While there are a sizable number of law school graduates who are struggling to find any job, another group has trouble choosing among all the choices open to them. Those in the latter group have collected a number of "merit badges," displayed on their resumes like the medals on a general's chest. These badges consist of degrees from prestigious universities, memberships in academic honor societies, seats on law review or moot court boards, positions of leadership in other student activities, and meaningful work experiences.
These merit badges don't mean that their owners will actually be better lawyers than anyone else. But the badges can get you in the door. Get you an interview. In the legal world, you will not get a job without an interview, so your first goal is to put together a resume that will earn you a half hour with someone who hires.
Merit badges can do that. Think about it. The hiring committee of a large law firm may visit ten, twenty, even thirty law schools each year to interview students on campus. Usually the firm chooses which students it wants to talk with there. Countless other students who missed that cut or who go to schools not visited may send in their resumes. The firm will "call back" or "fly back" to their offices only a very small percentage of those applicants. Merit badges can cause that frazzled hiring committee member to read your resume a second time, to decide to interview you.
How do the badges do that? They are screening mechanisms for busy lawyers. Law students have been repeatedly screened throughout their academic lives. They were screened by university admissions committees before they were accepted into college. They were screened during college by academic honor societies. Those who attained leadership positions in student activities presumably competed for them against other students, and were thereby screened again. The law school they attended screened them before admitting them. They were screened before becoming a member of the law review. Those who went on to clerk for judges were screened before being hired.
The busy hiring committee member doesn't have time to think too much about who you really are and what kind of contribution you would make if hired. And the hiring committee doesn't like to make "mistakes." So it's conservative. It looks for merit badges that say quality as surely as the USDA Choice label on the hamburger you buy. Merit badges such as Ivy League, Phi Beta Kappa, top-ten law school (don't worry, there are at least twenty or twenty-five "top-ten" law schools), law review, law clerk to the Honorable Judge So-and-So are the labels that busy lawyers use to find their new hires. If a new recruit doesn't work out, the committee won't be criticized. "Hey, don't blame me. The guy was Amherst undergrad, Stanford Law School, and clerked on the Seventh Circuit. How was I supposed to know?"
But what if you don't have as many merit badges as you might wish? Don't despair. Figure out which merit badges you can still earn, and go get them. The most important merit badges are the academic institutions where you received your undergraduate and law school degrees. Get into the best schools you can. Think about transferring into a better school after a superb year or two elsewhere.
Wherever you're at in school, look for badges to collect. You may gain more experience in an area of interest to you-environmental law, international law, commercial law-and can collect a merit badge at the same time. If you can't get a job with a law firm for the summer after your first year in law school, don't go back to your old lifeguarding job. Seek a nonpaying internship with a judge or a prosecutor's office, or become a research assistant for a law professor.
Think creatively about how you can collect merit badges. And also about how to shape what you've already done into a merit badge. How to describe your experiences in a way that shows you have the skills a legal employer wants.
The badges you most want to display are those that show you can use your mind, you've worked in a professional office before, you write well, and you can analyze complex problems or organize volumes of material. Those badges will help get you the interviews you want.
Beauty Contest
You collected your merit badges and lined up some interviews. Now what? How do you sell yourself to a legal employer? The obvious answer is by convincing those you meet that you'll make an excellent lawyer. One of the most important things a lawyer or prospective lawyer must project is confidence. To convince a legal employer that you would make a good lawyer, you must show confidence in yourself, and must demonstrate qualities that will instill confidence in others. Clients will be coming to you for advice. Unless the client has confidence in that advice, your effectiveness as a lawyer will suffer.
The qualities and abilities that combine to instill confidence in others are themselves things that prospective employers want to see in you.
Intelligence
Clients don't often present you with easy problems. They can solve the easy problems themselves. They come to you with the hard ones. You have to be smart enough to solve them, or they'll take those problems to someone else. On another level, the employer thinking about hiring you wants to feel comfortable that you're smart enough to learn the ropes without constant supervision.
Judgment
Show good judgment in every contact you have with that employer. Don't blow a good impression over lunch or dinner. Often your office interviews will be followed by what appears to be an informal social event - chance for you to meet some lawyers in a more relaxed setting.
Diligence
Sometimes it is not enough for a lawyer simply to be smart and have good judgment. Winning the trial, evaluating the potential contract, satisfying the regulatory authorities may all depend in the end on sheer hard work.
Being prepared for any eventuality
Your clients want to know that you are willing to put in whatever time it takes to handle their problem effectively. Your potential employer wants to see evidence that you've put in the hard work necessary to overcome problems in the past. You can show this in many ways: you worked to put yourself through college or law school, you excelled in sports requiring hours of training, you wrote a lengthy and detailed research paper. Find evidence of your diligence and highlight it on your resume.
Communications ability
Some people are simply more articulate than others. You may think that you can't do much to improve your communications ability. Not so. A big part of speaking well is knowing what you want to say. You can prepare for an interview, just as you prepare for a test. Some law schools put their students through practice interviews. If yours doesn't, have someone else interview you. Practice answering open-ended questions ("What type of law do you want to practice?" "What is your greatest strength?") as well as specific questions about your resume.
Communication is a two-way street. Take some control of the interview. Don't sit back passively and wait for the next question. You should practice techniques to get your interviewer talking about what he or she does. Lawyers generally love to talk-especially about themselves. There is no more articulate candidate than the one who listens intently to a lawyer rambling on about himself.
See 6 Things Attorneys and Law Students Need to Remove from Their Resumes ASAP If They Want to Get Jobs with the Most Prestigious Law Firms for more information.
Be Prepared
When you've put something on your resume, you must be ready to talk about it in detail. Your interviewer knows little else about you besides what appears on that piece of paper. If you can't talk in depth about the things that you've chosen to list there, the assumption will be that you can't talk-or think-in depth about much of anything. So prepare for the obvious questions. Think through in advance what it is you'd like to say about each item on your resumed. If you mention your college thesis on the sonnets of Shakespeare, reread it so that you can talk intelligently if your interviewer is a Shakespeare fan. Be ready to discuss how working for the poverty-law journal will be relevant to your corporate law practice. Have an explanation for the C you got in contracts.
Be prepared too for the obvious questions about what's not on your resume. What did you do during the one-year gap in your work experience? Why did you decide to go to law school after working as an accountant for four years? Why are you interviewing with this company? Why are you interested in working in this part of the country? (This will probably come up if your resume seems tied to another part of the country.) What type of law do you think you want to practice?
Written communication is also very important in most legal jobs. Have a good writing sample ready. Offer to provide it. Show that you are confident about your writing ability. Be prepared not just to regurgitate what's in your written work but also to react if you are asked to assume a different fact or to take a different point of view from what's in your writing sample. Legal employers want to know that you understand what you've written, not just that you can write well.
Personalize your communications to a prospective employer. A phone call to the firm or company will usually identify the person responsible for hiring. Send your letter directly to that person. Avoid "To Whom It May Concern." And don't forget to proofread the cover letter that you send along with your resume. Lawyers are professional nitpickers. If your letter contains typos or, heaven forbid, you misspell the name of the lawyer you're writing to, it will reflect poorly on you.
