Job Advice

7 Tips for What You Should (And Shouldn’t) Do at Your Callback

Not only did you make it through the hectic OCI season with some excellent interview experience, but employers are now inviting you back for additional interviews. Great job! Now is the time to be excited! It is also the time to plan. You hit it off with the on-campus interviewer and now you must plan for the next round of interviewers at the callback. Keep in mind some of these dos and don’ts for the callback, courtesy of the hiring director at an AmLaw 100 firm:

1. Wear a suit-even if the firm insists it’s a relaxed, casual place. This applies to both men and women. Don’t get fooled by the “business casual” stuff. According to this hiring director, go for business formal — though pants suits are perfectly fine for women these days. She also advises: “Iron your shirt or blouse and steam out the wrinkles in your suit. Use a lint brush.” Unsure about something you are wearing? Best to not wear it.

2. Do not wear perfume or cologne. Take a shower and use deodorant — that’s enough. “I’ve been in offices a few hours after lawyers meet a candidate and sometimes you can still smell the cologne,” says this hiring director. You want to be remembered for your skills and great talent, not your scent.

3. Find out who’s interviewing you, then Google them. Don’t just read the employer bios. Google them, too. “Note any recent cases or clients [because] attorneys do love to talk about themselves.” The employer didn’t tell you who will be interviewing you? No sweat: Just call the recruiting department and ask! But be prepared for last minute changes.

4. When you show up, treat everyone nicely. “Be friendly and engaging to the receptionist or whoever is greeting you. This shows that you can work and interact with staff and attorneys alike.”

5. During the interview, ask questions, then more questions. “Even if you’ve asked the same questions six times, ask them again.” And never ever say, “no I don’t have any questions.” Moreover, if the interviewer asks you a question, “don’t use one word answer; always elaborate.” You should also know your own resume-inside and out as you can potentially be asked questions about your activities, clubs, awards, classes, etc.

6. But don’t ask mundane questions. Save questions about salary, recruiting process, maternity/paternity leaves, reimbursement of travel expenses, retirement plans, etc. for the hiring director or coordinator. “Use your time wisely with the attorneys-talk about you, their practice, and their company.”

7. Send a brief thank-you note. You don’t need to pull out your monogrammed stationery. Email is now acceptable. But it’s always a good idea to include something about your discussion with the interviewers. “It shows they made an impression on you.”

Even if you decide to forgo a callback from the start, or you go to the callback, get an offer, then decide to cross the employer off your list, you should promptly and gracefully decline the invitation or offer with a call, followed by an email confirmation. (It’s also a nice touch to tell the employer where you end up.) “You may want to work at the company [you’ve turned down] one day, and the recruiting director might remember that you didn’t return her call!”

How to Transition from Law Firm Summer to 1st Year Associate

Guest Blog from Vault Law Blog – The expectations for law firm summer associates are very different than those for first year associates. Dan Grossbaum, a first year litigation associate at White & Case, answers some questions regarding the ramp-up period and how best to prepare when you start your career.

Is there anything students should do in law school or during the summer that would help with the transition to working as an associate?

One great way to get ahead of the curve is to take advantage of clinics at your law school. Clinics give you real-world hands-on experience and a good sense of what legal work entails. Depending on the clinic, you can get drafting experience, participate in interviews with clients or practice your oral advocacy skills.

As a summer associate, you should try out as many practices as your firm will allow. At White & Case, for example, you can split your summer between the Litigation and Corporate practices. Splitting the summer allowed me to experience a number of different practices and gave me a sense of how the practices differ. Based on that experience, I knew that Litigation was the right practice for me.

What are some of the best ways to meet and get to know other lawyers at the Firm? How approachable and globally minded are partners and senior associates, especially with questions about a project or assignment?

One of the easiest ways to get to know lawyers is to pop into someone’s office and introduce yourself. Whether you are interested in the type of work they do, or you have a question about one of your assignments, the partners and senior associates, are always willing to sit down and discuss it with you. Additionally, when you start, you are typically placed in an office setting with a lawyer with more experience than you have, usually a second-year associate. This makes the atmosphere more amenable when it comes to questions about projects/assignments.

When did you start to feel comfortable in your new position, and is there anything you could have done differently to make that happen sooner?

Coming from law school to a large law firm was an adjustment; having gone straight through from undergrad to law school, I had never worked in a law firm before I was a summer associate. One thing that made that adjustment easier was the informal mentors I ended up having. They were always there to give me advice and to teach me what it would take to be more comfortable in my new position. One thing I would encourage all junior associates to do is ask questions of the partners and associates they are working for.

Dan Grossbaum is a first year associate in White & Case’s Litigation group. He summered in the firm’s New York office in 2015 and graduated from NYU in 2016. Read more about his experience through Vault Law’s blog here.

New Attorneys Will Benefit from a Mentor

Passing the bar makes every new attorney think they are ready to hit the ground running and filing Supreme Court appeals their first year of practice. Whether you are starting your own solo practice or working for a big firm, make a conscious effort to find attorney(s) who are willing to mentor you as a new attorney. Good mentors are invaluable as you can bounce ideas off them and they can give you tips on how to overcome some common pitfalls a young attorney is sure to face.

But if you’re just starting out, you may be wondering just how you’re supposed to find a legal mentor. After all, legal mentors do not grow on trees. Here are three tips to find a mentor:
  1. Check in with the law school and former classmates. At no point in your life will you be surrounded by as many people involved in the legal field than when you were at law school. Check in with classmates who may have started a law practice, especially those who were a year or two above you. Also, you can ask law professors and your career advisor for suggestions. Alumni are often willing to work with other alumni.
  2. Contact your local bar association. Many bar associations have a section devoted to junior attorneys, and they may pair up juniors with more senior members. These sections are often split among practice areas, so you may be able to find a mentor directly in the area you work in. In North Carolina, membership in the Young Lawyers Division of the North Carolina Bar Association is open to all NCBA members who are under 36 years of age and all lawyers within their first three years of practice. Membership in the YLD is free and automatic upon membership in the NCBA.
  3. Approach someone you admire. At some point, you may read an article about a lawyer you aspired to be like. You should try calling or emailing that attorney. Everyone loves flattery, and even the busiest of attorneys may take some time out of their day to talk to their biggest fan. It doesn’t hurt to try, and the worst that can happen is that the person you approach says “no” or ignores you.
There are viable legal mentors everywhere. You just have to take the initiative to find one. If you need any assistance in how to start searching for a mentor, contact your career advisor today and they will help point you in the right direction.

Can Blogging Boost Your Legal Career?

There’s no better way for a law student to network with leading lawyers, alums and potential employers than blogging (also called ‘blawgging’ when referencing legal blogs). In addition, there’s no better way for a law student to demonstrate their passion for and desire to get into a niche area of the law than blogging.  Writing frequently helps to improve your expression, and the blog format means you learn to explain things in a clearer, more concise manner. Being able to explain something simply and accurately is the best way to be certain you and others understand it.

Then there are the career benefits. Blogging is particularly helpful if you are interested in a specific area of the law where opportunities are few and competition for particular positions can be somewhat intense. When you have no prior experience, all you can do is tell your prospective employer how interested you are in a particular practice area or legal niche. This typically involves saying, “Oh yes, I’m really interested in this area of the law,” and then worrying whether you sounded too enthusiastic or not enthusiastic enough when you said it.

Not sure how to get started on your legal blog? Read up on Sally Kane’s Ten Tips for how to create a successful legal blog. You’ll find advice on how to start, how to pick a topic, and how to engage your readers. Happy blogging!

How to Set Up Effective Networking Meetings

It’s fall and you’re getting back in touch with your classmates and friends, finding out what they did over the summer, and asking for advice about classes, professors, and even where great new restaurants are located near campus. Networking operates along the same principles. You’re asking friends, acquaintances, and referrals about career paths, people they know, and job search strategies. It’s really just a conversation. There’s nothing all that complicated or scary about it.

In addition to checking job listings in Symplicity and other locations, you probably want to start setting up networking meetings. Our office is a good place to get tips. The school alumni directory, located in the new Wake Network, is a great place to start. You can also talk to your career advisor about locating a specific alumni in a field and geographic area of interest. With alumni, you both have a connection to the same school, which is a good ice-breaker. Professors can also be a good source of information.

Student memberships in professional associations are another way to find people to network with – since you are a member of the same organization, they have a built in connection to you. LinkedIn groups are also helpful. Of course, friends, family, people you know through sports, campus activities, and other schools you have attended, are another good place to start.

Now that you have some un-intimidating ways to find people, what should you do next? You can send a brief, friendly email asking to chat with them about their career, and mentioning your connection to them. If you want, attach your resume. The email should be more conversational than job search directed at this point.

Next, put together a list of questions for networking contacts. Questions about their own career path are a good place to start. You know that everyone likes to talk about themselves, right? Questions about areas that are in demand, job web sites and professional organizations related to what they do, and predictions about future growth areas and are also good. You can show them your resume, and ask for suggestions to improve it. Questions about referrals to others they know in the industry are fine (but I would wait until the end of the networking meeting to ask for other names). Hold your first networking meeting with someone you know, rather than your dream employer, so you can practice, and work out the kinks.

Plan to conclude networking meetings by asking your contacts if it’s okay for you to follow up with them. Follow up is the key. It takes the pressure off them having to feel they have to come up with an available job for you, but leaves the door open to remembering you when they do hear of an opening.

Once you get into the mindset that networking is a conversation and not a high pressure job interview, it’s a great way to meet people. There are many career studies that indicate it’s the best way to find a job. Need advice on getting a networking plan in place? Make an appointment with your career advisor today.

Why Attend the Equal Justice Works Conference & Career Fair?

For those students interested in pursuing a career in public interest law, now is the perfect time to mark your calendars and make plans to attend the annual Equal Justice Works Conference and Career Fair. The career fair will be held this year in Arlington, Virginia, from October 28 to Saturday, October 29.

This event is the largest national public interest legal career fair in the country and provides students with the unique opportunity to network with a diverse grouping of public interest employers and organizations in one location over the course of just two days. The career fair typically draws more than 160 public interest employers from many states, including California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, New York, and Texas. The employers conduct actual interviews for internships and full-time jobs and meet with students in informal “table talk” discussions of public interest legal opportunities with their organizations. The conference also includes opportunities for networking, mock interviews, and resume review with practicing attorneys and workshops on specific public interest careers.

The cost of registration for the conference is only $25.00 and registration information is available.  A list of employers participating in this year’s conference is also available. Some notable attending employers include:

  • Animal Legal Defense Fund – Cotati, CA
  • Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, PA
  • Disability Rights Advocates – New York, NY
  • District Attorney’s Office of Charlotte, NC
  • Federal Trade Commission – Washington, DC
  • Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia
  • U.S. Senate Office of the Legislative Counsel

Registration for the Equal Justice Works Conference and Career Fair ends on September 14, 2016 so be sure you register early! To stay abreast of other Equal Justice events and public interest opportunities, students should also consider joining the Equal Justice Works JDs for Justice Network or following Equal Justice Works on Twitter.

Should You Take a Document Review Job?

Document-review work is not glamorous, but it is a common way to gain legal experience and provides valuable insight into the discovery process in many different areas of law. It is often done by solo practitioners looking for extra income or new law school graduates who have not yet secured permanent employment, or outsourced by larger firms with a heavy workload or large scale project. So what is document-review work and could it be right for you?

Document-review attorneys are required in a variety of situations. Typically, parties in a lawsuit or officials in a regulatory investigation need several documents produced or received. Corporations also need document reviewers to organize their documents. For example, a document reviewer might screen a recently departed employee’s computer files or create legal abstracts for insertion into a master spreadsheet.

Most document review work is done at a law firm office. However, it can also be done at a recruiter’s office, at the site of a corporation, or at a third-party location.

Typically, document-review work is done in teams of two to twenty persons. Occasionally, a document reviewer may work alone. Document review teams are typically supervised by one or two attorneys from the organization and interact with IT personnel.

The job requirements almost always call for bar licensure, and previous experience with document reviewing is preferred but not required in most cases. A document-review assignment can last almost any duration of time, commonly two weeks to three months. Document reviewers must be able to start an assignment on short notice, sometimes even within one day. The end date is usually not known upfront, but employers do provide an estimate if possible.

Our office lists document review positions in Symplicity posted by staffing agencies, but be sure to also reach out to legal staffing agencies directly and apply on their websites. A sampling of such agencies locally and nationally are:

  • Synergy Legal – http://www.synergylegalstaffing.com/opportunities
  • Hire Counsel – http://www.hirecounsel.com/who-we-are/locations/
  • Special Counsel – http://www.specialcounsel.com/locations/
  • Huron Consulting – Raleigh & Charlotte – http://www.huronconsultinggroup.com/
  • Strategic Legal, in Raleigh and based out of New York – http://www.strategiclegal.com/

Unsure if document review work is right for you? Contact your career advisor with your questions or Read More to find out how document review work can help you grow as a lawyer.

Prepare to Launch

Photo of Mary Crane

Guest Blog Featuring Mary Crane from MaryCrane.com

Congratulations — as soon as final exams end, you’re about to enter the world of work! This is an important first step in the transition that you will undertake from being a student to becoming a successful professional. Even if you are just entering your summer job, you will still have a plethora of challenges ahead of you. Over the next several weeks, you will begin to learn the intricacies of a new profession. You will start to develop your professional persona. You should begin to lay the foundation for what will eventually become your professional network. Perform well and your introduction to the world of work may lead to a job offer.

You will be prepared to launch your professional career if you undertake the following eight activities:

1. Establish S.M.A.R.T. goals for your summer experience
A S.M.A.R.T. goal is one that is Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-targeted. A summer associate assigned to a firm’s mergers & acquisitions practice group might send the following S.M.A.R.T. goal: by the end of the summer, research, assist with the drafting of bylaws and articles of incorporation, and participate in creating a financing plan for one merger. In contrast an investment bank intern might set the following S.M.A.R.T. goal: once a week, review a randomly selected financial statement and build a leveraged buyout model from scratch.

Identify as clearly and specifically as possible what you wish to accomplish and whom you wish to meet during the summer months. Once you’ve been assigned to a specific department or task, be prepared to revise and refine your goals.

2. Research

Learn everything you can about your summer employer. Understand the products or services that it provides. Get familiar with its culture. Ascertain how formal or informal the workplace appears to be.

Create a work journal in paper or electronic format and add your research results. Throughout the summer, constantly add to this journal, developing an ongoing record of the people you meet and the projects that you undertake. Make note of new skills acquired and lessons learned that you can later add to your resume.

3. Make contact with your new employer
In most cases, representatives from your employer’s HR department will reach out to you long before your summer employment begins. If they do not, take the initiative to contact them. Use these exchanges to confirm attire expectations, your start time on Day One, and any information that might be available regarding your supervisor.

4. Research your supervisor

To the extent you know the department to which you will be assigned or the people with whom you will be working most closely, spend some additional time engaged in research. Google or look up the names of key individuals on LinkedIn and look for points of commonality, for example, you graduated from the same school.

When you undertake this research, be discreet. Don’t get pegged as a cyber-stalker. And it goes without saying that all of your own social media information now needs to be workplace-appropriate.  If it’s not, clean it up now!

Read Activities #5-8 Here – Responding to Employers, Your Day-One Outfit, Commute Test Runs, and Your Work Kit

New Attorneys Will Benefit from a Mentor

Passing the bar makes every new attorney think they are ready to hit the ground running and filing Supreme Court appeals their first year of practice. Whether you are planning on starting your own solo practice or are starting work at a big firm, make a conscious effort to find attorney(s) who are willing to mentor you as a new attorney. Good mentors are invaluable as you can bounce ideas off them and they can give you tips on how to overcome some common pitfalls a young attorney is sure to face.

But if you’re just starting out, you may be wondering just how you’re supposed to find a legal mentor. After all, legal mentors do not grow on trees. Here are three tips to find a mentor:

  1. Check in with the law school and former classmates. At no point in your life will you be surrounded by as many people involved in the legal field than when you were at law school. Check in with classmates who may have started a law practice, especially those who were a year or two above you. Also, you can ask law professors and your career advisor for suggestions. Alumni are often willing to work with other alumni.
  2. Contact your local bar association. Many bar associations have a section devoted to junior attorneys, and they may pair up juniors with more senior members. These sections are often split among practice areas, so you may be able to find a mentor directly in the area you work in. In North Carolina, membership in the Young Lawyers Division of the North Carolina Bar Association is open to all NCBA members who are under 36 years of age and all lawyers within their first three years of practice. Membership in the YLD is free and automatic upon membership in the NCBA.
  3. Approach someone you admire. At some point, you may read an article about a lawyer you aspired to be like. You should try calling or emailing that attorney. Everyone loves flattery, and even the busiest of attorneys may take some time out of their day to talk to their biggest fan. It doesn’t hurt to try, and the worst that can happen is that the person you approach says “no” or ignores you.

There are viable legal mentors everywhere. You just have to take the initiative to find one. If you need any assistance in how to start searching for a mentor, contact your career advisor today and they will help point you in the right direction.

Making the Best Use of Spring Break

beach chairLaw students the world over look forward to breaks from law school. Some students view these breaks as a holiday—a time to get away from the intense daily demands of their studies, travel, and visit with family and friends. Other students have ambitious plans for catching up or getting ahead in their studies. Regardless of which approach you take, you are probably pretty happy when you see Spring Break finally approaching. There is nothing wrong to either approach to Spring break, at least in the abstract. In fact, the best Spring Break plans should probably include some of both. The key is to come back to law school after the break in a better place than you were before—and accomplishing this task takes just a little advance planning. Here are a few tips for making the best use of your Spring Break this year:

Set reasonable goals for studying during the break.  Often, law students say that they are going to outline for all of their classes during the break, do practice exams for each class, get ahead in their reading assignments, and read a bunch of supplements. Spring break can be the perfect time to work on getting caught up in your studies, but it is important to set realistic goals. After all, Spring Break usually only lasts a week! You aren’t superhuman, and you can’t do everything. When you set unrealistic goals for yourself, it is easy to get defeated and give up when you realize that you can’t get everything done. Instead, decide what your highest priority items are, and focus on those first. Create a study schedule for yourself during the break, and set reasonable goals for what you intend to accomplish during each of those study sessions. You will be focused and productive, and your efforts will build momentum for the weeks leading up to final exams.

Visit the city where you wish to work. Planning a trip to the city where you want to work, either in the summer or after graduation, will prove useful in the long run. By scheduling informational interviews or even coffee or lunch meetings with attorneys and alumni in the area, you can accrue connections to help you learn the ropes in a new area. On these informational interviews or meetings, ask plenty of questions so that you may acquire tips and best practices about important topics such as how to get your foot in the door at a particular place of employment.

Give yourself permission to take some time off. It isn’t particularly healthy to work long days every day during the break, including weekends. There is still a lot of time before the end of the semester, and you don’t want to burn yourself out. If you take a little time off from your studies, you will come back refreshed and ready to tackle the hard stuff. At the minimum, give yourself a couple of days off entirely. Do something fun. Get out of the house. See your friends and family. Read a fun book. Go to the movies. On the days that you study, take regular breaks. If you set realistic study goals for yourself and create a study plan to achieve those goals, you will be able to build in some time to relax as well.

Make vacation plans that recharge your batteries, not leave you even more tired. Maybe you are caught up on your law school studies, and you’ve decided to go on vacation during Spring Break. (Or you are making it a combination study/travel break!) It’s important to make sure that your vacation plans don’t leave you exhausted as you are heading back to classes. It’s still a long uphill climb to final exams, and you won’t be setting yourself up for success if you have run full speed the entire break.

Above all, think balance. As with everything in law school, taking a balanced approach to Spring Break and other holidays will help to keep you on the right path to academic and personal success.