Law Schools

On The Road Again

The best interactions with employers often comes from face to face contact.

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Anyone who works in legal recruiting, and specifically in Career Services, will tell you that the most prominent feature of the job is interacting with different groups of people.  Be it students that you counsel, employers who hire those students, or law school administrators who control the purse strings, the hallmark of the job is personal engagement.  This stands in sharp contrast to, say, a law firm associate, especially one relatively early in their career, who often spends most of their day in front of a computer pouring through documents or drafting memoranda.  It is also why stories like the one Joe Patrice recently wrote on coming legal automation cause me less personal agita than might be suspected. 

But as is the case for many in the modern world, much of my interaction with those outside of the law school takes place through non-personal media, e.g., email — less so via the telephone, because phone calls are bad.  This is especially true at a school such as Vanderbilt which sends its students and graduates to positions across the country; there is no way to properly manage all of those relationships without electronic contact.  However, while email and similar means of communication allow for a voluminous amount of contact, there is something missing.  Much like I can best advise a student when they are sitting on opposite sides of my desk, or sometimes shoulder to shoulder in the hallway, the best interactions with employers often comes from face to face contact.  That is why last week, I traveled to Washington, DC, where I was one of the few people working with pay as I visited a handful of legal employers. 

While I enjoy any chance to visit the city in which served as my home for 11 years, and also houses the unique wonder known as Dan’s Cafe, this was a business trip first and foremost with specific goals.  Perhaps the greatest benefit to what was kindly, and correctly, deemed by a law firm contemporary as “the smile tour,” was the chance to talk face to face.  Being able to put a face with a name in one’s email inbox will often take a working relationship to the next level.  Even if one’s meeting is with a colleague they see on a semi-frequent basis, reconnecting in person will only strengthen the relationship.  Meeting face to face also allows for frank discussions of various issues.  Over the course of seven scheduled meetings, how many do you think touched on the recent abandonment of the NALP Guidelines?  Here’s a hint

Less tectonic shifts can, and are, also discussed.  These meetings give me the opportunity to learn about an employer in ways that are valuable to students.  How many summer associates will you have this year?  What practice areas at the firm are growing over the next 12 months?  What is the best way students can demonstrate a passion for this sort of public interest work?  Conversely, employers can dig into some details about law schools.  How does this 1L class compare to years past?  What are the standout areas of the curriculum?  Which professors should I reach out to for questions about students?  These are all critical pieces of information for those on both sides of the recruiting game.

In-person visits should also not be limited to those employers or schools with whom you already have an existing relationship.  In my limited time at Vanderbilt, there has been no better way to forge new recruiting relationships with employers than via face to face meetings.  It is there that both parties get a chance to pitch each other.  Why should your firm take our students?  Why should we advise our students to work at your firm?  Sometimes these questions are easily answered while other times it takes some lengthy hashing out.  However, if successful, a new, mutually beneficial, recruiting pipeline can be established

While the crux of the in-person visit will be the face to face conversation, there is a good amount of valuable information to be gleaned from just being in the building.  Take a look around the office.  Does it seem run down and in desperate need of a paint job?  Perhaps that points to an employer with some financial instability.  Are attorneys doubling or tripling up offices, seemingly bursting at the seams?  That could be a firm with a lot of work to go around and is in the midst of a hiring binge.  Do the people you meet with seem happy?  How about the attorneys you can observe walking around.  Are they engaging with others or do they have a glazed look in their eye that screams they haven’t slept, nor seen the sun, in the last 72 hours.  These are all valuable pieces of information which I can pass along to students to help refine their job search and make employment choices.

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So even though the weather seems to be in a Hoth-like state and the thought of waiting through multi-hour security lines at the airport, staffed by an ever-shrinking number of unpaid TSA officers, might send a larger shiver up your spine than the weather will, make a plan to visit some of your contacts in person.  It will be well worth the time and effort.

(The views of this column do not necessarily represent those of Vanderbilt University Law School.)

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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