Curing The Post-Bar Exam No-Job Blues

You graduated from law school without a job, took the bar exam, and are wondering what the heck to do now. Here are some helpful hints.

In law school, you’re presented with one path: summer associate, law school graduation, law firm job, then in-house/government/partner or whatever the brass ring is for you. If you get knocked off that path, you’re screwed. If you just took the bar exam last week and you don’t have a job waiting for you, it’s over. Law school was clearly a waste of time and money.

But that’s ridiculous. There are many paths, to many different places, and it’s a little-known secret that even in Biglaw people took different paths to get there. They say you don’t have any control over where you start, but you do have control over where you end up. In this instance, you do have control over where you start, but you can’t sit back waiting for something to happen. You have to want it. There is no fate but what we make.

This is meant for those who — like me — graduated from law school without a job, took the bar exam, and are wondering what the heck to do now.

Constantly send out résumés. While Biglaw might be holding off on hiring for the next few months while they assess what they have and what their needs are, small law firms could have been waiting until the bar exam to start the recruiting process. (That was the case with me: I realized in early June I needed a full-time associate, but figured I should wait until after the bar exam to make a posting.) So now’s the time to strike.

And keep sending out your résumé, even to the firms that just sent you a rejection letter. What are they going to do? You’re already not working there. If the M&A group tells the in-house recruiter they need a new associate ASAP and your résumé happens to hit the recruiter’s inbox that afternoon, she might not care she just sent you a rejection letter the week before. And always send follow-up emails when you haven’t heard anything for a few weeks. “I am hopeful the firm is seriously considering my candidacy, as your firm is one of the firms in which I am most interested.” I got much more traction from my follow-up emails than my initial blasts.

Keep taking bar exams. The more jurisdictions you’re licensed in, the better. Think about it: less than a year from now you could have “Admitted in New York and California” on your résumé. Look at the webpage of any attorney, whether Biglaw or SmallLaw: it will always list the person’s jurisdictions. I’m not saying try to get admitted in 10 states, but if you took a bar exam last week and don’t have a job yet, there’s no reason not to sign up for an exam for February. And now will be the best time, since you’re not far removed from the studying and hopefully know how to answer the essay questions. I was doing doc review 80 hours a week and had no time to study, but fortunately, I was able to pass another bar exam that February. The further away from the bar exam you get, the harder it’s going to be to pass another one (without having to take a prep course).

Be geographically flexible. Maybe your dream is to be a lawyer in New York or Austin or San Francisco or some other hot spot, but you have to take a long view. You may very well have a 30-year legal career. Spending two years of it in some other town and then lateraling back to a good firm in your dream city would be way better for your career than spending years on the fringes of the legal field in your dream city.

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And stick with the cities. It’s easier to lateral from an established law firm in a city that’s considered a lower-tier legal market rather than a firm out in suburbia that no one’s ever heard of. In other words, I’d rather be trying to lateral to a top firm in New York from Akerman in Jacksonville than from “The Law Offices of [Fill-in-the-Blank]” in Garden City.

This is the main piece of advice I give to new grads that they’ll respond to with all kinds of excuses why they can’t do it. I have a spouse/partner, my family is here, I’ve never lived anywhere else, what about my Giants tickets, etc. If you’re unwilling to put your legal career first even for a short period of time when you’re first starting out, then you may very well be in for a career spent wondering why things aren’t working out for you.

No shame in doc review. Hey, you have to pay the bills. At least with doc review you’re surrounded by other attorneys, some of whom are new grads and just like you don’t plan on doing it any longer than they have to. Just don’t get stuck.  If I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t have been so concerned with getting the OT pay and would have spent more time going to bar association and other networking events.

Or staff attorney. A friend from my doc review days took a staff attorney position at the firm where we were all contract attorneys. (For those who don’t know, a staff attorney position is a non-partner track position at a law firm. Oftentimes they’re doing the same thing as contract attorneys, only it’s a permanent job. It’s generally not considered a stepping-stone to anything desirable.) He worked his butt off. When a hedge fund client asked one of the partners to recommend someone for a counsel job there, the partner didn’t recommend any of the associates but instead recommended my friend the staff attorney. He got the job, tripling his income and amazing the associates, who were stunned a staff attorney could land such a sweet in-house gig.

Do not, do not take a non-law job. Nothing’s impossible, but if you end up spending a year (or more) in a non-attorney job, trying to later lateral into an attorney job — at least anything half-way prestigious — is going to be tough. Law firms aren’t stupid: they know you didn’t learn anything useful in law school. You want to be able to show potential law firm (or other legal) employers that someone, somewhere, has taught you how to be a lawyer.

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By the way, now’s not the time to be overly concerned with money. A lawyer neighbor who was in the same boat I was in back then asked me what I was making as a doc reviewer. When I told her my pay, she scoffed and said, “I can make $50 an hour as a dog-walker.” (She was serious: she really was a dog-walker.) I confess I didn’t do any dog-walking research for today’s column, but it seems there would be a natural ceiling there in terms of what you can earn. She’s probably still making that $50/hour, whereas here I am bringing in these big ATL bucks.

What about starting your own firm? That’s a hard question to answer. I think the better way to start a legal career is to get a job at a firm first — any firm, doing anything — but launching your own practice is preferable to taking a non-law job. (Remember: anything is preferable to taking a non-law job.) Note that legal matters have a way of dragging out, and you don’t want to have to tell all the clients you worked so hard to get that you’ve taken a job at a firm and can’t take any of your matters with you, and so they all have to get other lawyers.

Be Happy. Last but not least, keep your chin up and a smile on your face. If you’re a sad sack and always talking about how life has doo-dooed on you (“No one is hiring, I don’t know what I’m going to do, law school was a huge mistake!”), people aren’t going to want to pass your name along to someone that has an opening, even if to your face they’ll say they will. Who wants to be responsible for a place hiring someone who’s going to bring everybody down? Instead tell everyone, “Things are great! I’m doing contract work at law firms, sending lots of résumés out, going to a ton of networking events, and I couldn’t be more excited about what the future holds! Life rocks!!” That’s someone people will think about when they hear of an opening.

Good luck.


Gary J. Ross is a partner at Ross & Shulga PLLC, which he co-founded in 2017 after running his own firm for four years and after several years in Biglaw and the federal government. Gary handles corporate and securities law matters for venture capital funds, startups, and other large and small businesses, as well as investors in each. You can reach Gary by email at Gary@RSglobal.law.