New York Lawyer
December 18, 2001

Q:
What kinds of jobs can litigation associates get outside of law firms?

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A:
The options are almost limitless, although your marketability may depend on the length of your tenure with the firm, what specialized areas or disciplines your litigation practice focused on, and, particularly, the reasons you left the firm.

By virtue of having successfully completed law school, passed the bar (I presume) and gotten hired by a major firm, you have gathered some "default credentials" that are marketable both inside and outside of law:

At a more general, "transferable ability" level, ex-litigators tend to be attractive candidates for roles involving situation analysis, synthesizing information, making logical presentations of that information, building rapport and trust with diverse audiences, framing arguments and positions, relating broad policies to specific factual situations and/or holding their own in confrontational situations. You will see a lot of them in such diverse roles as:

There is a downside. Most people regard litigators (even ex-litigators) as, well . . . litigious. They are presumed to be competitive, adversarial, aggressive and power-oriented. That means they often are not welcomed with open arms into highly collaborative settings. If the litigator claims that avoiding constant conflict was the reason for leaving litigation, others' responses vary from, "Yeah. Right" to "Prove it." It is a threshold issue ex-litigators must be prepared to address.

If you've blown out of litigation after only a short tenure, you are pretty much on an even footing with any other liberal arts educated job-seeker -- with the added pluses of the presumptions listed above. The longer you've been at it, the more you have to defend your prior career choice and explain why you're willing to leave a position and professional most non-lawyers view as prestigious.

And we've talked only about the presumptions of what you can do. Unless you're willing to take any employment that you can get, it behooves you to do some intensive reflection on what you want to do. As I say repeatedly, there are only two interview questions: 1) What value can you add to my organization (and can you prove it in a way I believe); and 2) Why do you want this job, anyway? The first is the competency issue. The second is the motivation issue. A good "fit" in a job or career -- both from your point of view and an employer's -- requires that you have good answers to both those questions. The most common career error I encounter with lawyers is their tendency to confuse what they are capable of doing with what they are temperamentally suited to do. Leaving law is a big step. Make sure it's not a step into free-fall over a cliff.

Sincerely,
Douglas B. Richardson
President, The Richardson Group