Ed. note: Welcome to the latest installment of “Notes from the Breadline,” a column by a laid-off lawyer in New York. Prior columns are collected here. You can reach Roxana St. Thomas by email (at roxanastthomas@gmail.com), follow her on Twitter, or find her on Facebook.
One time, early in my stint in the breadline, I interviewed for a position at a New York non-profit organization. The interview, with members of the organization’s steering committee, was held at the plush offices of a Wall Street law firm – a setting so genteel, so prim, that I immediately felt underdressed despite my perfectly respectable interview suit and conservative heels. All the women who passed through the reception area were wearing knee-length skirt suits and pantyhose; the men looked as though they had come from a photo shoot for Brooks Brothers. The walls were hung with portraits of stately, gray-haired firm elders, hunting scenes, and graceful horses who, I suspected, had pedigrees much more distinguished than my own. I was reading a tattered copy of the previous week’s New Yorker while I waited, and I remember feeling sheepishly self-conscious — both because I hadn’t gotten through a lengthy article about Iceland’s post-financial crash identity, and because I wasn’t reading something … weightier, like The Economist, or the Harvard Business Review.
How, you ask, did I have time to read, reflect, and observe a cross-section of the firm’s personnel? Well, friends: when you spend 45 minutes perched on an uncomfortable settee, waiting for your name to be called, there is little else to do. Eventually, of course, I did make it into the conference room where the interview was being held; once there, I was greeted by five lawyers, all of whom were talking at once. To each other. In fact, I found myself wondering, at various junctures, whether they were aware that I had joined them. One lawyer asked me a complicated question and then (without skipping a beat) answered his ringing cell phone and had a lengthy conversation. I tried to shift focus seamlessly by turning to address the others, but two of them were BlackBerrying while another listened to voicemail messages. When I finally stood up to say my goodbyes, they told me that they were impressed with my qualifications and hoped that I could come back to meet with the members of the steering committee who had been unable to make it to the interview that day. “That would be great!” I said enthusiastically. Perhaps, I mused, given the general level of attentiveness I had observed, they were hoping to organize a flag football scrimmage, and simply needed a few more people to work with (as well as a captive audience, or a referee).
As a new arrival to the breadline, this experience left me with a few thoughts. Among them were, “Are interviews always this suck-ass, or was this a freakish anomaly?” and “Is there a sliver lining in all of this?” Like a convoluted legal argument, the answer to the latter of these questions resolves the first inquiry as well. As I have discovered in the intervening months, there is not a single “silver lining” in all of this, but many, including: freedom from the oppressive sartorial conventions of the workplace, the luxury of dropping by Lat’s office for a mid-day drink from the coffee fountain, and the (admittedly mixed) blessing of life in a lower tax bracket. These perks, however, pale in comparison to one, particularly luminous reward, which I consider the most spangly of all silver linings.
And what might that be?

Continue reading “Notes from the Breadline: Always Seem to Get Things Wrong (Part II)”

Ed. note: Welcome to the latest installment of “Notes from the Breadline,” a column by a laid-off lawyer in New York. Prior columns are collected here. You can reach Roxana St. Thomas by email (at roxanastthomas@gmail.com), follow her on Twitter, or find her on Facebook.
The news that filters down to the breadline these days can be confusing. “The recession is over!” some sources promise blithely. The recession may not be over, warn others, but “even stagnation would be better than recent history.” (Anecdotal evidence of stagnation — blessed, welcome stagnation — follow, substituting for tales of hope.)
In the legal press, though, the forecast is decidedly more circumspect. Bloodletting may have slowed at the nation’s law firms, but, between rumors of the billable hour’s demise and free-floating anxiety about the future of associate pay, the recession is far from receding into the distance in our collective rearview mirror.
I have been seeing a new recruiter, one in a string of casual liaisons which — like online dates — offer much promise initially, but usually stall after the second or third encounter. (Like the others, she was relentlessly positive and showered me with complements, and … well, I ended up showing her my résumé on the first date.) I decide to ask her whether she thinks the end of the recession has come to our corner of the professional world.
“Well,” says the recruiter (whose name, fortuitously, is Faith), “a lot of my clients are back to running ads and soliciting resumes. But they’re not necessarily hiring.” A long pause follows, and she adds, “Yet.”
“Are they interviewing?” I ask. She answers carefully, telling me brightly that, yes, “some people have gone on interviews, here and there!” In other words, I translate silently: no.

Continue reading “Notes from the Breadline: Always Seem to Get Things Wrong (Part I)”

Ed. note: Welcome to the latest installment of “Notes from the Breadline,” a column by a laid-off lawyer in New York. Prior columns are collected here. You can reach Roxana St. Thomas by email, at roxanastthomas@gmail.com, or find her on Facebook.

After a few weeks of unemployment, I begin to wonder whether some sort of sporadic dysfunction is affecting my ability to receive email. Specifically, while I am able to peruse every available resource for potential job openings, the résumés I submit seem to drop into an online supernova black hole. Occasionally, I get a confirmation message indicating that my résumé has been received, but, as a general matter, I hear nothing but the sound of silence.

Where do they go? I wonder. Are they floating lazily in space, along with billions of unwanted headshots submitted by New York’s considerable legion of actor/singer/dancer/waiters? Are they in a virtual file cabinet somewhere, turning virtually yellow and brittle at the edges? Or do they go straight into a giant “deleted items” folder? Perhaps the beleaguered legal employers, in an effort to capitalize on economies of scale, have set up a single, huge data landfill, where cover letters indicating a willingness to be “flexible as to class year,” accompanied by finely honed (and embellished) résumés, can be gathered and stored. If the shrinking corps of presently-employed lawyers is wiped out by bird flu, raptured, or disabled by an epidemic of carpal tunnel syndrome, they will definitely get back to us … right?

So I am pleasantly surprised when I get an email from a potential employer, asking me whether I am available for a telephone interview. The job, which I heard about through a friend, is in the legal department of a publishing company, and although they are looking for an experienced litigator, the position does not involve actual practice. A year ago, I would not have considered it; but, given my present circumstances, I am delighted. I respond to the HR person’s email, wondering how to temper my desperation enough to avoid sounding, well, desperate. I settle on an answer that reflects both desperation and lawyerly faux courtesy, telling her that I am available later that day, the next morning, any time the following day, “or whatever works for you.” She schedules the phone interview, which will be conducted by Scott, the lawyer who heads the department, for the following morning.

Find out how Roxana’s chat with Scott went, after the jump.

Continue reading “Notes from the Breadline: And So Begins the Task”