BY DAVID C. JAMES
Although you're not very far into the school year, the fall recruiting season is well underway. If you need a job next summer and you haven't already checked in with your career development office, get in there. For many of you, the job you get next summer will strongly influence--if not determine--the course of your legal career for a long time to come.
The conventional wisdom among some law students is that the fall on-campus interview process works only for students with a high class standing. As a result, students who are not at the top of their class sometimes don't vie for on-campus interviews. Don't adopt that kind of self-defeating strategy. No matter what your class standing is, visit the career development professionals at your school and take full advantage of their resources, including the resume drop for on-campus interviews.
According to the National Association for Law Placement, law schools should not offer placement services to first-semester students before Nov. 1. Because part-time students are the exception to that rule, part-time students can get a jump on looking for a job as a law clerk. You need not suppose you are a second-class citizen where being hired as a lawyer is concerned, either. Many firms--and especially government and public interest organizations--are happy to hire lawyers who graduate from part-time programs. But, like your full-time colleagues, you need clerking experience to be most marketable. If you are a first-year student, no doubt you are well aware that, compared with second- and third-year students, you are not very marketable. It should be some consolation that there is not as much riding on what you do next summer. You have the greatest flexibility; you are in the enviable position of being able to use the summer to get your feet wet, trying out one or more kinds of law practice. Everyone knows it's difficult for first-year students to find a paid clerking position. So if an offer for a paid position comes along, you may have to take what you can get. Many first-year students don't really know which areas of the law to rule in or rule out anyway. Though you may think you have no interest in corporate law, litigation or whatever, after doing it for a summer you may find that you thoroughly enjoy it. And if you don't, well, you've learned a valuable lesson about what you should rule out when it's time to look in earnest for a position.
Finding an employer who pays first-year students is not your only alternative for summer employment. For those of you with competitive grades, one particularly attractive alternative is to apply for a public interest fellowship. You can get terrific legal experience in public interest organizations.
A couple of years ago, I had a first-year student write and ask me, a government employer, whether I would be interested in having him work for me for nothing. He explained that he had been awarded a fellowship that would pay him for working in the public interest. Do I let a law student who is doing well in school work full-time in the summer at no expense to me? What a no-brainer. I was eager to get him.
He did a great job and parlayed the opportunity into a paying job the next summer as part of our regular summer program for second-year students. Now I routinely refer first-year students to their school for fellowships. While not every applicant gets one, some succeed.
If you can't find a firm or a fellowship, consider volunteering. Many law firms that won't hire first-year students are happy to have volunteers. If you can't afford to volunteer full-time, volunteer part-time and pay the bills with a nonlegal part-time job. If you can afford to volunteer full-time, consider a "split summer."
One good combination would be working half-time for a judge and working half-time somewhere else (disclosing each placement to the other, of course, scrupulously avoiding any conflicts). Many employers who would not approve a split summer for second-year students are open to it for first-years. While employers court second-year students hoping they will become the firm's future associates, employers look at first-year students as short-term help.
Students often ask me whether volunteering is a good way to get offered a paying job. It depends. If you want an offer from employers who say the best way to get a job with them is to get in the door as a volunteer, it makes sense to volunteer. But don't overgeneralize the proposition that volunteering leads to a paying job. If your purpose in volunteering is to get hired, don't volunteer until you've established that the employer would consider hiring you. Some employers will allow you to volunteer even though they don't think you're competitive for a job offer based on your credentials--or they don't intend to hire anyone.
When first-year students take the summer off to relax or make money doing something not related to the law, most legal employers won't hold it against them. But that's the last hiatus you can take from the law without having some serious explaining to do the next time you try to find legal employment. Because the market is still so tight, you need every edge you can get. Clerking after your first year of law school may be the decisive edge when you compete for next summer's position.
At the end of that first summer, you no sooner return to school before it's time to start dropping resumes for next summer's job. And unlike the job after your first year, how you spend the summer after your second year will likely have great consequences for your legal career.
Employers that participate in on-campus recruiting are not interviewing simply to fill their summer clerking needs. They are looking for a long-term association, for students eager to return as lawyers. Of course, summer associateships don't always lead to a position as a lawyer. Either party, student or employer, can decide that the summer experience was not all they hoped it would be. Summer positions are tryouts. For students and employers alike, success means the same thing--a summer capped with an offer and acceptance of a job as a lawyer. If you've clerked during the summer after your second year and you do not receive, or you decline, an offer to come back as a lawyer, you need to make the most of your final fall recruiting season. Don't handicap yourself by forgoing on-campus and other fall interviewing opportunities. Every year, after I spend September and October interviewing more than a hundred applicants, invariably would-be applicants contact me in the spring. It's too late. I don't have any positions available.
Where have these students been? Some assume that because I'm a public employer I don't recruit in the fall. Don't rely on generalizations about when certain kinds of employers hire; rely on research!
If in the fall of your third year you don't have a lawyer position lined up, you should be pulling out all the stops hunting for a job. Use the fall recruiting season for all it's worth. If you don't get a job offer in the fall, keep searching through the spring. You do yourself a disservice if you wait until passing the bar exam to look for a job. By opting out of the process, you simply improve the odds for your industrious competitors.
Once you're in your last year of law school, you're not just looking for a summer job. After you take the bar exam, you want to clerk for an employer who has offered you a job leading to a position as a lawyer. Employers have more at stake when offering jobs than when offering clerking positions. Before an employer offers you a job as a lawyer, you will have to meet an even higher standard than it takes to be offered a position as a clerk.
Don't miss the moral of this story: As ill-conceived as it may seem, the fall of your second year of law school is the best time to set yourself up for the job you want.
If you're a first- or second-year student, consider this fair warning. If you're a third-year student and you don't have a position lined up, there's no better time than the present. Head straight for your career development office. Working with your school's career development professionals should be an integral part of your job-hunting strategy.
David C. James (scribedave@aol.com), a longtime member of the National Association for Law Placement and a frequent lecturer on job-hunting strategies for lawyers, is the hiring lawyer in the Office of the San Diego City Lawyer. Each year, he interviews up to 150 applicants for legal positions in the office.