Career & Professional Development Blog

It's Mid-Summer Review Time - Tips from a Pro

If you are spending the summer at an employer that utilizes mid-summer reviews, below is a link to a letter from a recruiting professional with tips for making the most of that review to aid in your career development (and to help secure an offer at the end of the summer). 

If your summer employer does not typically use mid-summer reviews, don’t be shy about asking for one! Feedback on your work product is immensely valuable in helping you become a better lawyer.

http://amlawdaily.typepad.com/amlawdaily/2008/07/letter-to-the-s.html

Tammy King, Washington University School of Law
 

Exit Plans

How you leave a position can have great impact on your career.  Attorney Carolyn Elefant discusses how to leave gracefully, whether the decision was yours or not.  Her article is part of The Complete Lawyer's current issue focusing on exit strategies.  The issue is full of practical articles covering all kinds of exits, from layoffs to disability to career change and even death. 

Carla DeVelder, Notre Dame Law School

What are "they" looking for? Tell your story.

Yes, some employers make a first cut for grades.   But beyond that, recruiters and hiring partners are looking for candidates who can express themselves well -- both in their writing and in their speech.

COVER LETTERS

1.    The first paragraph should tell who you are and what you want.  "I am a second year law student at the Excellent Law School and I am interested in a summer associate position with your firm."  If you have good grades and you want to mention your journal or moot court, add that.  But remember that the topic sentence of this paragraph -- indeed the entire focus of the paragraph -- is "Who are you and what do you want?"  Recruiters will not take time to wade through six paragraphs of "creative writing" to get to the point that you should have made in the first sentence.

2.  The second paragraph relates your experience to the work that you will do as a law clerk or summer associate.  "But I've never worked in a law firm! How could I possibly know what I will do?"  While you might not be able to chart the anthropological lifecycle of a law clerk's day, not only do you know what law clerks do, but you have done it well or you wouldn't be in law school.

Law clerks research and write.  When you were an undergraduate or in graduate school, you researched and wrote papers for a variety of courses.  Let your employer know that you enjoyed the work and, that you especially enjoyed doing research in original (not electronic) sources.  Why is this important?  While much of your time in law school is spent embracing the law, a large amount of practicing lawyers' time is spent searching out and parsing facts -- facts that can't be found on the internet, but might be located in a client's paper records or in a dusty courthouse basement or by talking to potential witnesses.   

3.  The third paragraph should address something about you that might be valuable to a potential employer.  Again, you ask "How can I possibly know this?"   Think about what lawyers actually do: they read, write, talk on the phone and go to meetings.  But why?  They are acting as advocates for their clients, their business, their policies, their problems and their personal lives.  Anything that you have ever done that demonstrates your advocacy skills can fit neatly into this paragraph.  For example:

• Teaching: You have explained things to people who were unfamiliar (and possibly resistant) to your information.
• Coaching: You have identified problems, including three dimensional problems such as how to hold a baseball bat or how to swim the Butterfly, and then explained and demonstrated the solutions.
• Other work:  One Peace Corps returnee had to climb a jungle-covered mountain to persuade people in his district who had never EVER left their villages, to accompany him to the largest and most dangerous city in the country to help make the case for water control projects that he was developing.  This is advocacy.

4.  The fourth paragraph will usually take one of two forms:

• Thank you for taking the time to review my credentials.  You may reach me at [phone] and [email], and I look forward to hearing from you.
• Thank you for taking the time to review my credentials.  I will be in [your city] during the week of [x date] and I will call you next week to set up a meeting.  In the meantime, you may reach me at [phone] or [email], and I look forward to meeting with you.

INTERVIEWS

Tell your story. Know three things about yourself that an employer ought to know before you leave the interview room, and be prepared with three examples of each which you can use to answer just about any question that's thrown at you. 

This is the ONLY way that you can begin to be prepared for behavioral interviews.  Behavioral questions usually begin with "tell me about a time when..."  If you have thought about your leadership, scholarship and other skills and you have prepared by telling your stories OUT LOUD, you will appear comfortable and sharp in your interviews.

Susan Gainen, University of Minnesota Law School

Resume and Interview Tips

We've covered this in the past on this blog, but just a refresher out there for those students and graduates who might be reading:

On your resume, please have a professional and somewhat innocuous email address. It can be simple: something like your first initial and last name. Use one of the many free email accounts that are out there now. I recently read a resume where the first word in the person's email address was "Queen".  Queen! When I read this, I instantly thought, what kind of person is this? (And her name was not Queen.)

For an interview, prepare questions in advance and act professionally throughout the interview. I recently visited with an employer and he said that an interviewee would answer "Check, sir!" to every statement made by the employer. Imagine: 

Interviewer:  We require our associates to bill 1800 hours.

Interviewee:  Check, sir!

Interviewer:  You will be required to bill in 6 minute intervals.

Interviewee:  Check, sir!

Interviewer:  How many fingers am I holding up?

Interviewee:  Check, sir!

While enthusiasm is a plus, there is such a thing as going over the top. Pay attention and give attentive and thoughtful answers and responses to the employer's questions.

Tailor your resume to the job description. It is good to have a standard resume, but always tailor it to fit the particular job for which you are applying. If the job description says, "Seeks person with management experience," then be sure to include any management experience you may have had in the past on your resume, even if it was in a non-legal setting. If the employer needs someone that is fluent in Excel, then make sure that is one your resume. Look for "key words" in the job description and make sure you have touched upon those areas either in your resume or your cover letter.

Speaking of cover letters, short is not always better. While "clear and concise" may have been your goal, you want to speak to the employer through your cover letter. Let them know why your are interested in the job. If the job involves a location change, tell the employer why you want to move to that location. If you are really excited about the job opportunity and it is exactly what you have always wanted to do, then communicate that in your cover letter. This is your first (and maybe only) chance to reach the employer through your words.

Finally and most importantly, proofread, proofread, proofread. Have someone else proof your resume and cover letter, too. The more eyes you can get on your application materials before you send it to the employer, the better. In the employer's eyes, a typo means that you don't care and it is the surest way to get your materials sent to the recycle bin.

Anetra Parks, University of Wyoming College of Law, Laramie, Wyoming

Loan Forgiveness

If you need information to help advise your students about the loan forgiveness legislation passed in 2007, this law review article summarizes things:

Philip G. Schrag, Federal Student Loan Repayment Assistance for Public Interest Lawyers and Other Employees of Governments and Nonprofit Organizations, 36 Hofstra Law Review 27 (2007).

Anetra Parks, University of Wyoming College of Law, Laramie, WY