Conferences / Symposia, Health / Wellness, Job Searches, National Association for Law Placement (NALP)

The Touchiest-Feeliest Law Jobs Conference Of The Decade

Now that you have a job, how do you feel about it?

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(Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)

(Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)

The National Association for Law Placement (NALP) held its annual conference in San Fransisco last week. NALP is the conference where law school career services officers meet up with law firm recruiters to talk about how to get people jobs. When the recession hit, NALP was the hospice conference. As the “new normal” took hold, NALP was the place to share best practices.

This year I assume the legal hiring market is doing just fine because all anybody wanted to talk about was… feelings. How are students feeling? How are new associates feeling? Are law firms and schools helping their people manage those feelings? Here are some crayons, please draw your feelings. Seriously, turn off your phone and DRAW FEELINGS.

The most popular session, by a margin, was a talk on “Impostor Syndrome,” that feeling that you are a fraud. The much buzzed-about presentation featured Sally Olson, Chief Diversity Officer for Sidley Austin; Neha Sampat, Founder of GenLead Speakers; and Susanne Aronowitz, a career coach.

I feel like we’re all familiar with the impostor syndrome: “Any day somebody is going to realize that I’m making this up as I go along and don’t actually know what I’m doing.” As the panel made clear, feeling like an “impostor” is a pretty common feeling among “high achievers.”

Anyway, here’s a series of slides talking about how to “combat” the impostor syndrome. The third one pretty much sums up this entire conference.

NALP17 Imposter slides

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You are seeing that right, that last slide told employers to “help [associates] regularly recognize their accomplishments and internalize compliments.” Then there was a drawing of a heart and, in case that wasn’t subtle enough, the heart had a #1 badge on it.

It wasn’t just this panel. The opening plenary was given by Christine Carter, who has authored books such as The Sweet Spot: How To Find Your Groove At Home And At Work, and Raising Happiness: 10 Simple Steps for More Joyful Kids and Happier Parents. It was a conference of mindfulness and wellness, and given that the whole thing was in San Francisco, I was relieved that my plane home was powered by fossil fuels instead of rainbows and encouragement.

Given the focus, I take two broad conclusions on the state of legal hiring in 2017:

1. Things Are Fine.

I’ve been going to NALP since 2009. I’ve seen middle-tier CSO officers walk around that conference acting like they just found out that the cancer has spread to the anus. When law students can’t get jobs, these people care about jobs. This year, the crisis management was focused on the individuals, not the institutions. That can only mean that the institutions have settled into a comfortable hiring feedback loop.

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Remember: Whittier Law School collapsed in the middle of the conference. Lots of people were talking about it, but it wasn’t an earthquake. Obviously, the job market remains incredibly difficult for middling students at lower-ranked schools, but if you are a decent student at a decent institution, there is a job for you.

Trust me, if you are a 2L, you’d much rather your career service officers spend a week doing design-thinking workshops (an actual thing that happened this year) than spend a week trying to get the recruiting coordinator of a regional law firm to open up janitorial hiring to applicants with a law degree.

2. The Special Snowflakes Are Running The Asylum.

Fellow Gen Xers, in case you didn’t get the memo, nobody gives a rat f**k about you. Your generation is small compared to the still-hanging-on Baby Boomers and the overpowering Millennials. Your time in leadership will be short. Your culture will never be dominant. Sorry, you were born during the wrong years, better luck next life.

The obvious reason so many panels were focused on wellness and feelings is that wellness and feelings are the approved ways of retaining the Millennial workforce. That is the talent issue law firms are most concerned about.

The last two years, at NALP, there have been a number of panels about “integrating” Millennials into the general meat grinder of a Biglaw office. Now, we’re full onto changing the Biglaw office to meet the needs of Millennials. It’s an important and not-subtle shift.

You can scoff at the notion of helping Millennials “internalize compliments” as much as I do. But I don’t have to get Millennials to work for me. I don’t have to worry about training them only to see them take their skills to my competitor. If you are going to invest in young workers, you are going to want the option of retaining them. Respecting their feelings is, apparently, important to making them stay with your law firm. Breaking down hierarchical lines of communication is important. Providing creative opportunities is important.

Millennials aren’t in charge at law firms yet, but they will be. And their numbers are so great even as juniors that their wishes cannot be ignored. Whether your firm is able to interact with these people, on their terms, will have a lot to do with whether your firm retains its best talent. Nobody wants to be on the wrong side of that equation, so… either you update your review process to give actual feedback and constructive help, or you’re going to lose your people.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to take a yoga break. And meditate. And cleanse myself with a kale enema. Dr. Carter said that I need to build in time in my day where I can “slack strategically.” But slacking is the one thing MY generation has always been naturally good at.

Elie Mystal is an editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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