By Brian Malcom 

What do you do when Rome is burning?  Honestly, I'm not sure.  I do know what you should not do: sit in the middle of the Pantheon with a cup of water.  Instead, I would suggest getting the heck out of Rome.

Harvard Law School might agree.  According to Law.com, Harvard recently advised its law students to "cast a wider net."  In other words, apply for jobs and clerkships outside of major metropolitan areas.

Rachel Breitman for Law.com writes, "Considering law firms outside major metropolitan areas might be a smart way to stay in the game, according to the school, which recommended students consider mid-Atlantic cities like Baltimore and Richmond, or Midwestern cities like Milwaukee."

Maybe ivy league law students should take a look at midsize firms while they are at it.  Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that midsize firms are picking up clients that are tired of paying BigLaw's hourly rates. "[T]o cut costs during the recession, U.S. businesses increasingly are handing work to less expensive small and midsize firms, typically those with fewer than 200 attorneys. And while their larger counterparts are laying off lawyers, some smaller firms are hiring attorneys to keep up with new business."

Perhaps American law is in the middle of a race to the middle.  No longer is the goal to work in the largest firm in the largest city with the largest compensation package.  The goal for young lawyers has become strikingly simple: to find a good job in a fair-sized market with a stable firm that pays well.

Priorities are fickle little things.

By Kathleen Pearson

Welcome back to school and Fall Recruiting!  Some schools have already started their early interview process while others are putting the final touches on interview schedules.  Before you know it, we (or at least some of us) will be coming on campus to interview you for our 2010 summer class. 

Here are a few tips to help you make a good impression and hopefully get a call back: 

1.  Do dress your best.  Please remember this is a formal interview and the very first impression is important.  It should go without saying, but brush your hair, shave, make sure your clothes are pressed.  Seems like a no-brainer, but you would be surprised how many students miss this step . . .  

2.  Do your homework.  All of us have websites with copious amounts of information about our firms.  Be sure you do your research and know some basic information about us – location, type of practice, etc.  You should be able to answer the question: “Why would you like to move to X city to work?” 

3.  Do have questions for us.  This should be an introductory dialogue and we expect you to have some questions about our firm, practice, city, what it’s like to be an associate, size of summer program, historic number of offers.  Don’t make the interviewers do all of the work. 

4.  Don’t name drop.  While it is good to mention how you have a connection to the firm (i.e. friends with a partner or client, etc.), you should mention it and move on.  DO NOT continue to name drop over and over again.  It is annoying. 

5.  Don’t be late.  Here again, this is a no brainer.  You have a very limited amount of time to make a good impression.  Don’t waste the first 10 minutes because you can’t manage your time.  If you are in an interview that is running over (let’s face it, some interviewers like to hear themselves talk), try your best to steer the conversation to a close and say you are looking forward to hearing back from them and hope to visit the firm soon.  Which leads me to . . . 

6.  Don’t end the interview by saying you have to go because X firm down the hall is waiting on you.  We know you are meeting with a lot of other firms.  Just don’t mention it to us.  It hurts our ego . . . and makes you look disinterested.   

These are just a few tips to get you started.  Feel free to add more in the comment section and check back.  I might add a few more as we move through the Fall!

By Will Morrow 

While it is always an issue for laterals leaving BigLaw, recent media reports highlight the market shift in new lawyer placement toward geographic diversity from the annual rush to Manhattan and other large metro markets.  A recent Am Law Daily report focused on advice given to recruits by Harvard's Dean of the Center for Career Services about expanding the geographic scope of search as a smart way to stay in the game.

Even if the shift is temporary and lasts just a couple of recruiting cycles, the perpetual wave of new talent (i.e. today's 1Ls) feeding the BigLaw personnel engine and coming up behind today’s candidates means that today's law students ignore the advice at their own peril.  All the while we regional firms are swimming in qualified lateral resumes. 

The focus of the media is on finding the job, and hence the paycheck - but in the long run the question that really matters (and gets discussed less frequently) is whether there is stimulating and financially rewarding employment for BigLaw refugees.  YLB asked a slightly older lawyer who has done both (Cleary Gottlieb to Waller Lansden) to offer some thoughts on the question. 

There is legal life outside New York for laterals and 3Ls alike.

At its bare essence, the BigLaw resume indicates to potential employers that: 

(a) you were hired by someone who cared a great deal about your resume and transcript (and probably less so about your individual traits),

(b) you drank from a fire hose of reasonably good work, although there is growing concern that the last batch of new BigLaw hires did not get deep enough into the practice before the music stopped,

(c) you probably (but not always) worked with talented people, and hopefully learned from them,

(d) BigLaw's systems of lawyer development had their way with you, and you are familiar with them, and

(e) you are probably a pretty dedicated lawyer.   

No advice will improve your resume or make you more dedicated, so let's focus on (b) through (d) for a moment.  By making studied and rational choices about target firms, lawyers can meet or exceed the career development provided by BigLaw.  Here are some thoughts on what matters.  

1.  Quality of work matters.  Getting quality work that is both stimulating and develops young lawyers is a challenge, regardless of the firm or type of work.  Plenty of my colleagues at great BigLaw firms disappeared into the abyss of document review and due diligence, never to emerge as developed lawyers.  In other words, every law firm offers good and bad work.  The key is to identify firms that are getting the best work in your area of interest, and that have an engine to get more of the same over the long run.  You can count on Joe Flom to have left behind a lifetime supply of good transactional work, but more research is required outside New York.  I am primarily an M&A lawyer, so I focused on finding a firm with a strong position in the transactional area of a specific market.  In my case, the firm is a leader in the healthcare transactional market (Nashville is the world's epicenter of for-profit healthcare companies).  By affiliating with leaders in a growing market, I improved my chances of building a growing practice platform.  From the geocentric Texas oil and gas market to the non-regional strength of certain litigation practices, you improve your chances of building the practice you want by carefully selecting a firm with natural growth prospects.  And know that history is no guaranty of future results, so make sure you see energetic market leaders with a good development strategy before you leap. 

2.  Mentors matter.  Mentoring is a challenge for every law firm, and there is no substitute for an organic informal mentor relationship.  My experience at BigLaw indicated that lawyers without mentors were often adrift, and the one thing I really regret about moving on was leaving my BigLaw mentors behind.  Ironically, this is one area where chances probably improve in a firm that hires fewer people per year, particularly in a firm that fosters a mentor culture.  The secret is to do the research to determine whether there are strong practitioners with a passion for developing young lawyers at a target firm.  You can simply ask interviewers, and you can look to see how many 30-something lawyers hold positions in legal organizations and are widely involved in speaking.  The 40-something crowd might get there on their own, but if you see a group of people who are being groomed for succession, it is a sign of a strong mentor culture. 

3.  Professional development matters.  The presence of systems for young lawyer development say more about the firm than your experience with them says about you.  One of the true benefits of BigLaw is that infinite manpower yields really good legal systems, and the need to develop 50+ lawyers per year requires that the firm have a pretty developed plan for success.  In the rest of the world, existence of those systems means that the firm cares enough about lawyer development to have one in place, and that presumably the young lawyers are better off for it.  Ask about the firm's development program for lawyers, and particularly in your specialty.  Everyone will tell you that they get together to discuss the practice - but how often, who leads (associate leadership of discussion based on recent engagements is a good sign of a development program), and what is the objective.  Does a corporate section have annotated forms of their own making (not from the ABA)?  Do the litigators have a brief bank or other litigation resources?  My BigLaw firm would tell you that they never want to have an associate presented with an issue in the practice they have not seen or heard of before - that is the gold standard for a development program.  You don't have to have that - but make sure someone is systematically developing young lawyers into successful older lawyers, and that you are not expected to carry 100% of that burden. 

What is automatic in BigLaw is available elsewhere, just not so automatically.  Manage your search and you will find what you want, and perhaps even avoid some of the oft discussed downsides of life at BigLaw. 

By Kathleen Pearson

As reported on Above the Law and Law.com, there is a new trend emerging with incoming associates.   That particular article shows a novel idea several BigLaw firms are trying out – using the first year or two as a true apprenticeship.  New associates will earn a lower salary (if you want to call $100,000 a low starting salary) but not have rigorous billing requirements right out of the gate.  Instead, they will continue classroom style training and shadowing attorneys to really learn how to put all of the theory they learned in law school to practical use. 

One should keep in mind, however, that while BigLaw makes a big news  splash with sky-high starting salaries – which may have been a significant contributing factor to profitability problems, need for deferring start dates, layoffs and apprenticeship models - these associates make up a relatively small percentage of the entire associate pool across the country.   According to NALP, only 23% of incoming associates in the 2007 class made $160,000 while 49% earned less than $75,000.

As YLB has reported in the past, mid-sized and regional firms that did not join the race to the top of the salary stratosphere continue to be better placed in the market and appear to be weathering this legal recession better than their larger, higher-leveraged colleagues.

• A lot of people will have to look at other job options. Even though their jobs may not be what they thought they wanted to do, getting new and different experiences might make them better lawyers and give them a better understanding of different parts of our society. However, fear of unemployment does not necessarily make us better or more motivated students, it just makes us miserable.
• The opportunity to have a hand in turning around our economic problems and establishing financially responsible practices that will make for a more viable and long-lasting prosperity.
• The greatest opportunity our class has is the same as our biggest challenge. Although we are coming in when the economy is at its worst, there are always opportunities in every situation. It seems that the recession, has caused not just firms but everyone to reevaluate how they do business. Our class is coming in when firms will doing a lot of shuffling to see what works best, and this would be the perfect opportunity for a young attorney to find his/her niche. Also, the healthcare reform, and green energy movement will create a lot of areas that will need legal attention.
• If the old "mega-firm" model of law is dead or dying, our class is best suited to rise from the ashes. With no inertia to stop us from trying new business models, or new ways of practicing the business of law, we are best suited to fill the ranks of those firms willing to take risks on new models.
• I am not convinced that the old model, or the "billable hour" is dead. So long as the class of 2010 is just the one more class, as all of the classes before it, I struggle to think of any real opportunities that are unique to the class.
• With the current state of the economy, the class of 2010 is going to have to "get creative." We are going to be forced to find alternative ways to utilize our legal training. This may open up doors that we have never considered if things were just "easy."

No surprise here, the economy ranks #1 as the greatest challenge for the Class of 2010.  It is interesting, however, that "entitlement" is even still a consideration . . .

3.  What do you see is the greatest challenge facing the Class of 2010? 

• The economy and the high levels of student loan debt that many students have.
• The economy. For many, it may be difficult to even find a job. For others, it might be difficult to develop a client base.
• The biggest challenge facing my class is that we are coming into the law at a time when the economy has basically hit rock bottom. This has created a sense of fear and confusion as to our job opportunities. Students don't know whether they will get offers, whether offers will be rescinded, etc.
• The economy. With most firms laying people off or at least initiating hiring freezes, finding a secure job is going to be very difficult for the class of 2010.
• Leaving out the economy (which is obviously the greatest challenge), perhaps the second greatest problem is a sense of entitlement.  Many law students feel a sense of entitlement toward their career. Law degree in hand, they are owed the best job at the best firm. They find little need to figure out how they could "add value" to a firm.  My classmates at school are uninterested in differentiating themselves, because doing so would, by definition, limit their options. (For example, if I commit to wanting to do X, I can not get a job doing Y).
• Another challenge is a general feeling that firms can view associates as temporary revenue-generating workhorses. The feeling is that firms sometimes do not view associates as assets who should be able to become partners if both sides keep up their side of the bargain. (An associate puts in the time, works the hours, and learns the craft. In exchange, the firm provides mentoring, training, exposure, experience, and ultimately the ability to join the firm for life). This deal no longer exists. I heard a statistic that 80% of associates leave their first firm within 5 years. Finding a firm where both the associate values the firm, and the firm values the associate, will be a challenge for the class of 2010.

Continuing our conversation with our Summer Associate Class:

2.  What do you think makes a great attorney?

• Commitment, compassion and ability to see the big picture while at the same time paying attention to detail. It also takes a lot of hard work.
• Attention to detail, work ethic, thorough thinking (looking at issues from every perspective), and integrity.
• Confidence in your abilities, but humble enough to understand that there is always something to learn. You must be able to lead and take direction interchangeably.
• Motivation & Initiative. Attorneys who welcome new challenges, who work hard, and who strive to produce the best work possible seem to be the most successful. The motivation to master what comes across your desk, the motivation to get the best outcome for your client, the motivation to simply conquer the more tedious of tasks, these are traits that define a good attorney (especially a good young attorney).
• People skills: Great attorneys, I've found, are able to talk to anyone about anything. They are generally outgoing people. Clients trust them, coworkers want to work with them. (I would imagine its hard to be very successful if your coworkers/teammates can not stand you). A sense of humor helps.
• Outreach: Great attorneys who are farther along in their practice also seem to have a high level of community involvement. Be it politics, non-profits, arts, etc., these attorneys tend to be easily recognizable in the community. Perhaps these attorneys simply are "branding" themselves as good people. No doubt these types of activities extend their network and garner good will. My guess, however, is that being civically involved is a positive experience that many attorney's genuinely believe in.
• Integrity. Being an attorney requires many traits: dedication, drive, sharp analytical skills, stamina, an ability to think outside the box, to name a few. These traits are, for the most part, common to all attorneys. However, I believe the characteristic that sets the great attorneys apart from the average is integrity.