Small Law Firms

What Every New Law Graduate Needs: A Venmo Account

Opportunities abound for young lawyers ready to hustle.

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As the number of legal jobs for new law school graduates continue to shrink, several innovative law schools have stepped up to give their students a competitive edge in a tight market. For example, Suffolk Law School offers a Legal Innovation and Technology Concentration to prepare students for available jobs in e-discovery, compliance, or legal operations. Dan Linna’s Legal Tech Innovation Index lists forty other law school programs that are innovating the way that law is taught — both to foster positive change in the legal profession and also to improve their graduates’ odds of finding jobs.

Unfortunately, the majority of law students lack access to forward-looking law school programs that open the door to job opportunities. So, what’s a law student without a job graduating from a traditional law school and trained for positions which no longer exist to do? The solution is simple — and something that most college students are accustomed to using: Venmo.  Here’s why.

First and foremost, a Venmo account makes hiring a new law grad even for small projects a frictionless experience. Many practicing lawyers want to help unemployed graduates but don’t necessarily want to bring a newbie onboard full-time. With Venmo, a lawyer can use a law student for small tasks like proofing a brief or writing a couple of blog posts and zap over payment immediately. Sure, there are dozens of freelance lawyer sites — but many lawyers aren’t using those sites and may not want to go through the hassle of signing up to pay a new grad a few hundred dollars to update the firm website’s terms of service or add footnotes to an article.

Moreover, in contrast to freelance platforms, Venmo puts the new lawyer in control. Instead of passively waiting to be found on a freelance site, new grads armed with Venmo can create a menu of small tasks with different price points and hawk their services at a bar conference. I can tell you that I’d be so impressed by their initiative that I’d use their services whether I needed them or not — and I suspect that many of my colleagues would do the same.

For new grads more interested in starting a practice than working for others, Venmo has value too.  Lawyers could create a legal triage team, offering to eyeball the client’s file in a debt collection matter or uncomplicated eviction case, and speak to the judge on their behalf. Lawyers could charge $40-$60 just for the court proceeding — and while that doesn’t seem like much, it’s an opportunity to spend time in court and get some facetime with judges and other lawyers in the community while helping underserved clients at the same time.

Karl Marx may not have been a capitalist, but he understood that to have power in a capitalist society, workers needed to own the means of production. By taking ownership of the payment mechanism needed to facilitate transactions in a digital economy instead of being beholden to someone else’s platform or reliant on a future promise to pay, new law school graduates can seize upon tiny opportunities that others ignore, and which can eventually lay the foundation for more permanent employment.

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Carolyn ElefantCarolyn 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 elefant@myshingle.comor follow her on Twitter at @carolynelefant.

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