Description
Deepen your understanding—explore valuable insights in this video's content through the full webinar here: Major Job Interview Mistakes to Avoid at All Costs
- In a recent Q&A clip, Harrison discusses the challenges attorneys face in losing their jobs.
- Key Insight: Most attorneys experience job loss, highlighting the importance of strategic representation in interviews.
- Career Perspective: Attorneys should treat themselves as their clients during interviews, focusing on positive aspects like skills and fit.
- Crafting the Narrative: Avoid discussing a lousy supervisor or job loss circumstances; highlight factors like lack of work, firm challenges, or practice focus shift.
- Geographical Advantage: Seeking jobs in different regions may lead to fewer inquiries, offering a fresh start. Applying to various firms is encouraged.
- Quick Thinking: Thinking on one's feet is crucial, aligning responses with legal profession expectations and maintaining a positive narrative.
- Continuous Learning: Keeping informed about law firms and job market dynamics enhances interview success and career progression.
- Recommended Resource: Harrison suggests the book "Nudge" for insights on decision-making in the legal profession.
- Application Strategy: Apply strategically, considering firm prestige levels and being cautious about shared information for accurate and relevant responses.
- Conclusion: Successfully navigating job loss involves careful narrative crafting, strategic thinking, and continual self-improvement in the dynamic legal landscape.
Transcript:
Okay. So, this question is if an attorney loses their job due to a supervisor who had it out for them and a switch flipped, how can the attorney present themselves and explain the situation in interviews, particularly for younger, mid-level attorneys? Okay. So, the first thing is that everyone on this webinar should understand something, which is very important.
Most attorneys lose their jobs at some point or multiple times. So, I want everyone to understand that regardless of how good of an attorney you think you are, you will lose your job. If you are at a super prestigious firm and you graduated order the coif from a top 10 law school and think you have, you will probably be told not all of them.
And it's much fewer these days, but you may be told you're done. Therefore, you need to find a new job when you don't make partners because you, the firm, don't make partners, whatever, or you may lose your job because you make a mistake at some point in your career, you may lose your job.
So, everyone will lose their job. So just. Be aware of that. Now, it doesn't mean you always will if you study the kind of stuff that I talk about and write and other people do too. I'm not saying I'm the only person who does this, but any, if you study law firms and if you study what it means to keep jobs and what you need to do.
And I think I have a lot of information that can help you. But if you study that sort of information, you will become more successful. Just as if you study finance and learn everything you can about how to. I don't know, trade copper or something. You'll become better than people that don't. So, everything is about learning how to make good decisions and doing that correctly.
There's an interesting book, by the way, called Nudge by some University of Chicago. And I know some other people, but anyway, it doesn't matter that you make decisions based on your information. When you're buying stocks, some people have much better information than you have, and they're going to do better than people that you get the idea.
Or someone who knows everything that's played tennis for 20 years will know a lot more than someone new and have an advantage. So, this kind of information will help you, but. Let me just get back to the point. Most attorneys have jobs at multiple points in time.
So, one of the things that's very important, and this is something that this point alone will change the course of your career and what you do and how you succeed when you are interviewing with firms, you are at, you are, oh my God, when you're interviewing with firms, you're, when you're interviewing firms, what you're doing is you are your client.
So imagine if you were representing a murderer and you went in and you went into court and you said, Oh, this person, this is not a good person. They've done this in the past and made these mistakes, and that's not what attorneys respect. So, there's something in the legal profession and the DNA of the legal profession that says. When you go into employers, you want to ensure that you represent yourself and do so in a way that the client would expect. So, do you talk about losing your job? No, you don't. Do you talk about a bad supervisor?
No, you don't. So, what do you do? You have to come across as a person. You say they didn't have enough work. They, the firm, were having problems or something that related to my practice area. Whatever it is, you have to bring it up and, or worse, just say something along the lines of, it may not have been a good fit or whatever you try to bring it up. One thing I would say, too, that's interesting is when attorneys are looking for jobs in other parts of the country, instead of where they're at, maybe they're moving to where they grew up. Law firms like that tend to give more interviews and make more hires for many reasons.
But one is because they don't have that kind of suspicion in the background. So, I just recommend that if this happens to you, just keep applying to firms. Most of the time, if someone needs you. They're not going to ask a lot of questions. If you're trying to get a job at a peer firm, it will be more complicated than getting a job at a lower-ranked firm in terms of prestige levels, but you just need to be very careful in what you say.
You want to avoid explaining the situation. You want to give the impression that the work wasn't there, that they didn't have work for junior associates or mid-levels. That's something that, and there are many explanations you can give for not having a job there anymore, but they need to be accurate. And, but that's about it. Or maybe you want to practice something other than a specific type of law and do something new. I don't know, but you must be careful about that question. And I hope that's a good answer. But you have to think on your feet as any attorney would do and represent yourself back to Biden.
