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Hey everybody, in this episode, let's talk about how you as a law student can find people who you should network with on your way to your law school summer jobs and to the first steps of your career after graduation. Let's talk about it.

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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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So you hear all the time network, network, network. You've heard me say it, you've heard your career services officer say it, you see other students doing it and professors telling you that if you want to find the right legal job for you, you need to network. What does that mean? It means going out and meeting lawyers, meeting people who do what you want to do, learning more about the aspects of their profession, learning more what you're gonna like about it and what you might not like, learning more how they got into it. So maybe you can walk that path or a similar one. And I firmly believe that networking is the way that like 90% of law students will find their first job or subsequent ones. Networking isn't something that ends in law school. You're going to use it your whole career to get where you want to be and the place that is right for you. And so when you're told to network, you probably have a lot of questions. How do I do this effectively? What do I say? Who do I reach out to? And how do I find people to network with? I'm making a ton of podcasts about the nitty-gritty details of networking because I feel like people tell you to do it and it's easy to tell you to do it, but they don't necessarily tell you what to do exactly and how to execute in a way that is going to get you to where you want to be. And so in this podcast episode, what I want to talk about is how you can find people to network with, how you can find the people who you should be reaching out to, to talk to, or to meet with in search of a career. So that's what we're going to talk about in this episode. And I want to begin by saying that as you think about making a list of people who you should network with, you have nothing to lose by reaching out to someone. Here's one thing I can promise you. If you don't reach out to someone who you're interested in networking with because you think that they could pull you into a job that is something you'd enjoy, if you don't reach out to them, I can promise you that they're not going to help you get a job. You're not going to be in a better place than where you are in terms of your career. But if you do reach out to them, you're either going to be in the same place you are today because it's not a helpful contact or they don't contact you back, but they may be helpful. So you have nothing to lose by reaching out. So if you're hesitant to find people to network with, to put them on a list and say, I'm going to reach out to them, I want you to lose that hesitation. I want you to shed it and say, I am okay putting myself out there. You may be someone who doesn't do that often. I'm like that myself. I don't like putting myself out there if I don't have to. I don't like talking to people if I don't have to. I'm very inward-facing, I would say, or introverted. But you have nothing to lose by meeting people. You have everything to gain. So you have every incentive to want to build this network and to find people to network with. And I'll tell you, some people you reach out to probably won't message you back or will message you back and then ghost you and not talk to you or meet with you. That's okay. Many who you do reach out to will be very flattered to hear from you and genuinely interested in connecting with you as a fellow professional. If you are genuinely interested in meeting them, if you have a genuine interest in learning about them and what they do and how they do it and what their professional perspective is on it. People want to connect. People want to talk to people who want to talk to them, right? So many times professionals will be grateful to spend a bit of their day talking to you and getting to know you because it's interesting to them. It's a break from work, it's fun for them. So many people will be genuinely interested in talking to you. So I say all that to help you gain confidence in finding people to network with and in building that network. So I hope that you take that forward as you go through the process of finding people to network with. So, how do you find people to network with? The first thing you need to do is figure out what you might be interested in doing with your law degree. You shouldn't reach out to criminal lawyers if you want to work in-house at a corporation. Those are two totally different jobs. You're not going to have much to learn from a criminal lawyer, a public defender, or a prosecutor if what you want to do is work in-house at a corporation. So find people who are doing what you want to do. And those are the big universe of people that we're going to start putting on a list to reach out to. I've made another podcast episode about how you need to make a spreadsheet in support of your job search. Go listen to it. Because what we're talking about now, the how is how you find people to put on that spreadsheet as people who you say, hey, I might reach out to that person because I think they could potentially help me along. So how are you going to find those people? The number one step is figure out what you want to do. Narrow it down generally to a practice area or types of law firms, and of course, geography. If you want to work in Hawaii, it might not make sense to network with lawyers in Alaska or in Maine, right? So narrow it down to where they are and the type of practice areas. It doesn't necessarily need to be one practice area. You don't need to be in law school saying, I want to be a maritime lawyer. I want to be a lawyer of the water. You don't know, right? You may have a few areas that you're interested in because of things you've learned about that area as best you can, reading blog posts and things online. So try to narrow it down to your practice area. I will make another episode on how to do that. Once you've narrowed it down to a practice area, start looking for any lawyer who does it, right, in the place where you want to do that. So if you want to do labor law for unions and you want to do that in San Antonio, it's time to get on Google. It's time to get on LinkedIn. Look for the lawyers and law firms that practice labor law for unions in San Antonio or whatever it is that you want to do and list them out in your spreadsheet. Put their names down. You should also look as you're doing that for any potential connections that you have to those people through mutual interests or experiences. So if they went to your college, if they went to your law school, note it. If you're looking at their firm bio and they have the same personal interests, note it. Of course, if you know of lawyers who are family and friends, you're going to put them on your spreadsheet and note it. So list those lawyers out. Look for lawyers who have those connections to you. And I will say that once you know you want to be in a city as you're networking, go ahead, even if a lawyer doesn't work in the exact practice area that you did. Let's say they work at a firm where you might want to work, and they went to the same college as you or the same law school as you. Even if they don't work in the practice area that you want to be in, write their name down. Write their name down. Maybe they work in debt financing and you want to work in labor law, the example I gave earlier. Well, just because they don't work in that practice area doesn't mean they can't help you. If they went to the same college as you, if they went to the same law school as you, note it. Because you're going to use that when you reach out to them to say, hey, I have a tenuous connection to you and want to do what you do. So I'm reaching out to you, hoping that we could talk, hoping that we could get to know each other so I can learn from you how I might pursue what I want to. Let's say you meet someone in the debt financing group of a law firm, and you say, Well, I don't want to do what you do, but you went to the same college as me. You went to the same law school as me. So I'm hoping we could connect and I can maybe talk to you about what your colleagues over in that labor department do. I'd like to learn a little bit more of that. I'm super interested in that. Do they hire often? What are those partners like? What are the associates like? How big is the group? Tell me a bit about it. And tell me how you see people getting in there, whatever you know about it. And then by the way, could you maybe help me meet people over there? That's how you could help me, is I'd love to get to know those folks better. So could I reach out to them and name drop you and say, hey, I was talking to this person at your firm and I told them I wanted to do this and they recommended and were okay with me reaching out to you. Now you've got a connection to them, to the people in the practice group that you want to be in. It is that easy. And you might ask the first person you met, hey, do you mind dropping them a note and say I'm going to reach out? I'd greatly appreciate it. That's what's called a warm handoff in sales. You are asking to be handed off to someone closer to the decision maker who is going to help you move your career forward. So look for those connections, even if it's just family or friends. And even if they don't do exactly what you want to do, meet with them and talk about your law school interest. Meet with them and talk about your interest in being a lawyer and ask, how would you see me getting into this particular field over here? How would you see me breaking into that? Do you know of anyone I should meet? Is there anyone from your law school class who is doing that? Is there anyone who you've practiced with who is doing that? Who you think I could reach out to and also maybe name drop you as someone who recommended that I talk to them, right? Because that name drop is going to help you advance the connection to the second person. It's the warm handoff. So creating those connections is important. Finding people who you may have a tenuous connection with because of something similar in your background will help you meet with them. If you have absolutely no connection to someone, you can still reach out to them. You can still ask to network because you know what your connection is. Your connection is that you want to do what they do. Your connection is that you want to go into their practice area. You want to work at the firm that they work at. And so you want to learn more about what that journey looks like to getting there because you're on it, you're pursuing it, and you see those people you're reaching out to at the end of that journey. And so you want to learn from them how did you get there? That is enough of a connection to reach out to someone, to send a quick LinkedIn message or email that says, Hi, here's my name. I'm a second-year law student interested in your practice area, wrote right in what it is. I was wondering if you might be willing to talk to me sometime or meet for coffee so I can learn more about it and how you broke into it. Boom, done. Your interest in what they do is enough of a connection to justify meeting with them. And many people will meet with you with no other connection, with no referral from a mutual professional contact that you both have, with no having attended the same college or the same law school. Of course, if you have those things, mention them. Mention who referred you to them, mention any common connections that you you happen to see. But don't just rely on that. Don't forego meeting with someone because you can't find anything similar in your backgrounds. I'll say too that in reaching out to people, I often found when I was a law student that meeting with junior lawyers was most effective because they had just gone through that job search. They knew what it took to get there, they've seen other people getting there. And so they can tell you what it has been like recently to achieve that feat. They can tell you what the current market is like. I tended to find that the further out lawyers were from law school, the less they understood about what the current market was like and what it would take for me to get there. So when I could, I would try to meet with junior lawyers. The idea being too that as they move up, they may pull people into their old spots. And that can be actually very helpful. So if you find a junior lawyer who graduated from your law school and is working at a firm you want to work at, and you reach out to them, maybe they'll talk to you. Maybe they will tell the hiring group that you're interested in that law firm. Maybe they'll pass along your resume and get you an interview. You never know. What I can promise you is that if you don't reach out, none of that is going to happen. So you're going to use the internet to find people, is the long and short of it. You're going to run Google searches based on what you think you want to do after law school, the particular practice area, where you think you want to work. And you're going to try to find people who are in that role to meet with, to learn how they got there, to get their advice, to ask for their help, to ask them for further connections in the groups where you want to be. And you're going to leverage those and continue networking with them until you have achieved what you want with your career. And then you just keep in touch as friends and you see how you can help each other out in your roles. So don't hesitate to reach out moderately weak or almost no ties to someone are okay. You can also network, of course, by attending career fairs, conferences, maybe even firm events that law firms host or public agencies, whatever it is. Attend those. Meet people, get their contact information, look them up after on their firm websites. If they are doing something that you might be interested in doing or working at a place where you might be interested in working, don't hesitate to reach out to them again to say, can we talk more about how I can get to where you are? This might not be the exact word to use, but that's what you are essentially asking them long term. So finding people to network with is can be quite easy. The other thing you can do that I haven't even mentioned yet, and you might be wondering, why hasn't he mentioned career services yet? You can go to your career services and say, who do you think I should talk to? But don't expect them to do the work for you. Your career services office only knows a limited number of people, and I'll guarantee you, they don't necessarily know the right people for you to talk to based on your interests, based on what you want to do, and based on where you want to do it, both what firm or agency, nonprofit you want to work at, and what geography. They just don't have every contact in the universe that would be really helpful to you. You need to make your own network. You need to make your own job market by doing this search yourself. Of course, go to your career service office, bring your spreadsheet that you and I are making together over these podcasts and say, these are the kind of people I'm thinking about reaching out to, or I'm gonna work to reach out to. Here's my draft messages. I'm gonna send those. I'm gonna meet with people every couple of weeks, you know, so it's not overwhelming. I'm gonna spread it out and I'm gonna try to make the contacts that I think would be meaningful to me moving forward, the career that is right for me. Your career services isn't going to have that spreadsheet. They aren't going to have those contacts. They may have some. So your career services official who you work with may say, aha, oh, you're interested in that. Oh, you know what? I do know somebody who graduated from here and is doing that. Hang on, let me drop them an email and I want you to email them too. Great. Rely on those connections, right? But the fact is that they aren't going to know the entire universe that you have the opportunity to meet and that will be helpful to you. Your career services office is not here to do this for you. It's time to grow up and do it yourself. As hard as that is to say, that's not what they are being paid to do, and they won't be as effective as you are, even if they were being paid to do all this work for you. And by the way, you're gonna continue doing this throughout your entire career if you want to climb a ladder. If you want to bounce around like a pinball to different jobs and move your way up along the way, then you're gonna need to meet people and you're gonna need to make an impression on them to show them that you genuinely care about who they are and that you are grateful the opportunity to connect with them. As you go through that process, you're not gonna have a career services office there for you. You're gonna do it yourself. I know countless friends of mine who are not at their first jobs that they were at out of law school. In fact, off the top of my head, I can only think of a small handful who are still at their first jobs that they got out of law school. Here we are, over a decade later at this point. What has happened is that many of them have met other lawyers doing what they want to do, closer to where they want their career ultimately to be, and so they leave. That first job that they got out of law school was the one that was available, but they keep networking, they keep going through the exact process that I've talked about on this podcast of meeting people doing something closer to what they want to do, and then pursuing that job. They aren't just throwing applications out there and hoping, saying, Oh, I'm one of 300 applicants. I hope I get plucked for this job. No, no, chances are that will fail. And by chances are, I mean literally the probability is that you won't get picked. You won't be the one out of 300. There's going to be someone better than you 299 times. But if you meet people, you will be an applicant of one. You will be someone who they absolutely want to take along with them on their career and on their professional journey. So that is how you find people to network with. It's really simple. We're talking about simple Google searches, simple acts of putting people's names in a spreadsheet until you build the universe, the network of people who could help you find your job and then you start reaching out to them. We'll talk in subsequent podcast episodes about how to reach out to them, what to say. I've already done one on what to ask. So check that one out. Because once you listen to all these episodes, you will have a fuller understanding of what you can do to network your way to the job that is right for you and to the career that is going to be most fulfilling for you. So thank you so much, everybody, for listening to this one. I hope that having listened to this, you can go out and you can start building your spreadsheet and finding people to talk to who could help you. It could be any kind of connection. I'll just give you one more. If you were in a college fraternity or sorority or in some kind of group in college like that, go ahead and look for people who are in that same group and who are lawyers and talk to them about how you might drop into the field that you want to be in. That's a connection that you can use. Even if they don't do exactly what you want to do, where you want to do it, talk to them. They may have a connection that helps. It cannot hurt to learn more about what they do professionally. So go forth and do that. These are tangible steps that you can take to get to the job that you want to be in that are way more effective than just dropping your resume into applications. So I hope that was helpful. I look forward to seeing 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.