Description
- As a young attorney, mistakes made in the beginning are not your fault, and law firms are responsible for training and development.
- Where you went to law school is not important; it's about your work ethic, willingness to learn, and the quality of work you produce.
- Losing your job is not the end, and you can still work in a large law firm if you find another job and work your way up.
- Large law firms are not for everyone, and there are different reasons to work in one, but it's not the only way to have a successful legal career.
Transcript
Transcript:
Okay, the first thing is for everyone, especially if you're a young attorney; this is insane. I'm saying this in your defense. The attorney typically only knows what they're even doing once they've been in a law firm for, I would say, two to four or five years.
Just making mistakes right when you come out is not your fault. It sounds like this is a not healthy-run firm that hired you and needed help understanding. Has business issues and all sorts of other things that probably affected their choice to bring you on. Probably without a lot of work, it wasn't a good idea, and the person running it had issues or the people running it.
So I would say that none of this is your fault, like it's the firm's responsibility to bring you in and train you. So typically like to take the side of firms because I want to give people tough love and make them approve. But here, it doesn't sound like it was necessarily your problem. I will say it doesn't matter where you went to law school. No one cares.
Your law school is essential because it may look good to some clients, but no one cares where you went to law school. It's all about your work ethic and the type of work you produce, your willingness to learn, and everything else.
So sometimes going to a good law school is a real drawback for people because what happens is they assume that makes them a reasonable attorney when the opposite's true. Like you, the characteristics of a reasonable attorney have nothing to do with you going to law school. Some of the best and the worst lawyers went to the best law school.
It's ridiculous, and it has nothing to do with anything. So that's the first thing that you need to learn is that you can't ever rely on where you went to law school to think that will get you ahead.
You're in no position as a young attorney to say that your work was good or bad, but you have to put in significant effort and try hard.
So it sounds like if the firm had enough work and it was hectic, they wouldn't have been critical of you, and you wouldn't have lost your job. They just didn't have the work, which is probably. I don't know why that is.
Now, can you work in a large law firm? Of course, you can. It's ridiculous to think you can't work in a large law firm because you lost your first job. What you have to do, though, is find another job immediately and make sure you use all the resources you possibly can to find a new job.
So your situation is similar to any other attorney that loses their job. You just have to find another job quickly, and you can only focus on something other than working at a big firm. The odds of that are no. A big firm won't hire you just because you attended a big law school. Big law firms hire junior lateral associates mostly, only some of the time, but 99% of the time. If you've been a summer associate at another big firm or something along those lines, you may be able to get into a big firm. People always get lucky, and I've placed people in big firms that have had this situation. But for the most part, you're only going to get into a significant firm if you can get another job and then try to work in a big firm and then move from there.
The other thing I would say to people wanting to work in large law firms is that there are a million reasons to work in large ones, but it's certainly only for some. If you look like the kind of person a large law firm would hire, and I don't know what it is, you probably would've gotten a job from on-campus interviewing. Why didn't that happen? Sometimes big law firms are looking for certain types of people. It could be that you're too entrepreneurial, could be that you seem too independent. Who knows? Or you could be that you just don't come across as someone that would take it seriously. It's not everybody's meant to do everything, and you indeed can find your place, but you need to step up, be responsible, not take any of this personally, and just keep going. That would be my advice.
