it. The court obviously continued the case and made the wife get separate counsel. And who showed up as her counsel? The guy sharing the office with the attorney #1. The fun issue started up when the prosecutor asked who the “& associates” were on each of their business cards since they were claiming to be solo, but shared an office and expenses and a secretary and a whole mess of other things. Let’s just say the judge was none too happy with the situation. Since you are likely dealing with broke and desperate attorneys, you are very possibly also dealing with a lot of malpractice (yes, generalization, but often true). The officeshare attorneys will take on any case regardless of the specialty or difficulty and hope to hell that a legal stationery store / Hot Docs template (which is well worth a mention in a future installment of this blog) will have a contract / legal looking paper they can buy for $2.50 and sell to you for much more before they usher you out the door and you have the opportunity to question whether you got your moneys worth. (for non-lawyers out there… do you think I am joking? I am not, sadly.)

But hey… that could just be an outlier. What else is wrong with it? Well, most of these ‘opportunities’ you see are offered by one person who requires that you split your fees with them. That there is a minimum hourly fee, that in addition to all of this you pay a monthly maintenance / rent fee to cover costs and materials, that you work under their nameplate, oh, and you don’t draw any salary — it’s just whatever you can bring in yourself and don’t expect any clients from the officeshare overlord. But hey, you can work from home! You don’t even have to show up! Why you don’t even have to work, just make sure to send in a monthly check to pay for the honor of being solo under someone else’s name.

Work from home. Work as much or as little as you want. Basically, the more you look at the situation, the more it looks like multi-level marketing in a law firm setting. But hey, don’t take my word for it. Just look through some of the ads on craigslist, or now featured on your law school career site.

Generally unrelated to much of anything, but I thought I would share an odd story. I’ve mentioned that the people who work too long in doc reviewer positions are a bit strange. The really weird ones can’t find substantive work and end up working permanently in doc review. Anyway, early on I was working on a several month long project and as you tend to do, you start talking to the people sitting around you. A bit over a month into the project I asked about the camera one of my coworkers always had with him; a little point and shoot digital camera. I enjoy photography and I have spent way too much disposable income on cameras and equipment over the years, so cameras always catch my attention; plus I usually carry a point and shoot everywhere too. So it turns out he also enjoys photography and we got to talking about cameras, photos. and whatnot etc etc. (For a mental image, this guy was about 65+ and he was working on the project with his wife).

Anyway, at some point he asks if I’d like to see some of his photos. So of course I said, sure. I’m sure some readers are already seeing where this is headed… anyway he sends me a link to his private Flickr album. The first couple were nice, seemed to be a bit obsessed with trying to photograph things in shadows, but whatever. Round about photo #6 things were not in shadow… no, they would more likely be described as full frontal. Of the coworker.

I never brought up his camera again. But I did have to continue sitting across from him for the next 3 months. Lesson learned, and a bit creeped out.

There is still the myth circulating out there that lawyers have lots of money. At least, that is the only reason I can imagine for the strange pseudo-job that is the recruiter. I’ve had a few more odd contacts since the last one I spoke about. Christ, the number of people who contact you once they think they can make money off of you is impressive. Patent attorneys theoretically make a fair bit of money, the USPTO publishes everyone’s name once they pass the exam, so the obvious thing for shysters to do is to spam the whole list and hope they can make some money off of at least one. I have come to the conclusion that there are no legitimate recruiters.

Why would I make such a blanket statement? Well, let me explain how this works for you. You see, in other fields (not the legal field), a recruiter has a job in hand and attempts to find people who can fill that position. In the legal realm, a legal recruiter contacts as many lawyers as possible to get resumes, then with no job to speak of, they spam companies with your resume (minus your contact info of course). So basically, legal recruiters work backwards; or to put it another way, they do it exactly the same way as you could. You know… just by sending out your resume and hoping.

From what I have been able to glean, a great many legal recruiters only do it part time. As in, they claim to be a recruiter, but work out of their basement two hours a week in the hopes of placing a single person and making a commission maybe once every month or two. My feeling is that the only people they place, are people who have a fair amount of experience behind them, but are too lazy to apply online and submit resumes to hundreds of companies themselves.

Check out this awesome website from a recruiter who contacted me. The best of website creation from the late nineties; it just instills faith in the ability of someone claiming to have their finger on pulse of the IP sector to have a website thrown together in 15 minutes about 15 years ago. I did like that they sent me an X-mas card, unfortunately it told me to go check out their website. I had received another note from someone out in California (sadly I can not for the life of me re-find their website). If you did a search for their office address, it seems that they were not just a recruiter… Oh no.. there were at least 15 entrepreneurial ventures he was working on listed at his address.

This all pales in comparison to the phone call I recently received. A recruiter requested I send them my resume thru email, I am a glutton for punishment, so I obviously complied. I keep having crappy experiences with recruiters because I keep hoping the next one will be legitimate (and I am constantly disappointed). Anyway, I get contacted by a recruiter from Amicus search in a round-about way; the recruiter is a friend of someone who is trying to get me to use their real estate services in the area and my name is passed and the recruiter requests I contact her. They end up talking to me for over an hour on the phone, request I send them all sorts of information that I have to pull together and then they make some promises about re-working some of my materials. They end the phone call telling me they are going to send me provisional copies of some reworked materials by the end of the week, but in addition to all the other stuff I am sending to them, could I send them a list of any places I may have recently applied in their area. Huh.. odd. That’s a new request, but hey, this person seemed very positive about getting me a job so I figure I may as well. This person was calling from a geographical market I had just started applying to, so I figured since they actually lived and worked down there, they must be able to do a better job than me who is 1000 miles away and has never stepped foot in the state.

And how I was wrong. I did a quick search to find out more about who I was talking to. Seems as if they had had been working for Amicus for less than a month. Awesome. But again, you never know, maybe this will be the exception. So I fire off all the materials requested, and then before I am about to send out my contact list of places I have applied, I stopped. My spidey sense was tingling. I went back thru it and scrubbed out all the contact information and Point of Contact info of individuals and just send out a general list with names of companies or firms. No need to give a recruiter a nice organized spreadsheet of potential contacts to spam. So the week is coming to a close and I have yet to hear back from the recruiter. I then get a hastily sent email saying I’ve applied to too many places and to try contacting them back again in 4 months.

What?

So me, applying to a completely different city than where I live, for a grand total of 2 weeks, has completely hit every possible employer this recruiter has access to. Really? And what was I supposed to do for 4 months? Not apply to anyone and hope that Amicus would be able to get me something then? If I had gone thru all of their potential contacts within 2 weeks, what did they expect would be the situation in 4 months? It almost seems like she was trying to get a potential client list rather than get me a job. So I fire off an email asking what gives. I didn’t even get the paperwork that was promised to me, I said it was very unprofessional and reflects badly upon the person who recommended her. Apparently recruiters are beyond caring, their response was that they had never gotten such an email before and had no idea where the disconnect had happened. It may have happened when they used me, or lied to me, or told me to go fuck off for 4 months… but hey. Par for the course with recruiters.

Sometime early in my second year, I showed up to one of the myriad of free lunches that were my stock and trade. This particular lunch, as so many, had a panel of attorneys discussing something theoretically relevant to our future as attorneys. I truly have no recollection of the gist of the panel, but one of the attorneys ended up mentioning something without much exposition which turned out to be ridiculously prescient to my specific situation. He was talking about how the legal community of different geographic locations had distinct personalities. At the time, there was no way for me (or for that matter any law student) to understand what he was talking about and I generally pushed it to the back of my mind to focus on the more pressing questions of the day such as why the law school didn’t order a higher quality pizza for these lunches.

I will preface this also by saying that some things do change after you graduate and become barred. You change classifications within the eyes of the professionals around you. You go from being someone to mentor and offer advice and possibly garner free work from as an intern; to someone who is potentially a competitor or at best a peer with no usable experience to exploit. It happens to all law students once you earn the liability of your bar card. So with that in mind…

The city I went to law school in was a medium sized city, not large to be sure but the metro area sprawled and there was a fair draw to the area for a number of reasons. Anyway, the legal community was incredibly welcoming. I had interactions with a ton of different attorneys and firms throughout the city, from small solos to legal aid to regional offices of the biggest firms in the country. I had a public interest internship which allowed me interactions with most of the legal community in the city in some respect. I also volunteered as often as I could at legal aid. The legal aid office was staffed by attorneys who devoted more time and energy to doing Poverty Law than you can imagine. They were paid badly, but they showed up on weekends and evenings to far flung locations to service the community. If someone passed along a tip on how they might be able to draw a wider net to help more people, they were open to it and would follow thru as best as humanly able. They were and still are the only ‘true believers‘ that I will ever have any respect for in the legal field.

Then I moved. I didn’t move incredibly far in my opinion geographically. It wasn’t like I went from New York City to Mobile, Alabama where you might expect the obvious varieties of influences to vastly change the landscape of professional and social interaction. No, I moved a few hours and crossed the state line into the neighboring state from where I had gone to law school. I may as well have crossed the border into Tijuana. The city was imperceptibly smaller, but otherwise a near mirror image in terms of  population and businesses.

The legal community there was what I can only describe as paranoid, closed, and feral. My first taste of this was during my initial short lived (first) fellowship. described in gory detail previously so no need to relive that one. But, one of the gems dropped by the untreated bipolar attorney from that fellowship was that in this state, no public official generally lasted 9 months before having some sort of criminal charges filed against them in relation to their office. In my time here, it seems to be a scarily accurate assessment of the state government (same state as the Gaming Commission interviews… hmm). This is just to give you a general flavor of the area, and it may explain what comes next.

So as my fellowship came to an end and I got my (first of many) bar numbers, I ended my ability to be used for free labor officially. But now I could do that thing that every law school and every presenter you’ve ever listened to at a CLE pleads with you to do… Pro Bono work. Right. I had been volunteering continuously in law school with Legal Aid and I liked doing it, this should be easy to find someone who can use a free lawyer. On top of that, I was fabulously unemployed so I had a significant amount of free time in which to devote to a good cause. I was sure I can do something worthwhile.

My first stop was the local Legal Aid Office. It turned out that Legal Aid had morphed into a children’s guardian ad litem group in this city, but was still technically legal aid. In the entire time I lived in this city, I applied to half a dozen job postings with them and offered to volunteer both in person at their office, and another half dozen times thru email with my qualifications attached. I never received a single response. Since that was generally a bust, I tried the other free legal services offering in the city that was geared towards adults. My first experience with them was when I first got to the city. I called up to feel out volunteering there and they asked me my qualifications. I started talking about my background with various types of law as well as my legal aid experience and at the end of it all, the person on the phone just said “What do we need with an Intellectual Property lawyer… ” and hung up. I had merely mentioned my IP background but actually explained mostly about my experience with legal aid. I was dumbstruck holding my phone. Maybe I had just gotten a particularly dense secretary. Yeah.. maybe that was it. So I manage to hook up with another attorney who is volunteering at their organization and follow them over to a bankruptcy clinic. I have no real bankruptcy background at all, I was just along for the ride and so that I could try to talk to the organizers. At the end of the clinic, I get a chance to talk to the organization’s attorney organizer; the head honcho for all of the legal aid affairs. I give them the same general speech about wanting to volunteer, and I explain that I have quite a bit of family law background etc etc. She looks at me and says “Do you do bankruptcies?” I say no, I’m here with so-and-so attorney who is a bankruptcy attorney but I have all this other stuff you could use. She cuts me off.

“Nah, we get federal funding for the bankruptcy clinics otherwise we couldn’t be doing them. We used to do family law but we don’t get paid to do that anymore. Sorry, we can’t use you.”

Reread that if necessary. Apparently the only way to get any sort of pro-bono work done for you in the city was if you were a juvenile in the system, or a bankrupt adult. Nothing in between. Later, I contacted the local office of the state Supreme Court thinking.. hmm.. maybe they would know of something. They passed me off to a wing of legal services who gave me contact info of someone who supposedly can get me in touch with volunteer services. This person turns out to be a librarian. Not a lawyer. Who offers me the ability to research and write for him, on his professional papers. Huh? To recap, the Supreme Court referred me to some random non-lawyer guy who wants me to help write his papers that he posts on SSRN.

Being a glutton for punishment, I continue on in my quest. I run across a legal volunteer service that provides free drafting of wills to first responders and their spouses. I show up to a several hour long training session wherein they take my contact info so they can send out info on when the next clinic will be… and for months I never hear back from them. Thinking maybe they lost the contact info, or possibly copied it down wrong, I send a message along to the organizer of the clinic. And I hear nothing back from them either. To this day several years later, they have never once contacted me.

Recently, I contacted the local bar association, thinking that maybe something had changed. Apparently the only thing that had changed was that they put up a shiny new web page touting all the pro-bono opportunities available. I’m sure you know where this is going, but I contacted a bunch of them. I heard back from one. They said they might be able to use me once a month for a day, but I have yet to hear anything back from them since then. I have become so desperate to do something, I contacted a law firm and offered to work for free for 6 months to get some experience in their specific area of law. A barred and certified attorney trying to give away billable hours for free. What was the response? Probably no, but the manager would bring it to the attention of the hiring committee in 2 months. I wanted to point out the ticking clock and reassert that I was moving out of state at the end of 6 months, but I see no reason to bother.

My degree and bars are so useless, I can’t even give away my services. So the next time someone tells you that as a lawyer you need to give away your services for free, laugh. Laugh at them and walk away.

There’s nothing like the quiet desperation of Law Schools trying vainly to find new money.

As with the previous post regarding similar mailings, I feel like Dean Barbara Kaye Miller might need to reconsider the whole concept of mailing out random crap to everyone on the exam pass list. Here’s a great little statistic for you BK… 4 out of 5 people who pass the Patent Bar are already attorneys. And we are listed on the register as ‘Attorney’ not ‘Agent’… which means your generous offer of admitting us to get a lesser degree of ‘Legal Studies’ with dubious legitimacy or utility is wonderfully insulting. How about you go back for your GED. And while you’re at it, take a business course or two to figure out why your grand plan to find more money failed.

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