Law Schools

The Law School Career Services Office: Where Dreams (Or Nightmares) Begin

The career services office is an entity that has taken on a newfound importance in the post-recession legal economy.

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Ed. note: Please welcome Nicholas Alexiou to our pages. He will be writing about the importance of the law school career services office, and providing some tips and tricks for law students.

Greetings from the Office of Career Services.  For you law school graduates, it is that place you remember with a feeling somewhere on the spectrum between eternal gratitude and disdain.  For those of you who have not yet dealt with the unique breed of fright that comes from 1L, think of law school career services as in the same vein as your high school guidance office (though student advising is only a portion of the job), but, you know, competent.  My name is Nicholas Alexiou, and I am the Director of LL.M. and Alumni Advising as well as the Associate Director of Career Services at Vanderbilt Law School.  I am pleased to be joining the team here at Above the Law to give you a peak into Career Services, an entity that has taken on a newfound importance in the post-recession legal economy as legal jobs have become harder to come by and as law school has shifted from an intellectual exercise for students still trying to determine their career path into a full-throated professional school.

When I first discussed the idea for this column with Elie, Joe, and Kathryn (full disclosure: all three have been close friends for more than a decade), the pitch they made was relatively straightforward: none of us have been in law school for a long time, so while we speculate what law school is like for the Class of 2020, you are actually there each and every day and are thus uniquely situated to share some insights.  For current law students, or those of you considering law school, I plan to use this space at Above the Law to write about the current legal market and how you can best situate yourself for the legal career path you desire.  For you lawyers out in the “real world,” I will write about issues surrounding switching jobs in a rapidly changing legal market.  For those of you with no real connection to the law, um . . . there will be lots of GIFs.

By now, many of you are probably asking yourselves, who are you and why are you here?  Perhaps more importantly, you might be wondering why you should listen to anything I have to say.  As I tell my first-year students each October, there is nothing I can do to force you to listen to my advice.  However, I am an NYU Law graduate (yes, there is an NYU Law mafia coming to take over Above the Law and force Brian Dalton to finally declare it to be the top law school in the state of New York) who has clerked for an Article III judge, worked in Biglaw, the non-profit sector, and now legal academia (or at least academia adjacent, which if you are familiar with the physical layout of Vanderbilt Law, you know is true both figuratively and literally).  So, I have had my toes in many different streams of the legal profession.

Introductions out of the way, let’s discuss a timely topic, 1L summer jobs.  First-year law students across the country are deep into their second semester (those of you on the quarter system may very well still be on Winter Break or started 2L for all I know).  For many, the excitement of closing the book on 1L is met with the trepidation of what job they should have for this summer.  For all of you 1Ls out there, take a deep breath.  As a general matter, what you do with your 1L summer is not that important.  Now, as with most matters, there are a number of caveats to that statement, but provided you do something in the legal vein this summer, you should still be well positioned for 2L summer employment.

The biggest of the aforementioned caveats is that your 1L summer job needs to be in the legal realm.  Interning for a judge?  Great.  Working for corporate in-house counsel?  Sounds good.  Working for a U.S. Attorney’s Office/Federal Public Defender?  That’s what I did.  Backpacking around Vietnam?  Bad idea.  While you never know who you might run into at a bún chả restaurant in Hanoi (the importance of networking will be a subject for a later column), legal employers want to see that you spent your first summer in law school developing your legal skills (i.e., research and writing), which is probably not going to happen after a summer of pho consumption.  Save that for your bar trip.

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The second caveat is for those students who want to pursue a career in public interest directly after graduating.  First, I absolutely salute public interest lawyers and those current students considering that path.  There are a large number of people in this country who desperately need access to quality counsel, but are unable to find anyone to represent them.  If you are thinking about going down this road, you should ideally spend your first summer in the public interest arena.  This will allow you to rapidly develop your skills while getting a first-hand look at what public interest lawyering actually entails.  In addition, there will be some public interest employers who chafe at the idea of hiring someone who has worked in the private sector.

The final caveat is that for those students who are seeking to go into private practice after graduation, a number of law firms are starting to shift away from the traditional model of only hiring 2L summer associates, instead bringing a higher number of 1L summers into the fold.  Indeed, some firms have abandoned 2L hiring entirely, instead hiring only 1L summers, while other firms are making permanent post-graduate employment offers.  If some of these firms are at the top of your “Places I Would Like to Work” list, then you will want to try to work there your 1L summer.

Something I will repeat for the life of this column is that my opinions on the range of subjects that I tackle are merely that.  While I would like to think that said opinions are well-informed, I also realize that the situations that I encounter at Vanderbilt will be vastly different for students at other law schools or lawyers in other parts of the country.  For both law students and lawyers, I urge you to reach out to your school’s Career Services Office.  Your career counselors are best situated to deal with your particular issues and needs.

That being said, I welcome your feedback.  For this column to grow and thrive, I am counting on you, the reader, to let me know what you want to read about.  You have already been Person of the Year, so helping to guide the future of this column would seem to be an easy lift.  Send thoughts, critiques, questions, etc. to abovethelawcso@gmail.com.

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Nicholas Alexiou is the Director of LL.M. and Alumni Advising as well as the Associate Director of Career Services at Vanderbilt University Law School. He will, hopefully, respond to your emails at abovethelawcso@gmail.com.

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