Top 8 Reasons That Solos Should Hire A Law Student This Summer
You owe it to yourself to hire a summer.
With Memorial Day heralding the official start of summer, there’s something that all solo lawyers (meaning true solos who operate a law firm of one) should do: hire a law student. With the legal job market still shrinking, it’s a challenge for many law students to find paid summer employment to gain experience that could help them land a position in the future. Hiring a law student lends a hand to the up and coming generation — but it’s not a gesture of charity because you’ll gain just as much from hiring a student as you give. And with that, here are the top eight reasons that you should hire a law student this summer.
1. Create Content to Last Throughout the Year Most solos are so busy serving clients that their marketing initiatives can fall through the cracks — with devastating consequences when they hit those inevitable dry spells. But many of these marketing initiatives are readily delegated to summer law students. If you already have a blog or newsletter, law students can find content and write updates. But law students can help out even for projects that have been on your to-do list but you haven’t had a chance to start. For example, this summer, I tasked one of my summer clerks with curating and writing a newsletter on Blockchain and the Energy Sector. Moreover, newsletters aren’t the only form of content that you can ask law students to create. Other projects that law students can assist with include researching and writing law review articles and how-to guides for prospective clients, and summaries of recent key cases in your practice area. Have the law student create enough content so that you can stockpile it and continue to distribute it even after your student has gone back to school.
2. Law Students and Social Media Related to content, law students can also assist with starting or continuing a firm social media campaign. Students can set up news feeds and find interesting articles to share on different social media sites. A few years ago, I tasked a student intern with my trade association to spend a day walking around DC and photographing the buildings where our organization did business so that we could post them on our Pinterest page. Likewise, you could send a law student to the courthouses where you practice, your favorite lunch spots, and other sites in your city and post photos on Instagram or Snapchat to give potential clients or future employees some insight into a typical “day in the life.”
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3. Law Students As First Cut Every day, solos are bombarded with emails about interesting CLEs or webinars that they may not have the time to attend. Or they may want to check out an oral argument or legislative hearing on an issue that they track for clients. Even though all this content is recorded and available online, it can take several hours to rifle through just a week’s worth of materials. Here, I’ve found that law students can be helpful in taking a “first cut” — listening to the material and summarizing the highlights. Based on the summaries, I can weed through those events that I may want to listen to first-hand, and if not, I still have the highlights summarized for my files.
4. Law Students As Technology Guides Take a page out of global law firm Reed Smith’s playbook, which hired a summer technology associate to develop projects to help the firm innovate delivery of legal services. Solos can likewise use law students to implement workflows, set up self-scheduling systems for clients, and experiment with document automation. A few summers ago, I used my summer associate team to get me set up to use my iPad for a federal district court trial.
5. Law Students As A Wingman If you don’t like networking alone, law students make excellent wingmen. You can bring law students along to networking events or lunches with colleagues and use them as an excuse to approach someone you haven’t seen in a while. For relatively new solos, bringing an associate along serves as a status symbol — a way to show off that you’re doing so well that you needed to hire staff.
6. Law Students Are Inexpensive and Offer Great ROI Best of all, law students are affordable for most solos. Depending upon your geographic area, you should be able to hire students for between $15 and $30 an hour — or between $3000 and $5000 for a full-time, six-week stint. And while these law student summer salaries are not small potatoes, particularly for solos just starting out, if you managed to bring in just three $2000 matters from a newsletter or article, you’d double your investment. Moreover, keep in mind that you don’t have to hire law students full time. In fact, by this point, some law students may have committed to unpaid legal internships or non-legal positions and might appreciate an opportunity to put in ten or fifteen hours a week handling projects for your firm.
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7. Law Students Will Allow You To Enjoy Your Summer Solo lawyers who don’t take a break are prone to burn out — yet few can afford long vacations and missing out on billable work. But with law students staffing the office — responding to simple client inquiries or filing perfunctory notices, you just might free up enough time for a few three-day weekends, or half days on Friday — and that may be all it takes to rejuvenate yourself.
8. Hiring Law Students Lets You Pay It Forward Most of us solos have had at least one or two people in our professional lives who hired us for our first job, or referred us a six-figure case. By hiring law students, we honor those who helped us get our start by paying it forward and reaching out a hand to those who come after us. During my twenty-something years owning my own firm, at least two dozen students and new grads have passed through the doors as contract workers, associates, and summer hires. After working for me, all have gone on to positions in government, or Biglaw, or on the Hill, or as judicial law clerks.
And that just might be what I love most about hiring law students. After all, who needs a feel-good summer blockbuster when you can get all the feels just by hiring a law student for the summer.
Carolyn 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 [email protected]or follow her on Twitter at @carolynelefant.
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