Continuing Legal Education / CLE, Law Schools, Small Law Firms, Solo Practitioners

What You Can Do While You’re A Lawyer (Part 1): Teaching

Once you’ve been a lawyer for a while, opportunities to teach are out there if you want them, according to columnist Gary J. Ross.

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Gary J. Ross

Gary J. Ross

There are a lot of reasons being a lawyer is great. For starters, the money. And the money. And oh yes, don’t forget: the money. But besides these three reasons, law gives us the opportunity to do many different things, all within the confines of a legal career.

And I’m not talking about part-time jobs. It would be a lazy column if I just rattled off a bunch of part-time jobs or dug up examples of attorneys moonlighting as [fill-in-the-blank]. I’m talking about things you can do other than practice law, that are related to but not exactly practicing law, but most of which will have the effect of making you a better lawyer.

Teacher

To me this is the most obvious one. Maybe your mother was a teacher (like mine). Or you taught school between undergraduate and law school and miss the interaction with students. Once you’ve been a lawyer for a while, opportunities to teach are out there if you want them.

CLEs are probably the easiest to break into. Often you can just send a CLE provider an email, with the classes you could possibly teach and a description of your relevant experience. Then get a PowerPoint ready and you’re off. You don’t have to be a superstar in your field, though if you’re not you probably need to start with some of the more obscure providers who are hungry for teachers. Most likely nearly everyone attending your class will have less experience than you in the particular subject you’re teaching, so you’ll be fine. If it’s a webinar, you will see questions that are asked, but the only other person who will see the question is the person who asked it, so you don’t have to answer if you don’t know it. (Or you can do what I do and have someone research the answer while you keep giving the presentation.) And let’s face it: almost everyone watching the presentation later will be doing something else, and only turning back to you every six minutes to click a button. There’s not a lot of pressure.

Teaching CLE helps get your name out there a bit, and it’s an easy way of beefing up your webpage and your LinkedIn and Avvo profiles. I teach CLEs, and though I don’t get many referrals from them and at most they’ll pay a nominal amount, they are good for getting used to explaining concepts, which helps with clients. We’re all different, but I find it a lot easier to do something than to explain it to someone. I can’t always put into words what’s going through my head when I mark up a document or do some kind of compliance check. Having practice breaking down, say, the requirements and restrictions of the 1940 Act into easily digestible pieces helps when I’m trying to explain to a potential client what they need to hire me to do for them.

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Based on my limited experience, unless you say something off the wall, you probably won’t get a lot of interaction with CLE attendees, which is something to keep in mind if you’re doing it to relive your past schoolteacher career. If you really want to teach and interact with students, you can take the next step and be an adjunct professor, though these positions have the double-whammy of being both harder to get and more time-consuming. But they also tend to be more rewarding, particularly if you have the opportunity to adjunct at your alma mater.

You could also be a “lecturer,” which is the title of one of my SmallLaw contacts (also a practicing attorney). I know it’s a step up from adjunct, but I’d rather have “professor” in my title. “Lecturer” sounds like you’re someone who walked in off the street, whereas not everyone knows adjuncts are paid peanuts. (Kind of like Fosters: apparently no respectable person in Australia drinks the stuff, but people elsewhere don’t know this.) In fact, if I ever adjunct I might be like that conductor in Seinfeld who made everyone call him “Maestro” and make everyone call me “Professor.”

Unless it constantly makes you unavailable, clients will like the fact that you teach. It provides reassurance that you might actually know what you’re doing, which could come in handy if your not-always-serious ATL column sometimes causes them to wonder. Edgar Dale’s Cone of Experience says you retain 10 percent of what you read, 20 percent of what you hear, 30 percent of what you see, and 90 percent of what you do, and in the last category he included designing a presentation. Ninety percent seems high, but I can imagine if you were an adjunct (or “lecturer”) teaching a subject a couple of hours a week for 14 weeks in a row, you’d really know the subject backwards and forwards, particularly if it dovetails with your law practice. So that is something else to keep in mind, and typically you won’t be considered any kind of thought leader in your practice area if you’re not teaching in some capacity.

I wrote a few of these, and while a few weeks ago I would have included them all in one monster column, ATL has requested I start abiding by the word limit again, so I’ll stop here for now.

Next week: small businessperson.

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Gary J. Ross opened his own practice, Jackson Ross PLLC, in 2013 after several years in Biglaw and the federal government. Gary handles corporate and securities matters for startups, large and small businesses, private equity funds, and investors in each, and also has a number of non-profit clients. You can reach Gary by email at Gary.Ross@JacksonRossLaw.com.

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