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The current employment market
As James Leipold, the executive director of the NALP mentions in their October bulletin, “you should not count on getting a job at a big law firm that pays $160,000 a year, even if you are at the top of your class. Those jobs are an increasingly small part of the pie, and you are much more likely to make $45,000 to $60,000 when you graduate than you are $160,000.”
However, Leipold goes on to say, and we fully agree with him, “a legal education can be a great pathway to a rewarding, challenging career, and can provide access to leadership opportunities throughout your life, whether they are in business, government, public service, or with a law firm.”
So, what should you be doing?
As a law student, you should start grooming yourself both for the practice as well as the business of law. This would mean learning how to run a business and marketing yourself. Usually, the industry advice to young lawyers was to start marketing themselves from day one. But today, if you are to make it, you need to start marketing yourself right from law school, and while you are a student.
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This means finding and selecting opportunities for advancing yourself and your interests including the right people, the right clinics, the right networks. It is difficult to say what is right for you, because that definition would vary from law student to law student, but it can be argued that what is right for you is where you find the greatest numbers of professionals, or the greatest probability of earning a livelihood aligned with your career objectives.
Time to do something more than studying and partying
Truly it's time to get serious and there are certain things you should be doing now:
- Start learning to dress for the court properly and start culturing the habit
- Decide on your available resources including material capital, human capital and social capital – in a lawyer's life social capital is of the utmost importance – it can make or break you
- Start on a business plan with available resources
- Learn what you can about running an independent business, in case you need to go solo
- Find out about alternative careers and have a B plan ready, just in case – well, the probability of that ‘just in case' is quite high with the BLS projecting an occupational growth of about 20,000 jobs per year in legal services and law schools putting 40,000 graduates in the field every year – so better have that B plan ready
- Don't network foolishly. Every guru out there offers networking as the ultimate solution for all problems. Networking with people without social capital or professional expertise is not going to help you. Find out the points of greatest density in social networks where people of worth congregate, and find ways to make yourself visible and establish associations
As a parting advice, don't let anything, including all that gloomy statistics con you – even if 50% of new law graduates may not get jobs at law firms, 50% will – so try to be within those who would attain their objectives – or tweak your objectives and increase your chances of survival.
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