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Should You Work as a Paralegal if You Can't Find a Job as a Lawyer?

By Carolyn Elefant

With associate positions hard to come by, new graduates -- desperate to find a paying job in the legal profession -- are applying for work as paralegals, legal secretaries and law librarians, according to Long Island Business News. The story sites one new grad, Jessica Sparacino, who secured a job as a paralegal at Jackson Lewis, but that was only because she'd been working in that position through law school. For the most part, law firms and other employers aren't willing to hire JDs for non-lawyer positions. In general, lawyers are either over-qualified or under-qualified for many of the available non-lawyer positions. For example, one firm that advertised for an administrative assistant was inundated with lawyer résumés. But the firm declined to hire a lawyer because it felt the candidate would simply leave once a better job came along. Marjorie Jassin, vice president of Law Library Management told the Business News: "It is totally inappropriate to have an attorney in a library ... because most attorneys do not have the necessary library science skills and degree to work in a law library." David Gabor, a lawyer whose firm turned down a JD for an administrative position, offered the most useful...

Full post as published by Legal Blog Watch on August 07, 2009 (boomark / email).