Associate Lateral Advice (pt 3 of 3)

It's time for the final installment (part 3 of 3) of our interview about the lateral hiring process for associates with Jordan Ross, member of the National Association of Legal Search Consultants and principal of Ross Legal Search, LLC:

15. How valuable is it to an attorney admitted in Nevada to be admitted in other jurisdictions (CA, UT, AZ, D.C.) when applying to Vegas firms?

Depends on your practice area. Good for federal work like IP or bankruptcy. For high volume work it probably won’t make a difference. For most commercial work it will largely matter only if an individual firm has clients that cross state borders or if they need to target an industry in that fashion. It also helps if they have offices in states where you’re admitted. Obviously, not very important for transactionals.

16. Do you have any advice for how someone working at a corporate firm can transfer into a Prosecutor’s office?

Show up with a pulse. Aside from the feds, the admission regime for most county prosecutors isn’t like applying to an AmLaw 100 firm. If you have no prior criminal experience, you’ll start at the bottom of the range, but it’s steady work.

17. I want to move from an insurance defense firm to an employment law or corporate finance firm, how do I do that?

You probably don’t. I suggest you look at my answer to question number 2. Not good news.

18. Would getting a clerkship with the NV Supreme Court or Federal Court help someone move from a small firm to a national/larger firm? Would it help to get a clerkship if I wanted to switch the area of law I practice (i.e. medical malpractice to estate planning)?

I hate to keep sounding a like a drag, but what you do right out of law school is so critical. It can label you for life. It is very hard to change practice areas, you are essentially starting your career over. Going from Associate to Law Clerk is a step backwards and will not look good. However if you’re talking about things like medical malpractice or estate planning, these are not commercial practice areas anyway and you can probably get a small or medium sized firm to train you if you can convince them you’ll work your ass off and stay several years with them. By the way, clerking is worthless for transactionals.

19. Does hiring a headhunter help attorneys find a job with a larger firm?

Hiring a headhunter helps you find a job with any firm large or small. And remember, it’s not the size that counts, but the billing rate. Don’t pass over medium sized or even smaller firms if they’re truly boutique. And a high end recruiter doesn’t have to go in the front door with the other 400,000 applicants.

20. How should an attorney evaluate calls from headhunters?

If their first name isn’t Jordan, then they’re obviously axe murderers. Seriously, if it sounds like someone is reading from a script or has the social skills of a tax accountant, take a pass. Legal recruiting is not like most other forms of recruiting, not even close. You can train a glorified clerk to recruit engineers, but not attorneys. Likewise if the recruiter is a "generalist" they probably don’t understand how radically different the legal industry is from corporate environments. And if they place attorneys "everywhere" or "across the nation" they very likely don’t have the kind of high quality relationships that a recruiter with a local focus does.

Membership in the National Association of Legal Search Consultants is not
mandatory, but you have to wonder why a recruiter doesn’t belong. There’s
usually one or more of four reasons that they don’t. First, they don’t do the
majority of their business in the permanent placement of attorneys, which NALSC
requires. They place paralegals and secretaries or they do other occupations,
etc. So they don’t have the focus that you need. The second reason is that they
don’t want to be subject to the NALSC Code of Ethics. That’s pretty self
explanatory. Third, they haven’t even heard of it. Duh. And fourth they can’t
afford it. Which is just sad.

21. In general, do you think the influx of national and regional firms is helpful or harmful to the legal community given dilution of the talent pool, increased competition for worthwhile attorneys (i.e., higher salaries), etc.?

First of all, helpful or harmful, it’s happening and going to continue to happen. In general competition is good for any industry, although the legal trade has an artificially restricted labor supply due to difficult licensing requirements, i.e., three years of law school and the bar exam. Is competition for higher salaries good for the “legal community”? Well it’s good for the guy who gets the higher salary, I know that. I think the ultimate micro-economic effect of this will be to further rationalize salaries within law firms. Today a high volume law firm, will not charge as much as a general commercial law firm. But within law firms, the diversity of billing rates is usually minimal. I think we’ll start to see greater diversity inside the same firm, between for example, routine real estate leasing transactional work and complex securities litigation or M&A consulting. It only makes sense to follow that with different salaries for attorneys based more on their billing rates. With slow but sure pressure from offshoreing of legal work, firms cannot continue to use the same business model they have for decades. They have to adapt or die.

If after this advice you want to pursue a position with a new firm through a legal recruiter, you can reach Jordan Ross at info@rosslegal.com.



[Our thanks to Mr. Ross for donating his time and wisdom to the readers of the blog]