How can I get my foot in the lower rungs of the law firm career ladder?

Transcript

"In one of your articles, I saw that you mentioned how law students who struck out of OCI would probably not be a great hire for a smaller firm. I can understand that, but as someone who wants to move up as much as possible, how can I get my foot in the lower rungs of the ladder?"

The big thing that I always recommend for people is, if you're always gonna try to move up, that's okay. The law firm will make money from you when you show up and they start billing you out by the hour and so that's fine. And you're trading your time for money. So it's not like you owe any type of allegiance to wherever you go, and you can certainly keep moving up to better and better firms. What I would recommend is to apply to as many places as you possibly can. And there's so many firms out there where anybody can work. Every market, there's countless firms where you possibly could work.

Now, I don't know if you're a law student or not, but if you are a law student, then you certainly can potentially find lots of different places to look. And you should be looking at as many possible firms as you can. Just doing the research, not necessarily applying to the places where everybody else is applying. One of the things I don't like about job openings is when there's a job opening, what tends to happen in a lot of firms is everybody's applying to the same job openings. And so if everyone's applying to the exact same job openings, then your odds of getting the position are much worse than if you're not applying to a job opening. So you're often better off just applying to firms that don't have openings, because if they don't have openings, you're the only person that's showing up there. And it's much easier to bring you in and hire you than it is to go out and recruit someone and have to review all sorts of resumes and stuff. That's one piece of advice that I have and I hope helps.