Law Schools, Small Law Firms, Solo Practitioners

Why Do Law Schools Ignore Solo And Small Law Firms As A Source Of Summer Employment For Students?

If so many lawyers are working as solos, maybe law schools should prepare them to work as solos.

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lawyer suit need a jobIn another week or two, law school will be out for the summer, and rising first- and second-year students will disperse to summer jobs ranging from the brass-ring, highly paid summer associate positions at AmLaw 100 firms to equally prestigious but unpaid internships at D.A. and Public Defenders’ offices, non-profits, and every other type of law-related job in-between. Of course, there are also the law students who weren’t fortunate enough to find paying summer work in their field or have the luxury of working for free — so many in this group will find themselves accepting the same types of jobs as college students — painting houses, tutoring, working at camps or nanny’ing — just to pay the bills.

But if my experience is any indication, there’s one place that law students won’t be heading for the summer: to solo and small law firms. And if my experience is any indication, law school placement offices are squarely to blame.

Nearly every year for the past eight or nine years, I’ve dutifully contacted law school placement offices in the hopes of hiring one or two summer associates. Because of the nature of my practice, it can be tough to predict exactly what summers will be working on. But generally, a standard summer agenda would include at least one or more of the following: appeals before federal circuit courts anywhere in the country, a trial or motions practice in federal or state court; a multi-party administrative hearing before a regulatory agency; or research of novel constitutional issues such as whether certain renewable energy incentives run afoul of the Commerce Clause, whether eminent domain for private gas infrastructure violates the Takings Clause or whether a federal agency overstepped the limits of its authority and trampled on due process rights. Other summers, my clerks have accompanied me to community meetings of 200 landowners in rural locations and counseled landowners on protecting their rights, or visited the site of a proposed pipeline or solar farm or marine renewables project. And if it turns out that there’s nothing really exciting going on, I’ll ask my summers to attend industry conferences or oral arguments and administrative proceedings and summarize them for my law firm’s popular newsletter. More recently, I’ve started offering all hires 10 or 20 percent time to use as they see fit — to write a journal article or go on informational interviews with potential employers.

Granted, I don’t pay biglaw salaries for summer associates. The compensation that I offer is more in line with what a non-profit or judicial clerkship pays full-time first years (on a pro rata basis for summer) — which is more than what many of these organizations pay for the summer — which is zero. Yet career offices stupidly prefer to place students in free positions with government offices or non-profits rather than paid positions at small firms because the career counselors believe that students will acquire more substantive work experience, not to mention, a chance to be hired full-time.

But at least with regard to my firm, the opposite is true. The only reason that I even bother to hire for the summer is to provide students with a substantive experience. Like many solos, I already have admin support, and I rely heavily on technology — so I don’t need a student to organize paper files or help transition my office from paper to paper-less — tasks often assigned to non-profit and government interns.

Likewise, while I often can’t hire students full-time, neither can most non-profits or trade associations who use law students for a summer and send them packing. But I can do something even placement offices can’t: help students find permanent employment almost anywhere in my industry. As a small firm lawyer in a specialized industry, I know and have developed good relationships with everyone — from government lawyers, Biglaw attorneys and non-profits. That’s how I generate referrals that pay my bills. As such, the dozen or so law clerks who have worked for me on a short-term basis in the past have gone on to jobs at regulatory agencies, big firms and non-profits both because those organizations recognized my firm’s name and because I was willing to personally make calls on my former associate’s behalf.

Not only do law schools fail to actively recruit solo and small firms to hire students, they don’t make it particularly easy for those solos and smalls who want to hire to access students. There’s not a single law school that I can find that maintains an online database of résumés of students still looking for employment that I could look through on my own to find potential candidates. Meanwhile, many law school placement offices don’t have even a direct email for a prospective employer to send a job listing; instead, there’s a contact box which necessitates an added round of communication. By now, I wonder whether my ads are even posted at all — because even in an era of supposedly rampant unemployment, I’ve never received more than four responses to an ad submitted to law school placement offices in the D.C. area. True, I’m no Gloria Allred or Gerry Spence or Skadden Arps, but I hardly think that working for firm like mine — a national energy practice that works on prominent, cutting edge cases and is regularly featured in the industry press — is a fate worse than College Painters or Nannies Are Us.

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In addition, law schools could place even more students in jobs if they were willing to give credit or offer grants to students accepting employment for solos who aren’t able to pay. Many solos would love an opportunity to show a student the ropes — and to have someone who could help them gain a web presence or create substantive content by summarizing cases or observing trials or listening to oral arguments and reporting on them in the firm newsletter or scheduling meet and greets with other law firms. Yet, the last time I inquired about having a law student handle that kind of work, I was bluntly informed by the snooty career counselor that “Law students are not allowed to engage in marketing as part of an internship program.” Sure — let’s allow law students to continue to believe that business will materialize magically like manna instead of having to be cultivated over time. That is probably the most valuable lesson that I ever learned as a summer associate: watching a prominent partner call a desired client, be rebuffed, call again, be rebuffed again until he reeled that big fish in the door.

At a time when law school employment was below 60 percent in 2015, I cannot fathom why the majority of law school career offices do not make ANY effort to try to match law students to solo and small firm lawyers willing to hire them for the summer, or to subsidize salaries for jobs with solos who are willing to hire but can’t afford to (as is done for public interest positions).  With 62 percent of lawyers working in solo and small firm practice, it’s a market too big for law schools to ignore. And yet they do — to the detriment of law students desperately seeking work experience and the solo and small firms willing to hire them if law schools didn’t put up so many roadblocks.

Carolyn ElefantCarolyn Elefant has been blogging about solo and small firm practice at MyShingle.comsince 2002 and operated her firm, the Law Offices of Carolyn Elefant PLLC, even longer than that. She’s also authored a bunch of books on topics like starting a law practice, social media, and 21st century lawyer representation agreements (affiliate links). If you’re really that interested in learning more about Carolyn, just Google her. The Internet never lies, right? You can contact Carolyn by email at elefant@myshingle.comor follow her on Twitter at @carolynelefant.

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