Description
What Must Be The Mindset Of Attorneys Who Are Starting Out
Harrison:[00:00:00] I'm coming from a top 10 law school and will be working at a smaller law firm after law school. A lot of my peers were making twice as much as me at big firms is somewhat discouraging. I'll be working on litigation. How can I move up to a bigger firm as an associate, or will firms try to slot me into a staff attorney because I didn't summer or start off at a major firm. No, they won't. I am feeling very frustrated, discouraged at this point in my career, especially because I'm not clear, I'll get much exposure to commercial litigation, more civil consumer-facing, as I'm hoping or might need to transition to a big firm.
Okay. First of all, that's a good question. That the first thing is, I think that it's important to understand about your career and the legal profession in general is, when you start out, even if you start out at a small law firm there's nothing that's going to prohibit you from ever moving to a larger law firm.
I see people that start out on small law firms all the time and end up in the largest law firms there are. Everything is about the talent and what you're providing in the market, later on. So, what that means is that the more [00:01:00] value you're offering in the market, the longer you're practicing, the better off you're going to be.
As you get more senior, the better attorney you become, the more specialized you are, the more clients you're bringing in, the more referrals you're getting, the better work you're doing for the people in the firm, the more you'll be advanced. And you can advance either in your firm, or, if you're out in the market you will certainly get the attention of other people and they will see how well or what a committed attorney you are and we will advance. I think that the problem is a lot of people are very short term. If you come out of law school at the age of 25, most attorneys practice these days into their seventies and eighties.
You're just starting. You have your entire future ahead of you. I've seen attorneys in their 70s move from mid-sized firms to the largest firms in the world. So, it's your whole career is a long progression and it's not something that you should necessarily worry about if things aren't going the way you want them to, right when you get started. It's important to understand it. And, just because you're starting at a smaller law [00:02:00] firm, it doesn't mean larger law firms will consider you a staff attorney later on. If you go to a top 10 law school, almost regardless of how well you do there, if you do a good job and you learn a lot, you will get interviews later in your career regardless of whether it's consumer-facing litigation or regular litigation.
My point is that you just need to really focus and you need to make it your goal to do as good of a job as you can in the smaller law firm when you start and really to throw yourself into it. Instead of feeling sorry for yourself, you should throw yourself in the work and do the best job you can and learn as much as you can, read about what you're doing on the side. Throw yourself into it and commit yourself into it.
If you do that, then you'll develop the skills to get a job in a larger law firm. The thing about getting a job in a larger law firm, that's important to understand is, a lot of times people will grow up in legal families, they'll grow up in professional families and they may understand how people in those kinds of backgrounds think, and they'll almost go in, and they'll be naturals in interviews. They just may be very good interviewers for [00:03:00] whatever reason other people don't other people go in and they say and do all the wrong things. Like one example I've written, I wrote written articles before and I've actually taken them down because people complain. If you grew up in a working class family, I don't mean that in a negative sense, but, sometimes people grow up in families where it'll be like, labor against management and will think, I'm the labor, I've got to show up and I'm going to be against the management and it's a mentality that people have in certain parts of the country, it's just the way it is. That type of mentality just go over when you're trying to work in a law firm. So, people need to unlearn certain things in certain ways. I'm not saying that everybody from a working class family thinks that way because of course they don't, but some people do and pick up those habits.
They're selling a skill and that people should buy it just because they did well in school. And they don't realize that it's about connecting the people and and saying things and making people comfortable and all these things that go into being a very good interviewer is important.
In terms of the work quality, people don't realize that it's not just about being smart and having good ideas. It's about proofreading things and about making things succinct and [00:04:00] easy to understand. There are all these skills that people learn and they can learn them at different speeds. It doesn't matter how quickly you learn them as long as you learn them. So, just because you don't get a job, four weeks of campus interviewing after your first year of law school, it's ridiculous. That's not your career. None of this is, even if you've had issues for the first 10 years of your career, it doesn't. None of this stuff matters.
I was reading a book the other day, I forgot what it was called, almost every great success comes out of failure. If you look at like apple, which I guess, is a very profitable company. Steve jobs was fired and considered the worst manager ever. He went and tried to start his own computer company and and was considered a laughing stock and then ended up coming back and having a lot of success. So people have a lot of times we'll have early career setbacks and so forth. The most important thing is to have persistence. And, having persistence is extremely important in anything. People that have persistence will succeed in the long run and people that don't, will give up the first time of defeat are the ones that [00:05:00] don't succeed.
One way to think about yourself is, how would you treat yourself if you were a client? And, if I had a client, my client said I didn't get a job. I'm so upset. I interviewed with three firms named hire me. My client, I would tell this is insane. You just have to work in your interview skills. You have to think about more what the law firms want. What would you tell a client in your position? Because, you're going into a job where where you're going to be an advocate for other people and as an advocate for other people, you need to have the ability to help people overcome obstacles. That's very important. It's something to think about.
