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Hey everybody, in this episode of Law School Decoded, we are going to talk about how law students can win when it comes to the search for their first law job after graduation. Let's get started.

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Welcome to Law School Decoded, the podcast that pulls back the curtain on what it's really like to succeed in law school. Let's get started.

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I've talked in other episodes about how searching for your first law job can be stressful. It is not an easy process, and there are many different pressures on you that you will feel throughout it. You can often feel like you are losing, not winning. You're applying to firms and they're telling you we don't have an opportunity for you or we don't have any opportunity at all. You may apply to dozens or even over a hundred jobs and you just aren't getting interviews. When you do get interviews, you're not getting callbacks. When you get callbacks, you're not getting offers. You are one of thousands applying to these jobs in some cases, particularly for competitive ones like clerkships, where you have people from all over the country who might be seeking them, particularly jobs with firms that everyone knows about in competitive cities where you're up against so many other people, and your application isn't making it to the top of the stack, and you're getting a rejection email. You may line up with other students to interview at on-campus interviews or OCI and you don't have success at getting callbacks. You may get called back and other very qualified candidates are picked over you. You may apply via law firm or other employer websites and find that your resume is filtered out by a recruiter or by AI before you can make it into an interview room to explain in person why you are perfect for that opportunity. The law school job search, the search for your first career during law school, can feel like a lot of losing and not much winning. And so in this podcast, what we're talking about is how can you make yourself feel like you are winning, particularly when you don't have a job offer yet and it takes a while to get there? How can you feel like you are doing things day to day that get you one yard closer to that goal line and that end zone and that touchdown for you football fans? How can you do things that are productive and make you feel good and that don't waste your time? How can you do things that are actually going to get you that law job at the end of the day? Well, in order to win your job search, my suggestion to you is that you need to step away from the rat race. For most students, you're not going to rely on OCI. You're not going to rely on just throwing your resume out there and hoping you are so magnificent that someone sees it and plucks you from the pack and gives you an offered letter. You're not going to rely on just spamming online job portals with your cover letter with the hope that you might get picked. That's not going to set you up for success. That's gambling. That's luck. You're up against hundreds of other students for the kind of jobs that I'm talking about. And that is not going to help you pursue your career. My suggestion to you is that one of the most important aspects of winning the search for your a legal job, and particularly one of the first jobs in your legal career, is to pursue the career that is right for you based on your legal interests, your skills, and your geographical goals about where you want to end up. You want to singularly focus on finding the role that is right for you and pursuing the jobs that are right for you. You will win your law school career search by making yourself an applicant pool of one for those jobs, not one of many, but the only one who should rationally be picked. You shouldn't waste time just spamming applications out there for jobs that aren't necessarily right for you or jobs that everybody's just applying to, because everybody knows those firms and those jobs. Sure, if you've got good grades and you're going to get plucked because you're at the very top of your class, great, I'm so happy for you. That's a great way to find a job, and you should be proud of that success. But for 90% of law students or more, that's not how the job search is going to go. You're going to be one of many very qualified people for those roles. And when you just submit your applications into a pool of hundreds of resumes, in all likelihood, just like your lottery numbers, yours will not get picked. Just by virtue of how the numbers work, in all likelihood, it's going to be someone else. So how do you win by making yourself an applicant pool of one and not one of many? How do you make yourself a shoe-in for a job? How do you make yourself the one that a firm or government office is going to pick in all likelihood? There are a couple steps to that, many of which I'm going to talk more about in other podcast episodes, but let's outline them right now to introduce the idea. First, you need to figure out what you're interested in. You need to figure out a few areas of laws where you really, really think I want to practice in this area. Why is that? Because you're going to apply to totally different jobs based on your interests. Someone who is interested in government litigation isn't going to apply for jobs at a law firm to do transactional work. Someone interested in transactional work isn't going to apply to be a prosecutor, right? Those are two totally different jobs. So if you're just spamming your application out there, hoping that you find something and then walking in at interviews and saying, well, I'm kind of interested in everything. No, those are two totally different jobs. Those are two totally different lives. It's okay to have a few different interests. But you need to be able to say, this is what I'm interested in, and this is why. This is my rational reason for why I think that I could enjoy doing this from eight to five every day. Some days the hours aren't that good. You need to be able to explain your answer to that in order to have a shot at being the one who is picked. Because if you're just somebody who's interested in everything, you're not going to get picked. Someone who's more targeted towards the career that they want is going to get picked over you for that role because they will seem like a better fit. So instead of just spamming, instead of just applying everything, you want to figure out where exactly do I want to work? What exactly do I want to do? Do I want to work in privacy law? Do I want to work in a government office? Do I want to be in court every day or sometimes or never? Do I want to take depositions all the time or never? Do I want to do a lot of discovery work? Or do I want to work on cases where there's not much discovery and the record is much simpler? Do I want to do big litigation? Do I want to do cases where you're handling dozens or even hundreds of cases at once or just a few? Think as best you can about what kind of job that you want, and then focus on pursuing only those. Now, how are you going to figure out whether you like those things or not? A lot of it's going to be reading and talking to lawyers, doing everything you can to learn about those areas, asking lawyers, what is it that exactly that you do? What do you spend your time on? What are the challenges? What are the things you like about it? Just ask open-ended questions to try to learn what they're doing every day to day and how they feel about it. And then when you're answering interview questions, if you like that area too, you're going to say, this is why I've learned about it from talking to practitioners. And I feel I would be a good fit for that because it fits in my interests in this way. It fits in my skills in this way. So try to learn about practice areas and pursue the one that's right for you rather than just inefficiently spamming law firms and other jobs with your application. Once you're an applicant pool of one, you can also start networking with people who might actually be able to get you a job. My suggestion is that once you learn practice areas, make yourself a spreadsheet in Google Sheets or somewhere else in the cloud. Make tabs for each practice area that you might be interested in, like privacy, employment law, civil litigation, criminal litigation, whatever it is. And then in each tab, in each workbook, go ahead and put down the contacts who you want to meet to try to find your way into that practice area. Figure out who is doing the job that I want to do? Who are the lawyers who have the job that I want? Because you need to talk to them. You need to talk to them about what they're doing every day to genuinely learn it. And you need to talk to them about how they got there. What skills did they need to have to succeed in it? What do they like about it? What do they don't? Are they trying to leave that practice area? And if so, why? What don't they like about it? And how did they get there? Who did they meet? Who did they talk to? What did they focus on in law school? You are going to want to do that and to build that network. Write down those names in that spreadsheet. Write down what firms they work at, write down what you talked about, document all of it because that's going to help you keep accountable. It's your project plan. You're going to document in that spreadsheet when you talk to people. You're going to want to follow up with them probably quarterly, maybe three times a year, to talk to them, even if it's just in an email update about how you're doing and your continued interest. So that if they think you might be a good fit for a role, they're reminded of you and they have an opportunity to think of you when a role comes open. That's what you want, so that they roll out the red carpet for you. You want to be the one person they're thinking of when a job comes up. When they are promoted in advance, an opportunity is going to come up underneath them, and you want them to think, gosh, this person talked to me about that. I should give them an opportunity to talk to me about it now, because now is the right time. Maybe before wasn't. This is very personal to me because when I was in law school, I had solid grades. I graduated in the top 10% of my class, even. But I applied mostly just by spamming law firms. Places, frankly, that would not have been a good fit for me. Practice areas that I ultimately didn't want to have anything to do with. Eventually, I started honing in in law school on a practice area. I started thinking this is an area where I want to work. The more I learned about it, it seemed to have a reasonable amount of trial work, a reasonable amount of advice and counsel. It wasn't the most money a lawyer could make, but it was really, really great compensation and certainly, certainly a dream for me to make what it would pay. So the more I learned about it, the more I thought, gosh, this seems like an interesting thing to do every day. And this seems like something I could want to do. So over time, I started meeting people who worked at law firms and did that thing. I met anyone I could, but the most important people I met were just a few years ahead of me. There were some people who I would just send a message to and say, hey, you graduated from my law school or my college just a few years ahead of me. You seem to be doing what I'm interested in. Any chance we could talk on the phone for 20 minutes about it, or if you're in my town, any chance we could get together sometime, have a coffee, have lunch, and I could chat with you about what it is you do and how you got there, that was invaluable to me. Those people advocated for me. Those people became friends with me. Those are contacts that I have had throughout my entire career because we have genuine shared interests professionally. So I would put their names in spreadsheets. I would try to figure out who all the people were at all the different firms. And that spreadsheet was my personal job list. It was one that no one else had. It was my interests, my geographic locations that where I wanted to be. No other applicant had that unique of a strategy. Maybe they had their own, but their interests were different. So their spreadsheet was going to look different from how mine looked. With that spreadsheet, with those firms listed, those practices, those lawyers, those government offices, if applicable to you, or those those nonprofits if applicable to you, or in-house jobs. Those were my list of places to apply. And by apply, I don't mean sit around twiddling my thumbs until an opportunity came up. No, I was communicating with the lawyers again three to four times a year. I was letting them know updates, like, hey, I'm writing a note for law review on a topic that is in your area. If you have anything on it, I'd love to hear. I was asking them every now and then for a phone call because I thought I had a genuine question that I could ask them that would help me and that they'd be willing to answer. I was asking them to keep an eye out for me, to let them know I was still searching and it did take me a lot of time, and that I was hoping I could find something in their area. I was showing genuine interest, I wasn't bothering them too much. And through that sustained contact, eventually, one of them who I emailed said, Hey, we have a job, we're just about to open up, we're just about to post it. Why don't you come in and interview for it? I skipped the screening interview, I went straight into the law office, I had one afternoon of interviews, and I had a job offer in hand the next day to work for that law firm after graduation and even during law school, during my 3L year, which was great. I was pretty much done with my studies, I just had a few classes left, and now I was making a little bit of money and getting to know my colleagues part-time in a low pressure environment before starting with them as a first-year associate. That was great experience. That happened because I built my own job search strategy. I wasn't spamming anymore. That never worked for me. That was a silly waste of time. Instead, by having that unique way of looking for jobs, I was an applicant pool of one. That law firm I worked at never posted the job. They just hired me. Why didn't they post it? Because they found the right candidate. They found someone who was genuinely interested in the practice area, who had taken reasonable steps to learn what it was like, to learn it substantively more than other practice areas, to take all the classes in that practice area. And so they knew that it was more likely to be a good fit than the people who would just spam their office with resumes, people who didn't want to be in that geographic location, people who were only moderately interested in that practice area, or maybe not interested in it at all, and who just wanted a job. Clearly, I was going to be a top applicant in comparison to them. And for everyone else on my list of places to work, I was going to be a top applicant because I had positioned myself that way. Because I said, this is where I want to work, this is what I want to do, I'm going to target the firms and people doing that, and I'm going to pursue it relentlessly. When you make yourself a job applicant pool of one, not one of many, you set yourself up to win your job search. And along the way, you will feel more efficient. You're going to feel like the time you are spending is calculated to getting you the job that's right for you. You're not just punching in your name over and over again on online portal applications. No, you're doing things that meaningfully get you to the job that is right for you. That is going to feel more like winning than simply sending out applications and getting rejected almost right away. Now, obviously that story is personable to me, and my approach is personable to me, but I feel like it can work for almost anyone looking for any kind of job. I have colleagues who wanted jobs doing corporate law. They got to know people doing corporate law, and they got jobs in corporate law. I know people who wanted to work at nonprofits, who wanted to do political work, who wanted to work as prosecutors and as criminal defense lawyers. From the start, they angled their career in that direction as best they could. They learned the areas as best they could, and they ran towards it. And they didn't look back. They did their best to show I am the one person who you should look at in this geographical area for a job in that area. When you do that, when you apply to jobs that way, you aren't just one of two hundred and fifty to a thousand applicants who apply. You aren't just one of the dozens of people in line at OCI. No. You are the one who should get that job. You are the one who is made for that job in comparison to all the other people who might line up and not be the right candidate. So do your best to win in your legal job search by narrowing the practice areas that you're interested in, learning substantively about those areas and practically what it is that people in those areas do every single day. And then make your spreadsheet with the practitioners in that area and the geographic locations where you want to be. If you don't want to do criminal law in Juneau, Alaska, don't apply. Instead, focus on where you want to be and what you want to be doing and pursue that. Now, you can change your interests over time, you can expand your interests over time. That's wise to do. You should be realistic. If your grades don't support the job that you're going for, if that's going to make it hard, realize you're going to have an uphill battle. Realize that it may be a career path that you need to get back to after graduation, after you've done some other job and proven yourself and clawed your way there, right? Be realistic. If one area of law just isn't working out, ask yourself, what else would I be interested in doing? And how do I make my spreadsheet for that career? You should do that because that's going to help you get there. So the more you take that approach, the more I think you will feel like you are winning at your job search, and I want that for you. As I've talked about in other episodes, searching for your first law job can be stressful. You're spending a lot of time doing a lot of things that don't get you a job, and it doesn't ever happen fast for pretty much everybody. So I want you to feel like you're winning by doing things that are productive, that are useful, and that are going to get you to the legal career that is singularly right for who you are as a practitioner, who you are going to be as a lawyer, who you are as a person, where you want to be geographically. That's what I want for you. And I hope, listening to this podcast, that you have a better idea of how to do it. I look forward to digging into this way more with you and other episodes of Law School Decoded. For now, thank you for joining us. We'll see you next time.

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That's it for today's episode of Law School Decoded. Visit us online at lawschooldecoded.com and make sure to subscribe. Until next time, keep decoding the law one step at a time.