The Whipping Boy of every law school is career services. There aren’t many law students who were thrilled or completely satisfied by their career services office. That’s because career services tends to do a very odd job: to ensure that the best qualified applicants at a law school are employed.
Point/Counterpoint
Aaron Street points this out at Lawyerist:
To assist students in landing any of these jobs, career offices traditionally focus on resume-building advice, job interview training, and “networking” to find off-posting job openings. These are all valuable skills, but they are focused entirely on students competing for the same, limited number of jobs that are publicly posted at the law school (or, in the case of job networking, are soon-to-be-posted).
Aaron’s recommendations seem logical: career services should broaden the skills they teach into personal branding and solo/small firm management and should cultivate nontraditional legal opportunities.
Susan Gainen, director of career services at the University of Minnesota School of Law, responds on Lawyerist that Aaron’s recommendations miss two big points. First, law schools can offer whatever entrepreneurial and career development education they want, but it doesn’t mean anything if students don’t take advantage of it.
Second, and more importantly, Susan notes the difficulties of focusing on nontraditional legal employment:
[A] dean would question the use of scarce resources if the office attempted to gin up scores of non-legal positions for which few law students would be qualified, and even fewer would have interest. An alternative career search is hard. What is an alternative career for a lawyer is someone else’s traditional career, so there is no law school OCI, and the jobs are posted where the other professionals look for work.
I get the feeling though that both Aaron and Susan have a misunderstanding about what nontraditional employment is.
Lawyers As Option
When talking about law schools, nontraditional employment does not mean the entire universe of jobs that don’t require you to be admitted to a bar. Rather, it means the set of jobs where having the skills taught in law school are helpful, but not necessary. Put another way, it means jobs where being a lawyer might help you thrive, but you don’t necessarily need to be one to survive.
In these cases, the job of career services (in theory) should be significantly easier. The people hiring for these jobs are considering lawyers and law students for their job, but might not know where to find them or how to go about connecting with them. That’s where career services can step in and build the connection, rather than simply blazing some trail through uncharted wilderness.
Experience vs. Experience
Most people might agree with Susan on the interest point, i.e. why spend time and money getting job opportunities that law students don’t want. I think the qualification point is the bigger stumbling block.
I work at a nontraditional legal job exactly as I described above: having a J.D. is nice, but not a necessity. The job is in college athletics, a highly desirable field. And the job pays reasonably well1 with great benefits and good job security.
Every time a job opens up in this industry,2 schools are inundated with two types of awful applicants. The first are simply sports fans who want to be near athletics and have zero understanding of what the job is. They expose themselves pretty quickly.
The second are lawyers with no training in college athletics. Either they want a change of lifestyle or fall into the sports fans category as well. Technically competent, there is no doubt that they could learn the system of NCAA regulation.
The problem is that they have zero experience in some of the other areas, for example explaining rules to 18-22 year olds. And you need to target lawyers who know how to develop good business solutions, since simply giving legal opinions is not good enough when a coach asks to do something.
Building that experience is difficult. But where career services can help is instead of seeking out paid, full-time positions outside of the legal industry, they should be cultivating internship opportunities, both paid and unpaid, in these industries.
A law student with zero college athletics experience can easily get an unpaid internship, while the J.D. might even be a detriment to a full-time position.3 And once they get that foot in the door, they will naturally develop the relationships and connections to find their own path to an alternative career.
