New York Lawyer
December 3, 2002

Q:
After law school, I clerked with a state appellate court for four years. I left the clerkship to become a full-time parent.

Now, five years later, I am interested in resuming my legal career.

What suggestions do you have?

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A:

For all intents and purposes, you may be starting pretty much from scratch, no matter how you define "legal career" -- law firm practice ... in-house staff position ... government, judicial, regulatory role, whatever.

You do not say whether or not you have passed a bar examination and whether you have kept your CLE obligations current, and these are major factors at this point -- an employer requiring bar admission is unlikely to want to invest extra time and money in what may be regarded as an untested or "stale" produce.

Your four years of experience are not irrelevant, by any means, but it says little about your aptitude and capability in other types of non-appellate legal or law-related roles. While the "legal market" can't fairly begrudge you your decision to put family first, it can insist on being shown a recognizable product; upon your re-entry you currently present neither a clear career progression nor an easy-to-pigeonhole practice interest or focus.

First, therefore, you have to decide what you want to do ... want to be ... as a lawyer -- or in a law-related role. The job market tends to assume that someone "is" whatever he or she did last. That is, it assumes that intelligent people with control over their choices will self-select into the kind of role or setting for which they are best suited -- temperamentally and in terms of their abilities.

That fact that you spent four years as an appellate clerk creates one place to start your self-marketing efforts -- targeting another salaried role that focuses on your analytical and drafting skills, rather than oral advocacy, negotiation or specialization in some narrowly-defined legal discipline. You are probably most marketable in a setting that draws directly on your proven abilities, whether it's clerking for another judge, working for a legal publishing firm or a contract research and drafting organization.

If you can stand the thought of working in the political or government arenas, you might also look into a position in legislative drafting or legislative affairs. Many legislatures have specialized drafting units to help your elected servants translate their ideas into bills. Many politicians maintain multi-person staffs to handle constituent inquiries, routine drafting and perhaps development of policy statements and position papers. If your duties as a clerk focused on scheduling and administrative duties, those will transfer readily to positions with similar responsibilities -- whether in law firm administration, litigation and risk management, litigation support or similar role that places a premium on your organizational abilities.

If you wish to pursue a different legal direction, namely practicing law, I think you will have to credential yourself for it by taking courses or training that provides you with cutting-edge expertise in some currently marketable discipline. An in-depth understanding of some new statutory scheme or familiarity with the legal aspects of information technology or other forms of intellectual property may provide you with some marketing leverage, for example.

Alternatively, through effective personal networking, perhaps you could get yourself hired into a broader, generalist role in a small firm with a generous-hearted mentor who will show you the ropes -- probably at the cost of low compensation. However, you are unlikely to have much luck with larger firms, even if you've boned up on electromagnetic torts and mastered the new banking regulations. You career path has taken you out of step with their standardized career progression, and you therefore confront them with what many firms label "the age and stage problem:" they don't know how or where to slot you into their pecking order or how much credit to accord your life experience.

My standard advice to career shifters applies to you (after all, you are shifting careers to get back into law): focus your efforts on informal networking, both to get information about what various law careers are like (and what their barriers to entry may be) and simply to let a lot of people see you, take a shine to you and decide to take a bit of a risk on you. The "conventional job market" (ads, recruiters, mass mailings) is unlikely to reward your efforts unless and until you become a distinctly-defined product. Networking, on the other hand, often results in the creation of roles that are shaped around the unique attributes of a particular individual -- in this case, you.

In short, what may work best for you is getting as much sympathetic visibility as you can, in the hope that a potential employer will see your strengths, honor your past life choices and work with you to d

Sincerely,
Douglas B. Richardson
President, The Richardson Group