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: Begging the Question

Please don't send me your resume

By "Milbarge" and "Fitz-Hume"

I've been thinking a lot recently about the tremendous ongoing upheaval in the legal job market. Above the Law has been chronicling the carnage, and Prof. Adler at Volokh linked to an interesting piece about what might be coming down the road. None of it is pretty.

But I've been lucky enough to be able to look upon the downturn as a voyeur, because we're hiring right now. (Not BTQ, but the people I work for.) It's definitely been a different experience from the last time we did this (last year). I wanted to write something profound and incisive about this process, but I couldn't come up with much of a theme, so I'll just share some assorted thoughts. For lots of reasons, I'm not going to get too specific about what kind of job it is. That's probably one reason it's hard to develop an overarching theme, but I really don't want anyone sending me any resumes.

1. For starters, we're getting a lot more interest generally. That's good because it gives us a larger pool of qualified candidates, but bad because it requires a lot more time and effort to weed through the submissions.

2. My impression is that a lot of the applicants are refugees from Biglaw. With these folks, it can be hard to tell whether they were eager to leave or bailed out just ahead of the pink slip or were allowed to formally resign and save face. I'll be the first to admit that I am not familiar with the culture and practice in big law firms, and I'm sure that most of these folks are very good at what they do. But you know how there's that old line that for associates on the partner track, it's like a pie-eating contest where the prize is more pie? Well, if you get out of the pie business, what are you qualified to do? I've seen quite a bit of what appears to be resume-padding from third- and fourth-year associates who don't seem to have accomplished all that much. If "Drafted portions of a motion to dismiss" is your lead line under "Experience," well, it makes me wonder just what it is you've spent all those billable hours doing. And again, a lot of this comes from me not knowing what goes on at those places, so I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that system. But it may be a rude awakening for some of these people to realize that being a great piemaker doesn't necessarily qualify them to work here at the cracker factory.

3. Kind of on the opposite end of the spectrum, we seem to be getting a lot of interest from people just out of law school. Or, more precisely, 2008 graduates who have been out of school for almost a year and don't have a job yet. I really feel for these folks. I didn't line up my first job until March of my third year, and I was panicking. I'm sure these people are a thousand times more desperate. I have a lot of sympathy for their situation, but it's awfully hard to rank any of this group above people with actual work experience, especially relevant (that is, cracker-related) work experience. So folks with good grades from good schools aren't even going to get an interview. Several were doing contract and temp work, and probably will be for the foreseeable future. I'm sure that's not what they had in mind when they started law school in a booming market and took on a raft of loans.

4. The last observation I have for now (I may revisit this topic if more thoughts come to me, or if I get interesting feedback) is about something I've seen a few times, and I can't tell if it's a sign of desperation or flexibility or something else altogether. Several of these candidates who are fresh out of school have this pattern: college in state A, law school in state B, took the bar in state C, and applying for a job in state D (and some are even living in state E). I'm sure they would be happy to take the state D bar exam if they got the job, but it makes me wonder what their approach to the job search is, and why they took the C bar in the first place, and why they're looking in state D. It also makes me wonder if and how the hurdles to multi-jurisdictional practice are going to affect the legal market in this downturn. A laid off New York associate may be able to land at a smaller outfit in, I dunno, White Plains or somewhere, but she can't just decide to try her chances in Boston or Philadelphia. I'm not really taking a position on how awful the state-by-state bar licensing system is, but I'm just curious how much of an impact it will have on lawyer mobility.

5. Lots of people are writing much better than I am about all this. In addition to the links above, here are a couple more I saw recently. Scott Greenfield of Simple Justice had a thought-provoking post about what many of the folks caught in this upheaval (especially the Biglaw refugees and former AUSAs) are going to do now. Carolyn Elefant makes a pitch for hanging out a shingle. Let a thousand cracker factories bloom!

Full post as published by Begging the Question on February 20, 2009 (boomark / email).