Graduate Fellow, Law Career Development
With the July Bar results being posted and holidays right around the corner, many recent law school graduates are feeling pressure to find a job and fast. Between rent, student loans, basic necessities, and yes, holiday shopping, the need to find a stable source of income, as well as move forward in your legal career, is a strong motivation to keep looking for work. However, you are not the only one looking for work. And trying to hone in on any one specific field can become a daunting task in a sea of legal specialties, firms, and potential employment opportunities.
Oddly enough, it seems that in this age of quickly advancing technology and internet dependence, most articles on looking for work still hold many in-person tactics for obtaining work. Things like leveraging networks, reaching out to personal contacts, and looking into opportunities where you have worked in the past are all great, tried and true methods for obtaining work, but may not necessarily help find the exact opening you are looking for. And for those law students who were not able to form a strong network during law school, finding that first legal job after graduation can be even more difficult. Enter the online search engine to help bridge the gap.
By now most law students and graduates have become well acquainted with many of the advanced search options in WestLaw, LexisNexis, and other legal databases. These tricks can help narrow down the vast amount of legal documentation out there into a much more manageable chunk of data, and even let you find the exact article or case that fits your argument. But surprisingly, many law students and graduates don’t apply the same skills they learned researching case law to their job searches.
Websites like Indeed, Idealist, USA Jobs, and even our own LCDonline have hundreds of job postings, with more added every day. While it might seem easy to use simple search terms like “law”, “lawyer”, or “attorney” might yield results, what you find may not in fact be what you are looking for. All of these websites include an advanced search feature that can help you narrow down what you are looking for and are worth taking the extra time to use. Doing so is especially important with general employment websites in order to prevent you from being loaded down with irrelevant jobs. It can be easy for a search engine to bring back unrelated jobs, such as paralegal or administrator, based only on the word “attorney” being somewhere in the description. As such, it pays off in the long run to be specific.
Keep in mind that many of these websites cater to a wide area, and that the advanced search function can be incredibly helpful in keeping your options close to home. Searching by city can help even farther, as counties can sometimes be expansive, or even ill defined. I’m sure all of us have looked up jobs in the “Bay Area” only to find results from Monterey listed among them. So look closely at the geographical location selected, and use the advanced search feature to tailor the results to your city of interest. This can also be helpful if you are planning to move, as it can give you an idea of the potential job market in that area. Many large firms and companies often have listings in multiple areas, so refining your search area can help to clear up which offices are hiring, and which ones are not.
Technology continues to move forward and becomes more and more sophisticated, meaning that in order to stay on top of things, you also need to refine your process as well. You have likely heard the phrase “Boolean search” when doing your research, but these processes will function more or less the same in almost every kind of search that you do. Taking the time to refresh yourself on this kind of search will help you sort through all of the potential job postings online in order to find one in a field or location that best suits your goals. Recruiters and hiring personnel are also using Boolean searches to find potential new hires, so it benefits you to use the same techniques to get their attention.
Online job searching takes a lot of time and patience, and you have to be ready to get rejected. However, these subtle changes to your search habits can also show you what opportunities you may have missed or overlooked before, as well as allow for your existing network to offer insight or even connections they might have at the firms posting online. By taking the time to refine your search you can spend less time sorting through dozens of jobs you’re not really interested in, and more time crafting personalized cover letters for the ones that interest you. But this is only scratching the surface of what online job searching can do. Keep an eye on the Onward and Upward emails, as we will be posting a special video on job searching just for GGU law students and law alumni.
The truth is that the best ways of getting a job in the legal world are still through your network. Most online job postings are an employer’s last option, having already exhausted their own personal networks. However, remember that your status as a GGU law student or graduate has already given you access to a powerful network, even if it seems that your own personal network is less then desired. The Law Career Development office would be more than happy to talk with you about not only how to better use online searches, but also to leverage the network you have with GGU.
The holiday season is a good time to invest in some career-related planning, and there are specific strategies that lend themselves well to this period of time. Law Career Development will be open Monday thru Wednesday, November 23 to 25 and during the month of December until December 23. LCD will be closed from December 24 until January 3 and will resume normal business hours on January 4. Call us at (415) 442-6625 to confirm office hours; evening hours can be arranged. We recommend that alums schedule an appointment with a LCD Career Counselor immediately following bar results. Click here to begin making your appointment.
