Ex-Lawyers, Soon-to-be-Ex-Lawyers, and Ex-Lawyer Groupies

Hello, regulars and drop-ins to our new permanent (hopefully) home. Gripes about the profession, questions about exit routes and how to use them, or discussions about professional alternatives or your work/life priorities -- all these are welcome.

Glad to be here, and a warm welcome to all. :cheers:

-- NYT Junkie

[Replaced_Texan]

Originally posted by NYT_Junkie
Hello, regulars and drop-ins to our new permanent (hopefully) home. Gripes about the profession, questions about exit routes and how to use them, or discussions about professional alternatives or your work/life priorities -- all these are welcome.

Glad to be here, and a warm welcome to all. :cheers:

-- NYT Junkie

I'm liking the new site and I LOVE your avatar. I have a similar one on another site, but I forgot about small Hobbs.

[pretermitted_child]

I ran across this link on That Other Board, and it seems to be bursting with fruit flavors: [spree: May sound discouraging at times]


I had once considered becoming a law professor ... and then I thought about my 1L year, whereupon I realized that muttering "must ... control ... fist ... of ... death" several times during a class session would be unprofessional.

-pc

Another great excerpt from Ann Israel:

"Some people seem to think that everything a recruiter does is motivated only by money and greed, and then there are those attorneys who have had successful relationships with recruiters (whether or not the relationship ended in a placement) and believe that the professional recruiter works for a lot more than just money."

I number in the former category of people. It never ceases to amaze me that headhunters go after the people who least need their help. Now, I can't blame them for wanting to go after the quick buck, but they really ought to be better salespeople when it comes to placing candidates that don't have pedigreed credentials.

Here is another execerpt that proves my point:

"As I have explained before, my business can be a cruel business. There is a very finite population of attorneys that can be placed by a recruiter. This is because the clients are only willing to pay a fee for a very specific profile to satisfy their needs and requirements. I have received letters from readers telling me that it is the recruiters' responsibility to make the clients operate in a different way and to be willing to pay a fee for someone who may not fit their specific needs but is willing to work 24/7 to try to fit into the requirements. Unfortunately, it is not within the recruiters' realm to change what the client is willing to hire when a fee is involved."

Clients would be quite willing to pay a fee for a candidate that is proven to them as being capable of: (1) performing the work with minimal handholding, and (2) is willing to bust his ass for the firm. It's been my experience with junior pedigreed lawyers that they are often pretentious as a result of their pedigrees, and don't really pull their own weight. If I was going to pay $30-40K for a candidate, I would take a second-tier graduate with summa cum laude over a cum laude or below from a top first-tier school. In today's legal marketplace, clients are more focused on getting value for their legal dollars, and discriminate more on price than the pedigree of the junior lawyers that work on their cases.

In case anyone is interested in our old friend HP, it seems rough carpentry wasn't working either.

http://www.infirmation.com/bboard/cl...?msg_id=0029gJ

I'm sure there's a story waiting to be told there somewhere, whether it's shattered fantasies about life in the law or life outside, the inability of construction work or teaching high school to make expected payments on law school tuition debts, or just a realization that other grass isn't always greener.

:smack:

Regardless of specifics, more people should look before they leap, both when they're applying to law school, and later when they're a lawyer and considering getting out of the BIGLAW rat race. I'm not giving an opinion on these important decisions, but because they're so important they should be informed, or at least more so than they usually seem to be.

Since I've been "brought onto" this board I figured I'd go ahead and start posting here. Besides there's also a lot more activity here than at infirmation.

In terms of looking before you leap, I was so sick of that mentality after my time in law that I could have screamed. Many lawyers overweigh risks and underweigh possible positive outcomes of risk. I had been cautious for a number of years and had had enough! (I think I would enjoy being a plaintiff's attorney if it wasn't a full-time thing. Rather than being risk-averse, I seem to seek risk. It sucks when you take a risk and land flat on your face, but it's a lot better than spending your whole life wondering what would have happened had you done what you wanted to. Besides, it makes life interesting.)

But back to look before you leap. People don't care as much about your past as about what you can do for them in the present--and give me the right situation (i.e. one where I have a decent amount of control over my working conditions, either contract or some part-time work) and I can definitely offer something to lawyers. There is a reason I got into and finished Harvard. Besides I actually want to work this type of job, whereas previously I was looking for and accepting legal jobs more out of a sense of it being what I had to do. People sense the difference. Getting back into law might be tough in some situations, but with a Harvard degree, I think I'll swing it.

My financial problems have not been with law school debt, but with a spouse who, like the vast majority of people, cannot live while I earn $10/hour. It's easy for me to cut back spending and work a low-paying job, but that doesn't come so easily for my spouse. I could live in a total crap-hole and not care; for me that would be easier than living somewhere nice and working a job I hate. But while I cannot give up on my dream of writing, neither can I ignore our financial situation and my spouse's needs. There is nothing else out there I can do that is going to pay me as much per hour as law. Not even close.

Junkie, I do think that slapping smilies thing is cute.

HP,

I applaud your sense of responsibility and acknowledgment of reality (as badly as it can suck sometimes). You seem to now realize that you need to do what it takes to realize your goal/dream to be a writer. No matter how fulfilling being a carpenter was, you realized that $10/hour wasn't going to provide you and your spouse the lifestyle necessary for you to be able to focus the bulk of your energies on writing.:thumbsup:

The law definitely pays better than most professions, even on a part-time basis. I'm surprised more full-time lawyers don't go part-time, or even adopt some type of "consultant" status whereby they charge their firms by the hour and don't require benefits/overhead.

Originally posted by Sting
The law definitely pays better than most professions, even on a part-time basis. I'm surprised more full-time lawyers don't go part-time, or even adopt some type of "consultant" status whereby they charge their firms by the hour and don't require benefits/overhead.

I used to be close to this business. Let me provide some insight.

There is a market for contract attorneys and it is usually filled by young grads 1-3 years out. The work is primarily litigation driven and the pay rates range from $25-$50 an hour, which hardly produces a fortune in cash flow when you add in the need to pay benefit costs and self-employment tax. Finding these positions on a part time rather than full time basis is hard. The work and the working environment usually suck. By the way, the firm's fixed overhead [rent, IT, reception, support staff] is not reduced by using contract lawyers.

For more senior attorneys, there is no significant market that will hire them on contract (Harvard grad or not). There are many reasons for this. Firms prefer to spend their capital, resources and marketing dollars on promoting their own lawyers not contract lawyers. Firms can rely on their employees to be there and make the extra committment more than on contract lawyers. Firms believe that clients are not be as comfortable knowing their more important work was outsourced to contract lawyers. Firms don't want clients to know that the rate they charge for contract labor is significantly more that the price the firm pays. There are malpractice issues as well.

With all that said, I had a solo practice at one point based on outsourcing legal work in a niche practice area. It was fairly lucrative. However, the business plan had to address the fact that the clients would often be acquired or grow to where they needed a full time lawyer in the practice area. The trick was to be able to replace the matured client with a new yonker every so often.

"The work and the working environment usually suck."

I am somewhat familiar with what you mean about the work (often mindless discovery tasks). But to clarify, especially regarding the working environment, why would you consider it bad?

:seenno:

anyone know the names of any legal recruiters who do good Temp Attorney (ie/ consulting, contract work, what have you) placement?

I hear that's one of the only ways to get a job as a corporate attorney these days -- might even turn into a permanent gig if you're sharp and really lucky I hear

Originally posted by harvardpauper
I am somewhat familiar with what you mean about the work (often mindless discovery tasks). But to clarify, especially regarding the working environment, why would you consider it bad?

:seenno:

I had to think a long time about how to reply to this question.

I wondered why the factual underpinnings of an entirely subjective view could at all be relevant to your decision making, given your prior emphasis on Myers Brigg results in career planning. Besides, the answer is obviously contained within your question. But then I realized you were looking for someone to confirm your fears, so here goes.

Answer: Your supervisors will insist on telling you what to do. Sometimes they will even tell you how they want you to do it.

The Attorney, Unemployed

Matt Kelly
The National Law Journal
04-10-2003


Heard the one about the lawyer who couldn't find a job? No? Well, keep listening -- they're all over the place.

Ask Lee Feldshon, a 33-year-old entertainment lawyer who lives in New York. He graduated from Columbia University Law School in 1994, worked at New York's White & Case and several other well-established law firms in the 1990s, then landed a job as director of legal affairs for Madison Square Garden in 2001. He got laid off in 2002.

Feldshon has been looking for a full-time lawyer job ever since, 15 months and counting.

"I was very confident that I'd find a new job soon," he said. He bought a 150-page notebook to track his mailed-out resumes and follow-up phone calls. As he filled the pages with records of fruitless efforts, the reality of today's job market sank in.

"Not only were jobs hard to get, they just didn't exist," he said. "It was the same chant: 'You have great qualifications. We just wish we had a job for you.'" He has approached at least 250 companies or firms, he said.

The Labor Department says that white-collar unemployment is the highest it's ever been, nearly 9 percent. For lawyers, at 1.2 percent, it's the highest since 1997. While that rate is low in absolute terms (in 2002, 11,000 unemployed out of 940,000), it's up sharply from 0.8 percent in 2001 and 0.6 percent in 1999. In other words, attorney joblessness jumped by half last year and has doubled since the Internet boom's peak.

The "real" rate is higher than the official one, though it's impossible to say by how much. The government considers all those working more than one hour a week in their chosen fields to be employed. And some lawyers have simply left the law. Every lawyer seems to know someone temping at nonlegal work. Recruiters say they see a small but steady stream of lawyers leaving the profession.

Unemployed professionals now take longer to find work than they used to. The average period of joblessness last year was nearly 18 weeks, up from 12 in 1991. The "core" unemployed, those out of work for 27 weeks or more, comprise one-fifth of the unemployed.

The result is a growing number of lawyers practicing something they never expected: long-term joblessness.

"I do find it frustrating," said Steven Spear, 35, a corporate lawyer in Boston. Fresh from the University of Connecticut School of Law in 1998, Spear began working at Boston's Goodwin Procter, representing its emerging-business clients at the height of the Internet boom. He lost his job in November 2001 as part of layoffs imposed because, he was told, "things were slow." Since then he has done contract legal work and public relations free-lance writing, collected unemployment and looked for work.

"You always know that failure could happen," he said. "And then guess what? You're the one who rolled snake eyes."

This bad job market began in the summer of 2001, when Palo Alto, Calif., powerhouse Cooley Godward cut 85 lawyers. The list since then is long: 32 lawyers laid off from Mountain View, Calif.'s Fenwick & West; 34 at Boston's Testa, Hurwitz & Thibeault; 46 at Palo Alto's Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich; and 80 at New York's Shearman & Sterling.

San Francisco's Brobeck Phleger & Harrison, an Internet economy kingpin that employed some 875 attorneys at its peak in 2001, dissolved completely.

Government and business legal departments are being battered, too. Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney wants to halve the 800-odd lawyers working for the state as he tries to close a $3 billion budget gap. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office cut 101 trademark examiners, all attorneys, in 2002. According to a survey by Corporate Legal Times, IBM cut 42 attorneys from its legal department last year; SBC Corp., 35; Merrill Lynch, 30; and AT&T, 25. Those numbers came out last August, before, lawyers and recruiters say, job cutting turned really bad. "We're just seeing more and more of this," said Jeffrey Simon, a legal recruiter at Chicago's River West Consultants. "Things are virtually at a standstill, and this is the start of the third year of it."

VULNERABLE AREAS

The legal industry is not suffering uniformly. Practices such as bankruptcy, patent prosecution and litigation still do well. The most vulnerable attorneys seem to fall into four groups:

• Dot-com hotshots. They often started as big-firm corporate associates in the 1990s and jumped to general counsel jobs at startups during the Internet boom. Today, their employers are often bankrupt, and their limited experience makes it difficult to compete for the few corporate counsel or law firm jobs available.

• Unprofitable partners. Firms today are more willing to cut loose partners who cannot bring in sufficient new business. Older partners might essentially be forced into early retirement. Younger ones without solid books of business, as much as $2 million annually in some cities, often cannot get a firm's attention.

• In-house counsel. Thanks to mergers, restructurings or budget cutbacks, many corporate counsel jobs have vanished. Those with jobs are staying put.

• Corporate associates. Workhorses of the 1990s boom, they are at risk because of falling demand from firms' corporate clients. With little experience, they have few options other than to send out résumés, network and hunt for temporary legal work to pay the bills.

Not surprisingly, the worst markets today are those that enjoyed the most success in the 1990s. San Francisco; Silicon Valley, Calif.; Boston; and New York all saw booms and could not hire lawyers fast enough to fill burgeoning corporate and technology practices.

"The Bay Area is probably the worst market in the country now. It's far worse than the early 1990s," said Avis Caravello, a legal recruiter in Silicon Valley. Layoffs in the valley started in earnest 18 months ago, and Caravello knows lawyers from that first wave who still haven't found full-time work.

Alan Tse, a 1997 graduate of Harvard Law School, is one of the luckier Silicon Valley lawyers. He was out of work for only seven months. Tse lost his job last August as general counsel of Centerpoint Broadband Technologies, a telecommunications startup, as it went into bankruptcy. He found full-time work at another startup.

Tse, 31, has six lawyer friends who have been out of work for more than a year. He knows three former associates who worked at cosmetics counters at department stores to get through the holiday season. Unemployment benefits help, he said, but they usually top out at $1,300 a month -- little comfort in Silicon Valley, where a modest one-bedroom apartment like Tse's rents for $1,400 a month. "Some people are in deep trouble," he said. "The benefits don't go very far out here."

Tse sent out several dozen résumés, he said, and managed to get in the door and interview with about 20 businesses.

SIX MONTHS, FIVE POSSIBILITIES

"In six months' time I saw only five really good jobs," he said. "I was competing with guys who were partners at firms or who had six to 10 years more experience than me."

Even veteran lawyers find the job search today difficult.

"It's not the best place to be, looking for a job, no matter what field you're in," said Robert Bruce, of counsel in Indianapolis-based Barnes & Thornburg's Chicago office. "I do think that for some of the more senior folks, especially coming from in-house, it's a tough row to hoe."

Bruce, 45, spent 16 years at the legal department of ServiceMaster Co. before losing his job in a restructuring last year. It took him six months of talking with firms around Chicago before he secured a full-time position in the labor practice of Barnes & Thornburg.

Another former in-house counsel, who asked that his name not be published, has 15 years of experience as a lawyer for several large Boston-area businesses; he was laid off in November 2001 and has not found a full-time job since. "The level of difficulty in finding a job now is sort of like the perfect storm," he said.

WORKING FOR FRIENDS

The former in-house counsel and his wife make ends meet thanks to her income and the legal work he does for friends and business acquaintances, but he said his income is at least 30 percent below that of his last salaried job. He said he networks relentlessly, attending legal industry social events, doing pro bono work and soliciting job leads from friends. "The last year would actually have been really fun, if I knew there was a full-time job at the end of it all," he said. But without that happy ending? "It's the hardest thing I've ever done in my life."

Meanwhile, the bills must be paid. And for the long-term unemployed, that fact has begun raising questions lawyers never expected they would need to answer.

Feldshon's unemployment benefits ceased in November. One month later, he landed his first temp job, working on a financing deal for New York's Fognani Guibord Homsy & Roberts.

After being so long without work, he said, "It was a great boost to the self-esteem." That job lasted two weeks. He subsequently landed another temp job at New York's Cravath, Swaine & Moore reviewing financial documents at $35 an hour. That assignment ended on March 10.

Feldshon lives in an Upper West Side studio that costs $1,620 a month. His student loans are paid off. Still, he has dropped cable television, and skips dining out in favor of home-cooked meals. He is considering a move to Los Angeles, where an entertainment lawyer might stand a better chance of success. His savings, he said, "have been severely tapped."

The financial strain is being felt by many, said Joe Madden, who runs his own legal recruiting firm in Boston. "I don't think this is like anything anyone has ever seen," he said.

Well, I had a huge post typed up, but the system buggered out on me. Anyway, I'll try to start at the beginning and explain my dilema.

I decided to make law my profession sometime in highschool. I was on the debate team and decided arguing with other people would be a good way to make a living. So, I jumped through the appropriate hoops and ended up at a good firm in a major legal market.

After about a year at said firm, I was really dissatisfied with my life and work. I started looking for the cause and decided it was because my wife and I were too far from our families. I decided to look for a job in the legal market closest to our families and ended up getting an offer from a good firm.

Well, I've been here for a little less than a year and the dissatisfaction is still there. I guess it wasn't the location.

Thus, I've been doing some serious soul searching and I decided I misinterpretted my motivation for becoming a lawyer. It wasn't really the arguing that drew me, it was the rush I get from performing or being on stage. The rush I feel when I argue a motion or whatever is very satisfying. It's not only something I crave, but something I need.

Sadly, I don't think my current firm will be able to provide that. I'm not sure any firm will be able to provide it. I look at the partners in my firm, and they are not in court often enough for me, if that is to be my fate.

So, I'm at a loss regarding what I should do. I've considered a lot of options, but none of them seems like an answer. In fact, here are the options i've considered, along with the pros and cons I see:

1. Prosecuting. Pros: Locking up bad guys would be a rush. Lots of court time. No billables. Cons: Low pay. Governement BS. Low pay. Jobs are surprisingly difficult to find. Low pay.

2. Law professor. Pros: Would be on stage everytime I taught. Great pay for the hours worked. Lots of free time. No billables. Cons: Pay not as good as private practice. Dealing with administrators could be a pain. Jobs are nearly impossible to find, especially since my creds are not top-notch (not a tier-1 LS grad).

3. Some other professor. Same pros and cons as above, but added con is pay is even lower and I would probably have to get a PhD.

4. Associate at true litigation firm. Pros: Lots of court time. Pay probably decent. Cons: Billables. Does this firm even exist? Probably not in court as much as a prosecutor.

5. Become an actor? too many cons to list, so this probably isn't a real option.

6. Start my own business? Doing what? Not sure on this.

7. Try to get into a completely different career field? But what?

Ok, those are just the things I've thought of off the top of my head. Any other ideas or comments would be appreciated.

When you make those comments, here are some other things to consider:

1. I went to a good law school, but not great. It's a solid tier 2 school. I graduated in top 1/3 of my class.

2. Will the fact that I worked at my first firm for 18 months and this one for less than 12 be held against me if I continue looking in the legal field? The job market here is still pretty good here and I imagine I could easily say the first move was location and this one is because the firm's practice isn't what I expected. Will potential employers buy that?

3. My time line for making a decision may be shorter than I'd like. I think my level of dissatisfaction is affecting my performance to the extent that I may be on the hit list of one of the main partners at my firm. In other words, I'm not so sure they won't kick me out the door the first chance they get.

4. I can't really afford to make anything less than 50K without a SERIOUS overhaul of the budget and a drastic adjustment to my standard of living, though my wife is on-board and is willing to make the SOL adjustment if needed.

5. While I don't NEED to be in charge, I don't really like taking orders. Thus, if I can't get a job that will give me a rush, I at least need to be in charge. It's a tradeoff. If I can't have one, I need the other.

OK, that's about all I can think of for now. Sorry this is such a rambling post, but I'm really interested in getting some feedback from you all.

Thanks!