Careers
Develop a Specialty Now, Alum Urges Law Students
Posted Jul 31, 2009 3:55 PM CST
By Martha Neil
To help its graduates compete in a tough job market, Santa Clara University School of Law is offering courses on law practice management skills created with input from a new advisory board that includes a number of senior administrative law partners.
One recurring theme in the group's discussions is the need to develop a specialty early, to stand among a crowd of eager-to-work young legal eagles, board member Dennis Brown tells the Recorder in an article reprinted in New York Lawyer (reg. req.). He is the managing partner of the Littler Mendelson office in San Jose, Calif.
"When I graduated from law school, hiring decisions were primarily based on GPA and getting a broad survey of general law courses so you could run, ride, rope and shoot—like a cowboy,” says Brown. “What we have seen, especially with a dwindling job market, is the firms no longer have the capacity or inclination to take the raw clay and to shape it completely into something they would like the associate to be.”
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Comments
tr
Jul 31, 2009 4:34 PM CST
I love how the law school industry keeps trying to sugar coat this disaster of an oversaturated lawyer job market with euphemisms.
“dwindling job market”?
“tough job market”?
90 percent of all grads from Tier 2 and below are jobless for the two years.
And the law school industry continues to hide the truth.
And the legal establishment journalists continue to be world class lapdogs.
Arf arf, lapdogs, arf arf!
Good boy!
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B. McLeod
Aug 1, 2009 6:27 PM CST
Did Brown just say the law firms are incapable of training and not inclined to train? Did he just say that? Not that I disagree. It’s just unusual to see somebody put that right out there like that!
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tng
Aug 3, 2009 7:41 AM CST
Get a specialty? That is crap advice
I just shake my head. Unless a law grad has a PhD is something that is currently hot, like Biotech, or pre-law jobs include working for places like the NASDAQ, SEC, Goldman Sachs, etc… then firms are still not going to give a damn. They are still going to use school rank and then GPA as the arbitrary (i.e. lazy) cutoff thresholds.
Be forewarned, law students getting a specialty is like roulette… choose wrong and you are pigeon holed and screwed.
Let’s face, the number new law grads needs to decease from 40,000+ to maybe 20,000
Ultimately, nobody should take out any student loans for law school…and if they must, definitely do not take out any more than the federal max…at least with federal loans one can consolidate under a low fixed rate.
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mac
Aug 3, 2009 9:56 AM CST
How could I have not thought of that before?!
Seriously, I got a specialty in real estate law, and just before I entered the bar the real estate market crashed. I’ve been doing doc reviews ever since.
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