"Harrison, I've had a few phone interviews with large firms in Indianapolis, an in-person interview at Frost Brown and Todd, and several interviews with mid-sized law firms and corporations, but I haven't been able to seal the deal in a large law firm position. I have pretty strong connections in most firms and a recruiter is trying to help me get an interview at Quarles and Brady. Every time I interview with someone, I feel like it goes well in the interviews. I'm, well-prepared, confident and try to make myself seem as desirable as possible and do my best to convey that I know exactly what I want and my strategy to accomplish that. I've been told I'm a pretty likable person, but perhaps I'm wrong. I also make it seem that I want to work at a firm more than any other firm and want to become a partner there. I just found out I didn't get the job at Frost Brown and Todd. I'm back at square one. Do you have any advice for me?
I don't have a lot of time to spend searching, so it's been tough to apply and interview. I wish I could just pay someone to search and apply for me. Do these services exist? I really want a position in which I specialize in corporate real estate transactions or business litigation. I have a little bit of experience in both, but mostly real estate litigation experience. Honestly, though, I'd take almost any position in a large law firm. I'm a fourth year attorney, I really want a large law firm position. I'm not sure what I should do. Any advice you offer is greatly appreciated."
Okay. The first thing is that if you've gotten interviews at Frost Brown and you're getting interviews with other large law firms, then your background is obviously very strong. But just because you didn't get a position after interviewing doesn't mean you did anything wrong. The large law firm jobs tend to be very difficult to get. That's also the case when the market slows down, which is the case at this particular point in time — they're even harder to get. I don't know why you didn't get the job. But what I would say is that you've also gotten several interviews with mid-size firms, that's also very good.
There's a lot of things going on in your question though. One of the things is you're saying, you're interviewing with corporations, you're interviewing with law firms. Really, what I would recommend is, especially as a fourth year, people go in-house many times way too early. And going in-house has a completely different set of rules than going to work in a law firm. When you go in-house, you're not expected to get business. There tends to be a lot more turnover in-house than at law firms. Your legal skills can deteriorate. There are all sorts of issues, many times, with going in-house. So you need to be very careful that you're committed to going to work in a law firm. If you're trying to carry on three romantic relationships with three different people at one time, and each one of them is a little bit different, you're never going to be able to commit to any of them and you're never going to be able to really close the deal, at least for you, with any of them.
You have to be committed to one strategy. That's the first thing. The other mistake I think you're making is you honestly, you can't be a litigator and a corporate attorney, corporate real estate transactions, or business litigation. You have to pick a practice area. If you have experience doing real estate litigation, that's what you should be doing. One of the things I teach the recruiters in our company is that the person needs to really understand, and the recruiters need to really understand the practice areas of what people do. And we spend a lot of time on that, weeks actually. And here, you're talking about doing different practice areas and real estate litigation. You should be concentrating on real estate litigation. You can have an entire career in many major cities doing nothing but real estate litigation and in smaller markets, there's real estate litigators.
If you try to be a corporate attorney or a real estate transaction attorney or a business litigator, those are all different and you need to be committed to one thing. So no law firm in their right mind is going to hire someone to do a job in a practice area where they don't have any experience, as a fourth-year. You can get hired as a real estate litigator, and there's going to be tons of firms in Indianapolis or whatever that potentially have a need for you. Now, you certainly can apply for general commercial litigation experience, but your best odds are going to be doing real estate litigation. The other thing that I would say as someone of your age, as a fourth year attorney, you shouldn't worry so much about working in a big law firm as you should worry about specializing and getting experience.
Working in a big law firm just means working in a big law firm. Specializing and getting an experience is something that's invaluable. If you're specialized in one thing and you have very good experience then you can have a long-term career doing something. That's important and you're much more likely to get into a large law firm, stay in a large law firm, and also have a career in a large law firm, if you're able to get a position, or if you're able to specialize in something like real estate litigation. Half the attorneys out there are general commercial litigators and do different types of litigation, maybe even more than that. I forget what the percentage is, but it's huge.
So why would you want to throw your hat into something where you're doing the same kind of work as everyone else? If you're a real estate litigator, there's always going to be a need. There's always going to be developers. There's always going to be people upset about real estate and suing people. It's a huge area and there's not a lot of people that do it. So you're much better off doing that. Why would you want to apply for corporate jobs when you don't have any corporate experience? None of this makes any sense to me. So if it was me and I was getting interviews at all these big firms, I would be very careful and do what I could to be specialized. And I wouldn't care so much about working at a big firm as I would be in gaining experience.
If you're a fourth year attorney, and let's say you graduated from law school at the age of 25, that means you're 29 years old. I know attorneys that are in their 90s practicing. So you're just at the beginning of this runway. The more you specialize and the more you get relevant experience, the better off you'll be. Frost Brown and Todd, who knows? It's a big firm. It could be gone in five years. And then in 20 years... Your career is a long thing, so you need to be very careful about it. And you need to be careful about dabbling. Dabbling means, and I say this to everyone , dabbling means you're doing multiple different things and nothing well. And you're better off doing one thing well than dabbling.
I'm trying to think if there's anything else here. Yeah. Telling people you want to be a partner is good, but knowing who you are and what you want to do and not trying to do a lot of things is very important. And that would be the first thing I would say. Your last question was, do services exist that I could pay someone to search for jobs for you? Yes. There's a service called LawCrossing Concierge that we run that is usually full, but if you contact them, they can help you and do all the search for you. But you can do it all yourself. There's lots of different ways to search for jobs. And we have a lot of more information too, on the OAR site. There's videos and all sorts of things that can tell you about what to do.
But you need to specialize. That would be my main thing. And then you also need to apply to a lot of places. If you want to work in a large law firm, another mistake that people make is they won't apply to enough market. So if you really want to work in a big firm, you should apply to a lot of markets. And markets like Indianapolis are great. Minnesota. But when you get closer to big markets like Chicago and stuff, it's going to get more difficult. If people want to work in big firms, many times you're better off looking at niche markets and not the largest ones, because the largest ones, people are climbing all over each other to get jobs. That's where the best people go, so it's much harder to get jobs there. That was a great question.
