Holiday Presents and Healthy Presence

By Alexander Hoyt-Heydon
Law Career Development Graduate Fellow

In my last entry, I talked briefly about the importance of keeping yourself healthy to help let your body do what it does best. A little over a year ago, the LCD blog posted a fantastic article about TED talks to watch before your next interview, as well as an article about networking during the holiday season. What do each of these have to do with each other? You might not realize it, but your personal health and well-being has a direct impact on your ability to network and find a job. How well you take care of yourself not only influences the way you feel about yourself, but also how those that you meet feel about you. Health is a key to your personal success in life.

Prior to attending Golden Gate University, I was a bartender, and to earn a little extra money during law school, I worked for a staffing agency that would routinely send me out to bar-tend for catered events all throughout the Bay Area. At one of these events, a tech company was hosting a guest speaker as she toured the country promoting her upcoming book. That speaker was Amy Cuddy, a professor and researcher at Harvard Business School, and her new book is about how nonverbal behavior and snap judgments affect people. If that name sounds familiar to you, it’s because her TED talk on how Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are, as well as her popularization of the ‘Wonder Woman’ pose, have made her one of the most watched TED talks over the last couple of years. As luck would have it, I was able to snag an advanced copy of her new book, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges, and read it 2 months before its expected date of release.

New Materials Added to The LCS Resource Library

LCS has added new material to the Resource Library available to students and alumni for checkout or viewing in the Law Career Services office. Some of the new/updated material includes:

• From Lemons to Lemonade in the New Legal Job Market by Richard L. Hermann

This book offers advice on how to position yourself to find a good job, how to build a sastifying legal career and how to cope with --and make lemonade from--all the other lemons in your search for work. Lawyer/Legal career counselor Richard Hermann gives 21 strategies for entry level attorneys to compete effectively for jobs, even against more experienced attorneys. (Available for checkout).

• The Happy Lawyer Handbook by Mitchell Nathanson

Written for the current law student, The Happy Lawyer Handbook provides insight into those practicalities of law practice that are perhaps not contemplated while in law school but which will very likely have an overwhelming effect on the entirety of a budding attorney's career. It is intended to encourage students to become more engaged in their own professional future...[so] they will ultimately achieve the immense personal and professional fulfillment that the practice of law can offer, but does not guarantee. (Available for checkout).

• The New What Can You Do With a Law Degree by Dr. Larry Richard and Tanya Hanson

In this new, 6th edition of a law career classic, lawyers are introduced to a unique, five-part model for career satisfaction. The five-part model developed by Larry Richard JD/Ph.D. will help identify your career identity so that you can find lifelong satisfaction in the traditional practice of law or through alternative work arrangement or career choices. This book contains career exercises, practical career-finding techniques and a compendium of 800+ ways to use you law degree inside, outside or around the law. (Available for checkout).


Other new materials added/updated:

• Networking For Veterans: A Guidebook for a Successful Military Transition into the Civilian Workforce by Michael Faulkner, Andrea Nierenberg & Michael Abrams
• Choosing Small, Choosing Smart: Job Search Strategies for Lawyers in the Small Firm Market (3rd Edition) by Donna Gerson
•  Innovative Mentoring for Lawyers and Law Students by Matthew Christiano

Book Review - Best Friends at the Bar

by Sarah Wood
LCS Grad Fellow

Best Friends at the Bar by Susan Smith Blakely is a book designed for young women in law schools as well as women pursuing their undergraduate degree who are considering a career in the legal field. The author has worked in the legal field for 25 years and has experience in both the public and private sectors. She includes contributions from more than 60 legal professionals, including judges and legal career counselors. The focus of the book is to help women make well-informed choices regarding their legal careers because according to the author’s research over 40% of women leave the legal profession midcareer and nearly 80% of women in major law firms leave after just five years of work.

In addition to advice from her contributors and her own personal advice, the author provides her readers with article, book, and web resources within the text. This book is a quick and easy read but is still very well researched and packed with useful information and advice. Every chapter incorporates advice from people in the profession such as practitioners, authors, judges and also law school career counselors. The author addresses the impact of the current economy and the difficulty of balancing work and home life. She includes excerpts from women in the field of varying ages on how they have personally dealt with the work-home life balance. For specific research and resources on this critical topic, see the University of California Hastings’s Project for Attorney Retention.

The author emphasizes the importance of choosing a specialty early on and finding a mentor (male or female). She explains with staggering statistics the reality of the legal profession still being male dominated and provides realistic information about pursuing a career in litigation or with a large firm. The new idea of flexible hours and part-time partnerships are discussed and, while technically possible, the author emphasizes that they are not always a reality in large firms and on the whole are extremely hard to come by. There is a section titled “critical lessons” which includes tips on dressing appropriately (which means different things in different legal settings as well as different areas of the country), office relationships, keeping emotionality to a minimum, and working with other women in the profession. The book concludes with profiles of women working in the legal profession and who struggled with a variety of work-life issues. She incorporates advice from 20, 30, 40, 50, and 60-somethings as well as a male perspective on women in the legal field.
 
[ This book is available for check-out at Law Career Services. ]

BOOK REVIEW - The Opportunity Maker

by Danny Wang
LCS Grad Fellow

Assertive law students who take the reigns of their job search will have the most success in locating employment. However, students may wonder when is the appropriate time to start looking for a job, or what networking techniques are available that will increase their opportunities to find work down the road. Ari Kaplan’s book, The Opportunity Maker: Strategies for Inspiring Your Legal Career Through Creative Networking and Business Development, goes into detail answering these questions. The book encompasses a wide array of helpful approaches to successful job hunting through building a professional network, so students can easily find an approach that fits within their own comfort zone.

For example, Mr. Kaplan provides tips on how to build and maintain a relationship with a mentor in the legal field, as this mentor can provide both valuable advice on how to begin your legal career and potential networking contacts that may lead to a job opportunity. For those persons who generally shy away from networking events, the book also includes advice on how to successfully network: “If you remember that networking is much more about ‘them’ than you, you will be successful every time.” Networking boils down to relationship building, and this can be accomplished by asking more questions and talking less so you learn more about others.

In addition, Mr. Kaplan emphasizes the importance of maintaining your optimism during your job search and networking events: “’There is no worse way to begin a conversation with someone than to be down on a current job position [or] the market in general’ . . . . Nobody wants to chat with a complainer . . . . Save the sad stories and the gossip for your friends; network like you are the luckiest person in town.” Making a positive first impression with someone will make it that much easier for your new contact to introduce you to his own circle of contacts.

[ Mr. Kaplan's book is available for check-out at Law Career Services. ]