Description
- Don't Define Yourself Solely by Law School: Emphasizes that career success is determined by practice area, work, business generation, and the type of attorney you become, not just the law school you attended.
- Bar Exam and Litigation: Encourages multiple attempts at the bar exam, highlighting that success is about studying, not innate intelligence. For aspiring litigators, experience from clerking in a state appellate court is valuable.
- Job Search in Raleigh: Raleigh offers a robust legal market. Suggests searching for litigation attorney jobs through various means, such as emails, letters, and networking. Recommends using tools like Law Crossing and Google for job searches.
- Abundance of Opportunities: Stresses that there are numerous job opportunities available, with 125 law firms listed. The key is marketing oneself effectively and exploring unconventional avenues to stand out.
- Creating Opportunities: Urges aspiring attorneys to create a market for themselves by finding and applying for opportunities that others may overlook. Drawing parallels with product marketing, emphasizes the need to package and market one's skills effectively.
- Networking and Asking for Help: Recommends leveraging connections and reaching out for assistance in job searches. Advocates using resources like Law Crossing and Google to uncover hidden opportunities.
- Conclusion: Concludes that with the right approach and resource utilization, securing a litigation job in Raleigh, especially for those with state appellate court clerkship experience and a top law school background, should not be overly challenging.
Transcript:
So one of the things I just want to say everyone is that, and this is okay, and I'm not critiquing the statement. But everyone seems to define themselves based on the fact that they went to a top law school. And I certainly went to a top law school, but it's not.
Your career will be defined based on the practice area you choose, based on the work The kind of work you do based on the amount of business you bring in, based on the type of attorney you are, all this sort of thing. So people define themselves early on based on the law school they went to, which is good.
I don't, I'm saying I've certainly worked extremely hard to try to get into a good law school, but I'm just saying it's not, you shouldn't define yourself. Going forward based on other things. I know people that are in their eighties that you can't spend more than five minutes with them if you're just meeting them for the first time, they won't tell you where they went to college, if it was MIT or Harvard or something.
So it's just, you have to define yourself based on the career decisions you make. That's more important in the long run, anything. I'm in Los Angeles and I don't, I couldn't tell you how many people I know personally that went to Harvard Law School. It's huge numbers, like 20, 30. It's not, they don't think of themselves really any differently because there's so many of them.
It's crazy, but it's just, I just would recommend everyone to find themselves based on the law school. Now it's a big deal and it shows you're smart and all that kind of stuff. It's very competitive, but I would just go for it. Okay. So there's nothing wrong with spending multiple tries, taking the law and taking the bar exam.
That's perfectly fine. I think it's taking the bar just so everyone understands this. It's a question of, it's a question of studying, not being smart, but studying. And that's really it. Some people are natural, but it's really about how much you study. And if you study and not feel passive, I wouldn't feel, and thank you for saying that you took three tries.
There's absolutely nothing wrong. Okay. I want to be a litigator. What's your new experience? So yeah. So if you clerked in a state appellate court, that's enough. You've learned about litigation. And you need to find people to work with. If you are in Raleigh, that's a huge market. Keep coming back to this stuff.
I just want everyone to see. You would just say mitigation attorneys and Raleigh, North Carolina, and get all these places and there's just tons of them. So there's plenty of places you can work. The law firms look at this crazy, look at this number. So there are plenty of places that you can find to work.
How do you find those places? You can email them, you can send them letters. I would send letters. I was, that would be smart. I'm just telling you how it works, but you can do that. You can connect with people. You can look for jobs. If you had those, I don't want to again, promote my own companies because it seems self serving, but if you did litigation, attorney jobs.
In Raleigh, North Carolina, then La Crosse, so you have a legal job, litigation, attorney jobs in Raleigh, and you get all these things. Why is this good? I'm just, you have 10 pages of these jobs. Why is it good? It's just, it means that there's a ton of places that you can work. And find positions, and if you use this, there's 125 law firms, I don't know what's going on there, but just lots and lots of places you could work.
And these jobs, by the way, the reason this is smart is these are not, these are off of different websites and things that, or law firm websites and company websites. So there's plenty of jobs out there, and I really wouldn't worry about it. Marketing. Means applying for things and finding places that no one else is applying to.
So again, finding opportunities and creating opportunities. No one else's. What is that? So I just, a couple more points when you're what finding opportunities that no one else's means you're, you've got to, you create a market for yourself. So if someone comes out with a, I don't know, or something that I don't know, blows in the dark and I don't know, but some new product, whatever the product is.
The person's going to have to market it. They're going to have to find people, market it. Sometimes if someone's trying to market a new shampoo or something or beauty product, they might hire an influencer to do a post on Instagram about you do things any way you can to market your products. You can, you need to figure out how to market it and how to package it.
So that's. The way I would say, but yeah, if you clerked in the state appellate court, went to a top law school, you should have no problem getting a litigation job. There's tons of litigation jobs and it shouldn't be very difficult for you. And you can create a market by. Finding and asking people to help you find a job.
It's not asking people who they know, or just, it's really not that hard. I would use law crossing. I would use Google. I would do whatever you can to find opportunities in that way. And it's going to help you quite a bit.
