How Would You Articulate To Employers The Desire To Change Practice Area [00:00:00] How do you articulate to employers the desire to change practice area? That's tough. It's very difficult to change practice areas. I've written a lot of articles about that. Basically, if you want to change practice areas you try to get experience in your existing employer with that other practice area. It's the best way. It's very difficult for them to do that, but, they will, if you push hard enough or you need to get work from partners in that practice area in your firm. If you are dead set and you can't get that work, you can apply to other firms doing that, but, it's going to be very difficult to get the position many times at a firm of the same caliber. You can also go to a general practice firm. That's a great question and very difficult. I think, one of the things I would say is a lot of times litigators will see people that don't like litigation, we'll say I don't like so much conflict. That's how they transitioned to transactional practice areas. People who don't like, real estate or something, may say I'm very interested in real estate. You can take classes, you can do other things to show your interest. I know that people like, for example I talked about it earlier in the seminar, but people were transitioning awhile ago into data [00:01:00] privacy. They would become assertive. They would take classes and become a certified privacy professional and do all these things. And that was very helpful for them in the transition. Those are some ways to think about it and taking outside classes. In order for someone to hire you to do something different than what you're doing, your resume needs to give off a scent. So the scent means, if you're a litigator and you want to become a patent prosecutor practice practices, you need to have the center of the practice area. So that means, joining organizations taking classes in order to do that. It's giving off the scent of that. So just making sure that people can see that in your resume when they're trying to interview, it's not enough to say I want to do something, because if all you're saying is you want to do a practice area, then people are likely to not hire you based on that. There has to be something that shows them that there's a driver and it's worth them taking the risk.
