Optimizing Job Applications: Resume vs. Comprehensive Approach

Description

• Industry Insights: Harrison discusses job opportunities for new attorneys in specialized litigation and employment law, particularly in the context of insurance defense firms.
• Job Market Dynamics: Emphasizes the abundance of opportunities in insurance defense due to high demand, with a focus on various cases like auto accidents and slip-and-fall incidents.
• Employment Law Perspective: Challenges the perception of limited employment law opportunities, highlighting the constant need for legal services across various businesses facing issues such as discrimination, wrongful termination, and class actions.
• Firm Size Consideration: Advises considering smaller general practice firms for stability and diverse work in employment law, cautioning against challenges in large firms that often focus on class action defense.
• Strategic Job Search Approach: Stresses the importance of unconventional job search methods, encouraging attorneys to proactively seek opportunities by researching and applying directly to firms, even those not actively advertising openings.
• Unique Job Search Platform: Introduces LawCrossing, an unconventional job search platform that aggregates unadvertised opportunities from law firm and company websites, providing a broader view of available positions.
• Proactive Career Management: Advocates for a proactive approach to job hunting, underlining the significance of being the first and, ideally, the only applicant for a position to increase the chances of success.
• Long-Term Career Strategy: Positions the unconventional approach as a game-changer, asserting that understanding and implementing these strategies can yield lifelong dividends, as the majority of job seekers do not adopt such proactive methods.
• Closing Advice: Encourages attorneys to break away from traditional job search norms, take control of their careers, and actively create opportunities rather than passively waiting for openings.

Transcript

Optimizing Job Applications: Resume vs. Comprehensive Approach
 
Okay. So, next question. I'm a new attorney in a specialized field of litigation and employment law, but many of my firms in my region Mostly do insurance defense. I will explain the insurance defense, why that is at the moment, and why employment opportunities are limited. I'm coming from a branch office of a more prominent firm. Should I consider attending a smaller general practice firm, sticking to employment law, and looking at other regions?
 
Okay. So everyone understands there are lots of insurance defense firms. Insurance defense, by the way, is litigation. There are a lot of insurance defense firms. And if you are interested in getting a job and feel like you're having difficulty doing it. Insurance defense is always a great practice area to go into.
 
It's a great practice area because if you are doing insurance defense, you're more likely to have an excellent opportunity to get a position. After all, there's just a lot of demand for it. Insurance defense, by the way, is auto accidents, slip and fall, all those sorts of things, slip and fall, all those sorts of things for people.
 
Get insured, and insurance companies defend people. Typically, this job pays for lunch, but there are many of them. And so this person is saying that employment opportunities doing employment law are limited. I'm afraid I have to disagree with the law, which is not limited. It's not because every business out there gets sued for different things.
 
McDonald's gets sued all the time. Everybody gets sued. There's just one little McDonald's, and people are getting injured. There's sexual harassment. People feel that they're, I'm not saying there's sexual harassment, but there's usually some sexual harassment. There's. Some people think they're discriminated against.
 
People think they were fired for the wrong reason. That's just a fricking McDonald's, one McDonald's. So they will have things. So, I do not think employment law is limited. I think that employment law is typically in the highest-paid law firm. The problem with working in large firms and employment law is that I want to ensure everyone understands that employment law is typically in the highest-paid law firm.
 
Employment law is almost always limited to defending against class actions that are brought because the companies can pay a lot of money for that. The show is typically limited to class actions. Then, the next thing that happens with employment law at the largest law firms is that sometimes, they do it for established clients and themselves. Still, the problem with employment law is that because there are so many firms, you have like your Littler Mendelsohn's, Jackson Lewis's, or Fortin Harrison's.
 
Because there are so many firms that do nothing, but that nothing, but employment law, to do employment law consistently for your McDonald's and your Walmarts and things, someone must be able to charge less money consistently. These firms are only billing a little money except for the major firms.
 
So, there are only a few big firms that do employment law. The ones that do typically do class action defense. And the ones that don't do that may do employment law, but they're typically not charging as high of rates. So it is harder to get jobs in big firms. But by the way, those jobs are also less stable because, often, because employment law doesn't, the firms can charge less money, or it's more challenging to hold on to clients.
 
The big firms that do employment law often seek to eliminate their employment law practices. So, what would I do if I were in employment law? Lawyers, so employment law lawyers, the nice thing about them is there are tons of firms in every city that do either employment defense or employment plaintiff's work.
 
There is a lot of money to be made in plaintiff's works in most states, but not all. And there's also a lot of money to be made in employment defense. So, I do not think that wherever you're working, I don't think employment opportunities are limited. I will tell you. Let me just see if I can do this quickly.
 
I can open a page that's not, doesn't have anything so scary. Are you? I don't care where you are. Let's say you're in, I don't know, Oklahoma City. This is a small market, right? Oklahoma, the city, I meant the fence, Loughborough, I'm just, Loughborough. The way you look for opportunities isn't necessarily to be able to find, Oh, look, hiring partner.
 
Awesome. Interesting. I'm sorry. I'm going to cut this out. The hiring partner is one of my companies. I am just shocked at showing up this way. So I'm excited about this. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I didn't even know that company advertises. Pretty awesome. So you can see these firms here in Oklahoma City that do defense stuff.
 
So you can find them. It's not too hard. You have all these firms. You also have, if you want to keep looking for law firms, many times there's sometimes things will come up that show you all of the. Different places. So you have these sorts of things that come up, these different rankings of law firms. And you can also, and many markets, like if you're in a big market, let's say Sacramento, California, that's not that big of a market, that's California.
 
The way to find jobs way to find jobs is not to have to, is not to find or apply to firms. That you're finding that you're finding on job boards or whatever, et cetera. The fight, the way to find jobs, is to find jobs. And again, this one piece of advice, this one little piece of advice I'm about to give you could change your life and really could, it could, it's going to, if you fully understand what I'm about to say, it's going to be 100 times worth.
 
The price of admission or whatever, it's no price, but. Coming to this webinar it's going to, if you write it down, change your life. If you understand it, it's going to change your life. It will make it so you never have to worry about getting a job again or being unemployed because no one is doing this.
 
I will tell you there are jobs because this is what I do. Eighty-five percent of Pearson's and BCG's placements; I want to ensure you understand this because these firms are paying us tens of thousands of dollars, if not more, to find people. Sometimes, they'll pay; if it's a partner, they will pay a quarter of a million dollars.
 
This is something that everyone frickin life. Eighty-five percent of placements are with firms that do not have openings. So this is the entire business, my entire business, that no one else is doing places with firms that do not have openings, no one else is doing this. No, 99 percent of recruiters and printers do not do this.
 
Also, 95 percent of job seekers still need to do this. Why is this important? So when you apply to jobs, and again, this is so important when you apply to firms, don't have openings, you are the only fricking applicant. Yeah. So why would, because no one else is doing this? No, 95, 98 percent of candidates do this.
 
And if they do, they're only applying to these big firms. They're not applying to everyone. Candidates do not do this. So this is huge. I just want everyone to understand what this means. So why was I searching on Google? I was searching on Google to show you. All of these fricking law firms that do your type of work.
 
It's not that employment opportunities are limited. It's that no one's fricking applying to these jobs. You have to be out of your mind. And I wonder why people don't do this. I don't know. It's mystified me to fricking death my entire damn career. But this is the first time anyone has done this. You probably don't do it.
 
They're like, Oh, I got to move. No, you don't have to fricking move. I've seen people working in no jobs. I search for them on Google or in databases, and there are 50 firms. Doing the kind of work like this is no one does this. You have to be again. I've been in this business forever. You do have to be out of your mind.
 
No one does this, not do this. So their employment law into opportunities every single where you go. Now, how else do you find them? And again, I'm going to promote one of my fricking own companies. And I'm not doing that. So LawCrossing, which I own, goes to every law firm website with jobs, every company website, and every that we can find and puts them on there.
 
And they're not advertised. If you put a job on LinkedIn or a company puts it on LinkedIn or Indeed, they're paying to be there. So that means. You're only seeing a small fraction of the jobs out there. It would help if you saw every available job. You're only seeing the jobs that people are paying for.
 
So, LawCrossing just shows you every job that fits. Websites that aren't advertised, that's it, works. But anyway, there are better options for small markets. Suppose you're in a tiny market, tiny. An example would be a town of 15,000 or something because there are only a few ever firms, even 10,000.
 
Anyway, I work and live in Malibu, California. There are probably 10 law firms here and maybe 7,000 permanent residents. So again, there's, you have to, but the point is then LawCrossing, I don't want to promote it, but also has what are called archive jobs, which is the most significant, most intelligent thing you can do. Those are jobs a law firm has, companies have had in the past, and law firms; if you apply, they're likely to do that.
 
If you are applying for a job, what happens is that anybody with an internet connection finds a job on LinkedIn or just bombards most employers with openings. And typically, what happens when you apply to openings? People are only applying to the first openings.
 
They're the players who typically take people from the first applicants. So if you're like an employer and get 50 or a hundred applicants, what will happen in the first 20 or 30 you'll look at? And then you're going to try to interview and hire based on those, and the ones that come after; you're just like, I don't want to keep clicking on open and looking at all these emails.
 
I'm just going to look at the initial ones. I'm going to spend my time interviewing those people that I like. And hopefully, I won't have to look at more people because this is a lot of work and I don't have time. That's how law firms think. So you want to be 1st to apply. But better yet, you want to be the only applicant.
 
I can't emphasize this enough. If you read this and you listen to this, then that's, if you understand this, you will, it will give you dividends for the rest of your fricking life. Rare. No one does this, though. And again, I'm not talking about sending your resume unsolicited to Melvin; no, in honor of Gibson Dunning Crutcher.
 
That's an excellent law firm. I can only say that if you try to do that. Send an unsolicited resume to them. They're probably everyone is doing that. So it's not going to mean as much as that. If you send it to a firm, that's a small size. So that's how that works.