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Hey everybody. In this episode about your career search and networking, I want to talk about why focusing your career search on a particular practice area within the law is going to be really important to identifying your first job as a new attorney. 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, as I've talked about in other episodes, when you're in law school, you are also going to be on the journey to your first job. That will probably be a long process for most of you. Some students will get scooped up early, depending on how early firms are recruiting at that time. And they'll get, you know, hired into a big law job as a first-year law student, and they'll work there their first summer and then their second summer, and they get a clerkship with a judge because their grades are exceptional. And then they go on to work at some kind of firm doing what it is that they want to do. That's going to be a very small percentage of students in your law school, maybe just a handful, depending on what school you go to. For the vast majority of law students, you are going to do some form of networking to find your way to the career and to the job that is right for you. That process, particularly of getting your first job, takes patience and persistence. It is going to take time. It is going to take work. It is going to be a slow burn because you have to meet people, you have to learn what you might want to do, and you have to figure out how to pursue it as you are going. So I've done some episodes about networking. I've talked about what you can talk to people about when you're networking, how you can find people to network with. In this episode, I want to focus on a very simple premise. In order to succeed in the search for your first legal job, it is really important to have an idea of what kind of law you want to practice after graduation and in any jobs that you get during your law school career. It's really important to have some practice areas of interest. What my thesis is going to be in this podcast episode is very simple. Narrowing the scope of your job search to one or just a few practice areas that you're especially interested in will help make your search way more effective, way more efficient, and probably both a lot less stressful and way more successful. Here's how I'm going to illustrate the importance to you of identifying the practice area that's right for you. I want you to imagine that you are going in as a law student for an interview to a large, big law firm for your first lawyer job after you graduate. You're at some point in law school and you're interviewing maybe for a summer position, or maybe just for a job after you graduate. The interviewers are recruiters and lawyers, and they're probably going to ask you at some point, what kind of law are you interested in practicing? How you answer that question will make a strong impression. You might say something like, Well, I don't really know. I think maybe I'm interested in corporate, but maybe litigation, maybe real estate or commercial disputes, maybe employment law or privacy, I don't know. Or you might respond to that question by saying, Well, I'm interested in a couple different practice areas. And then you explain what those practice areas are and why you are interested in them. Or you say, I'm interested in privacy law because, and then you explain why you're interested. You are going to look a lot better in that interview if you demonstrate that you've thought very carefully and intentionally about why you went to law school and what it is that you want to do with that law degree that you are pursuing. So which answer is better? Imagine you're the interviewer. Which answer suggests that this candidate is someone who has their life figured out, who has thought through analytically why they are doing what they're doing with their career journey. It of course is the student who says, here's the practice area, or maybe a couple that I am interested in. That is the person you want to be in interviews. You don't want to be the person who seems aimless. You're going to look a lot better if you demonstrate that you've thought through what you want to do and why. That is important with practicing law because different practice areas are tremendously different. Different types of lawyers do tremendously different work. Some lawyers are in court every single day. Some are never in court at all. Some represent businesses, some represent individuals. Some are litigators who manage a high volume of cases. Some are litigators who only work on one or a couple cases that are massive at a time. The lives that you will have in those different jobs vary. The work that you will do every day varies. And there's some work that you would probably very much like to do, and some work that you probably very much don't want to do. In that interview, you want to show, hey, I am someone who has thought about what I want to do. I am someone who knows what I want. I have confidence, and I can candidly explain to you what I want to do because I've thought it through. If you come off with someone who doesn't know anything about what they want to do, you won't look very competent. You won't look like a strong candidate, and you will have trouble getting that job. Now you might say to yourself, gosh, I have no idea what practice area I want to do because I'm not a lawyer yet. I don't know what these folks are doing day to day. That's completely fair. And you're not wrong. But you still should make an attempt to learn a little bit about what kind of law people practice day to day, what they do day to day, what their lives are like, and what you want for your work life. You should make an effort to do that because the reality is that different forms of law, different practice areas are very different in terms of what your day-to-day life is going to look like. You should try to think through that before you apply to jobs, before you go interview. So we'll talk in other episodes about how to determine what practice area is right for you. But you're going to do a few things. You're going to look at firm websites, you're going to look at firm blog posts and materials, you're going to go to firm webinars, you're going to talk to prosecutors or criminal defense attorneys if that's the world that you want to live in. You're going to try to learn as much as you can about what day-to-day life is like, if that's your job, and then make a decision. Do I want to pursue that or not? When you figure out which practice areas you want, after you've gone through that process, you will be much more effective at networking your way to your first law job in an efficient manner. What does networking involve? Well, we've talked about it in other episodes. Networking means identifying people who do what you think you want to do with your career and connecting with them, making genuine connections with them, making friends with those people. If you have a genuine interest in a practice area, you figure out who's working in that area in the location where you want to work, and you focus on trying to meet them in support of your job search. Now, if you haven't focused your job search on a particular practice area, you will be running around in the dark. You'll be meeting with attorneys without a real purpose, objective, or aim. That's a waste of your time, and that's a waste of time of the attorney that you're talking to. Because it probably won't be a productive meeting because you don't know exactly what you want to do or you don't have any idea. When you're targeting a particular practice area, though, you can make a list of the attorneys who you want to meet with in the geographic areas where you want to be. You can say, I'm interested in this kind of law. Let me go figure out who those people are who do it. There are rankings out there of attorneys in particular practice areas in different parts of the countries. Chambers is one of the popular organizations that publishes those lists. Business journals publish those lists. Firm websites identify what people do. You can look at those resources and say, aha, I know who the attorneys are who do this kind of work in this location. That's who I want to meet. That's who I want to try to network with, because they are the people who do what I think I want to do. I'm not sure, but I think I want to do these things, and these are the people who do it. So those are the people who I should meet. You can go through that process once you have a practice area. To be sure, it is okay to have a couple different interests, particularly if they are really, really similar. So if you want to do some kind of commercial litigation, there may be different types of litigation that you'd be interested in within that subset. But ultimately, that's the overall type that you're interested in initially. And you're going to learn more about other types as you go on and pursue that interest. That's completely fine. It will look a little more inconsistent and not as well thought out if you want to do completely separate things. If you say, oh, I want to be a criminal defense attorney for individuals on one hand, but I also want to be a commercial litigator. Well, those are very different jobs. Those involve very different tasks, similar skills, and you'll work in similar systems, but one's criminal and one's civil. That's very different. So you want to try to narrow down what that practice area is because that's what's going to allow you to make a really good list of people with whom you can make a genuine connection, people who you can reach out to and say, hey, I'm mildly interested in what it is that you do and in doing it myself. That's why I'd like to meet. You don't want to just reach out to people and waste their time and say, well, I want a job somewhere and you do a lawyer job, so let's talk. That's not productive. That's a waste of your time and theirs. You want to come off as more genuine by having a practice area in mind. So try to nail down what are the one to three things that I'd really like to do with this law degree? What are the things that I think I am passionate about? Be open to changing that list. Be open to developing it as time goes on. You might find there aren't many people who do this kind of law, or it takes a background that I don't have to get into it. For example, certain types of intellectual property law. You probably needed to have done some things before law school to set yourself up for success if you want to get into that. If you worked in employee benefits extensively before law school, maybe you're well positioned to be an ERISA attorney, right? Maybe you'll pursue that. But then maybe you look into more what those attorneys do. You learn more and you say, gosh, I'm not very interested in that. I want to pivot. That is something you should do. That is something you can do. So consider how you're going to map out your networking strategy once you have those practice areas determined. Because it's going to be much easier. You will be building a spreadsheet, as we'll talk about in another episode, with a list of people and a list of firms or agencies where you might want to work. That list is unique to who you are, to what you want to do and where you want to do it. No other law student is going to have the network that you do. You will suddenly be putting yourself in a job application of one where you are the only good applicant who should be hired for a job. That is how you network your way to a job. But it starts by looking not outward to law firms or job applications. It starts by looking inward to what it is that you think you want to do as a lawyer after graduation. Once you know that, that's when you can build your list of people to network with. That's when you can reach out to them. That's when you can say, I'm here, I'm interested in joining your community. Let's talk about it. Let's see how I learn more about it. So I can potentially follow in your footsteps or decide whether that's something I want to do. So I hope that this episode was helpful. I'm going to make more of them about selecting your practice area because it's a key step in your career search. Thank you everyone for joining. We will 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.