In-House Counsel, Job Searches

The Road Not Taken: Getting Out

Is one of your resolutions to get a job, either a first job out of law school or changing jobs -- maybe even one outside the legal profession? Here's some advice for you.

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Jobs questionsIt’s a new year and the cultural inertia inspires us to change our lives for the better. Did you make your resolutions? Is one of your resolutions to get a job, either a first job out of law school or changing jobs? The current unemployment rate is 5%. Legal industry employment still hasn’t rebounded to pre-recession levels.

What does this mean for you? It means you might have an easier time finding a job outside the legal industry than within it.

“Sacrilege,” you say. “You should be embarrassed to even think a person could live with a job that is less than being a lawyer.”  I know. I read Above The Law (and the comments) too. A job that is anything other than “lawyer” is admitting defeat and is absolute proof that said person is not as intelligent/deserving/possessing the minimal criteria for compassion. Let’s ignore that fallacy for now — we’ll get to it later in this series. The people who judge those who take jobs outside the legal industry aren’t paying your bills and aren’t bringing joy to your life.

If you’ve decided to leave the industry this year, or want to start investigating a departure, you may feel overwhelmed and lost. You may also feel alone. You may have already discovered your law school career services office is less than helpful with developing a non-legal résumé, or investigating opportunities outside the legal industry. Law school career services offices generally do not have an incentive to find students and alumni jobs outside of the legal industry and, for the most part, may not be equipped to do so either (a broad generalization).

To add to the frustration, if you’ve never had to work to find a job after law school, you may not know how to find a non-legal, professional job. If you got your first legal job through OCI, then changed once or twice with a recruiter, or even on your own, you may not fully understand what goes into a non-legal job search. There’s a reason for the saying, “finding a job is a full-time job.”  

You’ve made the decision to leave. You have a map, but half of it is missing. And it’s in a different language. It will take some time. It will take some work. But it is possible.

First things first, what do you want to do? Specifically, what do you want? Not just, “a job” or “a job that makes lots of money” or “a job I don’t hate.” Literally, what do you want to do? In your day, what is it you want to do? Do you even know? How do you figure out what you want to do?

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Start looking at job postings. Create a document to collect job descriptions. Pick random geographic regions and see what comes up. Don’t worry about whether you are actually qualified for the job or even if the job is in your geographic location. Right now, you are only gathering information. Any job that attracts your attention, goes in this document. The whole job description. Don’t analyze, just feel. This document is going to end up being many pages. If it is less than 20 pages, you haven’t found enough jobs — keep looking.

Next week, we’ll talk about what you are going to do with this list.

Celeste Harrison Forst has practiced in small and mid-sized firms and is now in-house at a large manufacturing and technology company where she receives daily hugs from her colleagues. You can reach Celeste directly at [email protected].

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