Description
Why is Finance a Good Practice Area Even for an International Attorney
Speaker 1:[00:00:00] I studied in my home country, as well as in London, used to be a finance attorney at a law firm in a bank in my home country. I am now in a smaller law firm in LA doing transactional work. How do I market myself to major law firms as an international attorney? How do I market myself to recruiters like yourself who can then help me in my job search?
Okay. The thing is you need to understand, anytime you're applying to a large law firm, there are pluses and minuses. And so the big plus typically is they look for reasons to discount you. If you worked in banking, that's good. I don't know if you do banking now, but I would look for banking firms in LA, large and small. You can find them online by just searching Google or different lists and so forth. I think they're listed on BCG too. We have all the search rankings. So research. So that's one thing I would do.
The other thing you can do is you can... I don't know where your practice area is, but you should, whatever practice or you have, if it's focused enough, and I don't know how focused enough focus it is, but you should research firms to do that. I don't know if it's banking research firm to do that. But the problem is, large law firms are not necessarily going to be interested in [00:01:00] you as an international attorney, especially in LA.
LA is not a big corporate market. LA is considered a mid cap corporate market. So, what that means is it's not like the most sophisticated of the corporate markets out there. It's more of a smaller type corporate market, mid-sized I guess. And so it's going to be difficult for you to find jobs. If you were an attorney in Los Angeles and you'd worked at a major US law firm and gone in-house, it would be difficult for you to get a job at another big firm. If you were just an international attorney that had worked in a top law firm in London and had moved to LA, it would be difficult for you to get a job. If you don't have a JD in LA, it's very difficult to get a job.
The big thing is, if you're an attorney with more than five or six years of corporate experience, it would be difficult to get a job with a law firm. So the point is that you have a lot of things that are against you. The only typical way that I could think of to do it would be if you're, I don't know what type of finance, actually. I don't know why I said banking. You said you were a finance attorney. So finance is actually a pretty good practice area. So I would find firms who do international practice area, international finance.
There's a lot of, by the [00:02:00] way, firms in LA, branches of firms and other markets, that, that have strong finance practices, especially in New York. I would have try applying to those and see what happens. I know a lot of asset finance and other people that are very senior and are able to get positions and they've gotten them even internationally from New York and so forth when they're, like 15, 20 years after. I don't know why I said banking originally, because you've worked for the bank. But if you're doing finance, it is a good practice area.
I would research all the firms in LA that do finance related work and market yourself to those. You certainly can send me your resume, but the big issue is going to be your seniority. But there's not a lot of finance attorneys in LA, which is nice. But it sounds like you have a pretty good job right now, which is great. And the other thing, the big way would be to try to bring in business.
But yeah, I would go with that finance route. I think that if you have a lot of experience, doing that could help. And you can always go to smaller firms. Like smaller firms, especially. Mid-sized firms, are always looking for some corporate help. And so you may be able to get a better job with a mid-size firm and move from there.
