Description
Why Do Law Firms Gravitate Towards Candidates Having Consistent Experience
[00:00:00] My issue is almost the opposite. I was hired out of law school by a subsidiary of a firm that does lobbying work, but with the expectation that I become a duel timekeeper with the firm and bill legal work. It was what I wanted to do, and was very lucky to find a job enjoyed out of law school. I did pass the bar and the firm made me dual timekeeper, counsel was position. But, circumstances changed over timeand the partners who hired me were not bringing enough legal work as expected, and did not have time to help me develop my own book of business for lobbying. So, I left, took COVID to do LLM and IP. Okay. I've sought advice from other attorneys on how to best market myself to firms but they have told me that, I need to decide if I want to be a real attorney, which is yes, but my experience is in policymaking and political law. And, I'm not sure how I get through to firms being five years out of law school without having a true associate position on my resume, something they understand.
Okay. So that's a good a good issue.
So, your practice area is, government or you have to find positions in your practice area. There's always a positions in that practice area. If you look nationally and I understand what this position is. You have to [00:01:00] figure out a way to put that on your resume and in a few letters and make sure that you're able to communicate it.
There are some things I like. The first thing is, you can definitely get into other law firms that have the same job. You can get jobs with lobbyists and lobbying organizations.
You're definitely employable. The but my concern is this LLM, so the problem is the LLMs unrelated to what you're doing. And IP typically, in order to be good at IP, you have to have a hard sciences background. And, no one's going to hire someone with five years of experience in IP, in political law, to do IP.
They may, but it wouldn't be a smart decision if they did. You have to position this on your resume in a smart way. And, it just basically would be what I would do. Let's say the firm was Smith Barnes. So, you would just say, a member of some counsel, it's attorney with subsidiary, whatever, consulting, et cetera. And then, just put that down. So, you put the names of the big firms, and then just put your attorney with the political subsidiary and then the [00:02:00] dates of employment, and people will understand that. And then, you do some description of what you did. This stuff with IP, I would just say that, something along the lines of, you wanted to take some time off when the firm ran out of work during COVID, you decided to do something fun and learn about IP, but, you're ready to go back.
That's what I would do, but you need to be very careful. I'll say this. So I reviewed resumes at BCG all day long. I don't know if, if you applied in the past, the big thing is what I look for is really consistency of someone's experience. Because ,if you have consistent experience, then there's going to be a firm somewhere that will want to hire you. But, once you start doing multiple things in your consumer experiences is inconsistent, then it becomes much more difficult to get a job. Someone that does personal injury and then they go do a corporate and then they go do real estate, like that's inconsistent.
Law firms want to hire people that have, consistent experience, even if they're small law firms, most of them want that. You just need to be careful about mixing things up and now all of them in government or something would have been interest in your lobbying, but I don't know why you did IP. You might've [00:03:00] just been interested and just say it was fun. That's fine, but you just need to be careful about that, but I think you can.
