Today our law school had representatives from the different types of jobs in the legal sector share insight on their respective fields. The contact ratio was awesome at 1:1. I spoke with a solo practicioner, corporate lawyer, small firm lawyer, federal government attorney, and local district attorney.
I’m not directly interested in all of those jobs, but I did want to here what different people are saying within the industry and get a pulse for the legal market.
I went to the solo practitioner first. No surprise here. I want to start my own practice/firm. I discovered one particularly valuable gem that I did not know. The attorney recommended I share a law office with other lawyers to get clients. He said this was the source of most of his work. I was planning on a smaller office for less cost, but that his idea has been noted. I tried to ask him as many practical questions as I could and he shared some of his experiences, but after 5 or so minutes I think he was ready to be done. Another positive from this question and answer session was he reaffirmed a lot of my initial thoughts on going solo.
I next went to the small firm representative just to get acquainted on what was going on and indirectly ask for a blueprint on starting my own. She indicated she worked about 60-70 hours a week for decent but not great pay. She wasn’t a partner and had no desire to be one or go anywhere else. The firm only concentrated on family law. She seemed genuinely satisfied with it and that’s great for her, but not for me. I thanked her and headed to the corporate law table.
The corporate world has sounded appealing to me, but after hearing the advice on getting into the exclusive world of corporate law I started removing any interest in that realm. The corporate attorney advised I work 4 or 5 years in a non-legal setting for what niche I want to go into and then apply to a corporate position. My life isn’t that long. I’m not going into 4 or 5 years of anything. What if I decide I don’t like the legal aspect of the niche once I get into a corporate setting? Good insight on the difficulty of entering corporate law and undoubtedly sound in the advice of becoming involved in the technical aspect of subjects, but 5 years is a long time and I’m way too diverse in my interests to concentrate on any one thing that long. I need to be all over the place. I take into account she was just providing one opinion, but it would have taken a lot of incentives just for me to seriously consider corporate law anyways.
I had noticed the federal law table ever since I stepped into the “fair” or whatever it was called. The lawyer at the table only had one person stop by for the 30 minutes I had skipped tables. Its always good to visit the underappreciated tables because their is a good chance they’ll be eager to talk with you. In this case, that wasn’t the case. The attorney from a subdivision within a government office wasn’t particularly enthused to be there. I asked him if I could speak with him for a few minutes and he replied with a meager answer of yeah I guess so or something to that tune. The “fair” was about to close in 10 minutes so its safe to say he was ready to end his 2 hours of being on display. However, once I started talking with him he started sharing some light into the governmental legal world. The most interesting highlight was that there was currently a job freeze. He also noted that not all government jobs are listed on their job site so keep that in mind if you’re looking. You may have to dig deeper to find different areas of legal spots.
Finally, I went to the district attorney table. As you might expect, the average age here was much less than the rest of the room. The “fair” was closed but I hung around to look at the pamphlet-type information and see if any of them came back. Sure enough one DA did and was very friendly/helpful. He was also very close to my age (just by looks) so that helped with a more candid conversation. He also said there was currently a job freeze, but that it could be lifted at any time. Very interesting @ the 2 jobs freezes. However, he suggested I contact the office if I was interested in an internship and seemingly left the possibility of getting one at very high.