SmallLaw: How to Find Your First (or your next) Job at a Firm That Won’t Try to Kill You

Are you a lawyer or law student looking for a job outside of BigLaw?  In this episode, we dissect the recent Paul Hastings powerpoint which has many people talking about what life must be like inside of big firms.

My experience coming out of law school was that William and Mary did little to nothing to educate me on what life was going to be like inside a small law firm.  In this episode, I talk about what to expect in a small firm, how to get your foot in the door, and what solo and small law firms are looking for when they make hiring decisions.

Are you a law student interest in a 30-minute zoom call with Brian to learn more about small firms or to get feedback on your own job application process?  Use this link to find a time to chat.  (All slots taken).  This link will be active for the first five bookings.  If you don't see the link, the slots are gone!

____________________________________
Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.

Want to connect with Brian?

Follow Brian on Instagram: @thebrianglass
Connect on LinkedIn

Transcript

0:00

Hey guys. Welcome back to another Friday. Solo episode of time. Freedom for lawyers. I'm your host Brian Glass. Today. We're going to be talking about your guide to finding your first job in small law. Or your next job in small law. I had a post go semi viral on LinkedIn this week. And I got a lot of responses from law students and recent law grads that career services offices at law schools were doing next to nothing that teach them. About opportunities that exist outside of big law. And so I want to use this episode as an opportunity to tell you about what goes on in small law firms. Kind of what you can expect to be paid in a small law firm and then what i would be doing if i were in your shoes and if i were applying to small law firms right now in 2023, Okay guys, welcome to the show. If you don't know who I am, maybe this was shared with you by fellow law student or by somebody who found this episode and thought it would be helpful to you. My name is Brian Glass. I'm a personal injury lawyer in Northern Virginia. I have a firm with four lawyers. Now it's going to be five lawyers by the end of may. And I run this podcast as a way to talk to myself. Three to five to 10 years ago. Really this podcast is a compilation of the advice that I would have needed. When I was earlier on the growth journey and it's my. Way to document the journey that i'm on right now and also to help people just like you get closer to where i am faster than i got there I don't have anything to sell you. My only ask of you is that if you find this helpful and you think your classmates would benefit from it as well that you share it with them. So why am I doing this? Really the impetus for this episode. Is from a LinkedIn post from last week that I made that went semi viral. I got like a hundred thousand. Impressions on this post, which is a high for me since I only have about 2000 followers. And I was commenting on this Paul Hastings. PowerPoint memo that came to light last week. If you haven't seen it before, if you have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm going to link to it in the show description. But it was a set of 10 non-negotiable expectations for an associate at that firm. And I'll store by saying. That I think a lot of what they have is good advice. The problem is that the good advice is buried after. The your life is going to suck part of the memo, right? So things that they say in this memo are we're in the business of client service. You're the concierge at the four seasons. You're a waiter at Alinea client always comes first and is always right for client. Once a mountain moved, we move it, no questions, which I think is complete and total bullshit. If the client is always right, you are superfluous and they don't need you. It goes on to say, as a junior, your clients are the associates and the partners on the deal team. Again, if they are always right in your job is just to tell them that they're right. Then why do they need you? AI is going to come and take that job. PowerPoint goes on to say you are quote online 24 7, no excuses, no exceptions. And clients expect everything to be done perfectly and delivered yesterday. And so that may be true that they expect things done perfectly and delivered yesterday. Again, the client is not always right on that. And they're not always entitled to that. And the firm that you're working for, I don't think is entitled to have access to you 24 7. In fact, I don't think anybody is entitled to have access to you 24 7, regardless of what they're paying you. And the trade-off in big law is listen, we're going to pay you upwards of$200,000 a year to do this job. And so we want you to be available all the time. And make no mistake about it. When you graduate law school, you are not worth$200,000 a year. And so that is the trade-off right? And, and somebody is going to read this memo and it's going to fire them up and they're going to be like, this is the place that I want to work. It wasn't me. When I was in your shoes. I interviewed for a bunch of big law. Jobs and I didn't get any, I think probably because I said things like I work smarter, not harder. And I want to have a life outside of the law. Like I was not aligned with big law interests in part because my career services office at William and Mary in 2008. Eight. When I graduated was doing nothing to educate us on opportunities that existed outside of big law, right? If you've made it this far and you don't know what big law is because you're not a lawyer. Big law is like a firm with 2000 lawyers, often in multiple cities. Sometimes multinationals. And they were the ones who were coming on campus and doing interviews. They had the large budgets and they had the, the hiring managing directors and blah, blah, blah. And so that was all you were exposed to. Like they would pay the school. They would come and they would interview 20 people on a day and then they would fly the candidates to their city for a callback interview. Have these huge hiring budgets, especially pre financial crash in 2008, we're running oftentimes lavish summer associate programs where you really were being recruited. To come and work for the firm you were being taken out in wine and dine and taken to sporting events. And of course, all of that ceased the moment you became an associate because you no longer had time to do any of this because you're, you're like online 24 7. And so. The problem with the way that law school is set this up is that they don't give you. Any exposure, really to what it's like at a small firm, public interest comes in. Government jobs come in. But there are not folks on campus like me who have a law firm with four lawyers. Who are talking to you, except in maybe like your legal research and writing class, where you have an adjunct professor who is a local lawyer. And even those lawyers really aren't doing much. If anything, to tell you about what life is like inside of those firms. So that's what I'm going to kind of dive into on the podcast today. I will just hit briefly, like the couple of things that I thought in this Paul Hastings memo were, were really good. Our items five through five through 10 or so So, let me just blow through that cause they don't want to. Pretend like everything in here is crap. Somebody's paying you$850 an hour for one hour of your time. Like think about that in everything you do a hundred percent. Yes. In small law, you're probably not being billed out at$850 an hour for one hour of your time, except to the extent that you're working on a big ass injury case. As I work on those cases, sometimes I have an effective hourly rate of two or$3,000 an hour. It's great work. If you can get it. But yeah, act like somebody's paying you top dollar for your time. Number six, take ownership of everything you do once you touch a document. You own every mistake in it, fair or not? I think that's a hundred percent accurate. Number three, a number seven work from home is a luxury. Don't take advantage of it. I think work from home is a luxury. And I think it's a mistake as a young lawyer. I think you learn so much as a young lawyer about negotiation, about client interaction, about staff interaction. Just by eavesdropping on what's going on around your office. I learned 90% of what I know about negotiating auto accident cases from listening to the partner that I worked for negotiate auto accident cases. So I think even if you have the opportunity and the flexibility to work from home, it sounds really good. You were going to miss out on a lot of the soft skills. If you take your firm up on that opportunity. Another one that they haven't here is no questions until you've tried to figure something out on yourself. A hundred percent. I am a hundred percent aligned with that. Like don't come to me before. You've tried to look on. Google and in Westlaw and on a trial lawyers listserv. And then if you still can't figure out the answer after an hour or two. Come to me. I probably know the answer, but I want to know that you've looked for it first. And then the last one that I think is really important is this your career, right? Nobody is ever going to care as much about your career as you do. And nobody else should, you are a hundred percent responsible for the trajectory of your life. And your career. I think that's good advice. So, again, the story of this episode is that I had this LinkedIn post go viral and I overnight acquired like a hundred. Law student followers. And so I'd just DMD a bunch of them and I sent them. A couple of episodes of the podcast that I thought would be helpful to them. And then I invited some questions. To the tune of like, is your campus doing anything to tell you about what it's like in small law and uniformly? They said no. And so. I want to use this episode to kind of go through like, what's pay, like what opportunities are out there and what are we looking for as small law firm owners who are hiring. Law students or recent law grads to come and work in our firms. The first thing that I'll tell you is that. Small law firms were just wildly different from each other, not, not even from big law, right? You would expect that we're different from big law, but across the spectrum of small law firms, you're going to find everything from a general practice that. That leans on. These kind of workplace insurance programs to funnel clients to them. To insurance defense practices. So the folks that get hired by Geico or by state farm to defend auto accident lawsuits. To high-end boutique shops that have five lawyers, but do really, really high end like construction litigation or Rangeley litigation. You're going to find the general practice guy who does wills. Who's just like a step above legal zoom, and you're going to find the really high end guy who's constructed the will and the trust and the Wyoming. Yeah. Secret. Hide all your assets thing. And so we're wildly disparate in terms of what we do. But also in terms of how we pay. And so one of the projects that I'm working on now with my team, a great legal marketing is putting together this. Survey of what kind of a law firm do you have? How do you pay and how do you incentivize great work for your team? So that's something that you're going to see within a couple of months. And then the other thing is like, we're, we're wildly different in terms of tech adoption. So the lawyer that we're hiring, who's going to start at the end of may, is coming from a firm where they didn't even use laptops. Like she showed up for work and had a, had a desktop and a hard, hard printer. And and I'm like, how did you guys survive? The pandemic? What we found during the pandemic is that we had firms that were still relying on a physical fax machine. So, you know, As, especially as a millennial law student coming and going to these firms, I think you're going to be surprised by how little technology some law firms have adopted and. And it's going to create a lot of opportunities for you to come in and be a real asset to the firm early on. But the number one question that I got from law students. Was how do I get one of these jobs? How do I look for one of these jobs and how do I connect with small law firm owners? And so my response back to a lot of these. Young people was, what are you trying to do? What kind of work you want to do? And a lot of people told me they wanted to do litigation. And so the first thing that I think you do is you have to go deeper than litigation or transactional work, right? I think career services offices. Tend to split up legal work into transactional, sometimes administrative and then litigation, without thinking much deeper about what those things mean. You tell me you want to do litigation. And I don't know what that means, right? Because there's family law litigation, there's commercial litigation, there's personal injury litigation. And then there's trial work like trial work is totally different than. Than litigation. I don't file a lot of motions. I do discovery because I have to do discovery, but the vast majority of the work that I do is actually in a courtroom. Right. I don't do a lot of research. I don't do a lot of writing. Those are things that I would associate really with litigation jobs that are, are very, very different than what trial work has. And so my first piece of advice to people who were in your shoes is defined with as much granularity as you can, what you want for your life, because this will cause you to write better cover letters and it will cause you to apply for fewer jobs and with a looming recession, that might be scary, but it'll actually cause these things to get read. So the perfect cover letter for me would be somebody who has demonstrated that they've actually looked at my website and have an understanding of what I do. They've probably listen to my podcast. They've probably read some of my writing and they're going to come and tell me, I'm interested in personal injury litigation, and I see that you won blah, blah, blah case. And I'm. I had these three questions about it right like demonstrate that you've actually looked at what it is that we're doing here As somebody who's hired a number of people. Initially like off of indeed we don't do that so much anymore. Now we kind of go out into the market and we recruit people. But when we were hiring on indeed, it was very easy to tell who had just clicked the apply button and who had taken the time. To read through our job posting and tailor their response to our job posting. So like a little bit of effort goes a long way. And if you put in a lot of effort, it's going to be evident to the lawyers who are reading your cover letters. So the advice that I gave to a couple of people who were starting out in. I got a strange number of people told me they were graduating next December. Maybe they're off cycle or whatever, but I was like, this is perfect for you because you have nine months before you're going to be entering the job market. So you have plenty of time. So here's the advice that I would give you if you're a two L or if you're somebody who's graduating in December. Is that your first contact with lawyers should have nothing to do with a job. You should send somebody in the area of law that you want to practice. Elder law. Will's criminal, whatever, send them a letter saying I'm interested in doing the highly specific thing that you do. And I have a couple of questions. Can I bring you lunch and sit down and ask you these questions and tell me what the questions are upfront, right? Don't say I want to come and pick your brain. That's a complete waste of my time, because I don't know whether I'm going to have the answers to the questions that you have. Tell me, I want to know. This aspect of criminal law, I want to know how you get clients. I want to know what three things you do in the beginning of a case that you think are really important that nobody else is doing. Those are things that most good lawyers will share with you. And if they don't know the answer to them, they'll send you to somebody else. But the worst thing you could do is is the offers, like, let me bring you lunch. I can buy my own lunch and pick your brain. I don't even know what you're going to ask. And then during that conversation with the lawyer, now that you've gotten your foot in the door, You say, listen, I know that you might not be hiring next year, but you probably know a firm that is. Do you mind putting me in touch with one or two or three firms that are looking for a young lawyer? Who's my age. And once you get a couple of these lunches under your belt, you're going to have leads on people who are actually hiring. The other thing about approaching a, somebody who might be a mentor for you is that they're going to give you some advice and you better fucking follow up on the advice, right? I'm not sitting down for a second lunch with somebody who hasn't done. The thing that I asked them to do on the first lunch. So if I recommend a book to you, For a recommend a podcast to you for a recommend a course to you. The very best thing that you can do to get a response in the future. Is send me a note a couple of weeks later saying I read the book. I loved it. Or I hated it. Here's the action that I'm taking as a result of having read the book. That's going to be memorable to me because almost nobody does that and that's going to cause me to be invested in your future and follow up with you and want you to do well in life And the thing that you're going to learn from having a couple of these lunches is that there's always somebody out there who's looking for a young lawyer to come into their practice and maybe take it over. So from a 2022. Thomson Reuters, ABA survey. They asked small law firms again, law firms under 30 lawyers. What are your top three priorities for the next year? 40% of them listed growing the size of their firm as a top three priority, but 20% of them. One fifth of all law firms out there listed succession planning. As one of their top three priorities. And so coming into a practice. Early identifying lawyers who are. Looking to transition out of the practice of law. And take over their practice. Like what an opportunity. To just walk into a book of business, especially if you're somebody who thought like, maybe I'll just go out and do it on my own. You can walk into somebody's book of business, take it over, provide a soft landing for their team, provide a soft landing for them. And now you're up and running in two years instead of seven. So we're actually utilizing this in our firm right now. With my new hire. My team has some additional bandwidth. We're sending out a letter to all the local lawyers saying, listen, I know you might not be thinking about succession planning. But I know that, you know, the lawyer, that's tired of taking depositions. That's tired of trying cases. I'm building a machine over here, powered by great technology powered by a twenty four seven phone answering service powered by 270 plus five star Google reviews. Like this would be a great opportunity for some lawyer to transition their practice to my firm in a way that's going to be a win-win win for everybody. And if you can provide that same kind of opportunity. To a lawyer who's at the tail end of their career like what a great chance for you to walk into something great And I say that with the caveat that a lot of us aren't looking, right. So 40% are looking to expand. That means 60% are not. And so a number of the firms that you reach out to are not going to be hiring right now. And that's okay. Where I would not be looking for jobs is on indeed. I would not be. Trying to find the entry-level position on indeed, because that's where everybody else is looking. Number one. And number two, it probably is not the highly specific. Narrowly focused. Search that you want to be doing for your career, because the worst thing that you can do out of law school, His step into a job. That's good enough for right now, but isn't what you actually want to do. And then you waste the next three years of your life when you could be learning. A highly specific niche. Kind of treading water, doing something that doesn't turn you on, that you aren't excited about. That's how lawyers get burnt out. That's how we get depressed. That's how we become alcoholics and get divorced. Like you don't want a life that doesn't inspire you and I want to encourage you to whatever city or town you're in. Like there's a lawyer that does what you want to do, probably where there's a lawyer nearby that does what you want to do. And so reach out to those lawyers and ask them whether there's somebody in their network of friends who is in growth. Both Mode because there probably is Now when you're in front of a lawyer who actually is hiring, I'm really looking for three things. I'm looking for somebody who's going to be an asset to my practice. I'm not looking for somebody who's a liability. What do I mean by that? And asset is somebody who can go out and generate their own business. And asset is somebody who can take things off of my plate. That I don't want to do. Liability is somebody who does the exact same thing that I do enjoys doing the exact same things that I do. And doesn't find any business on their own. Again, if you do exactly what I do, one of us is superfluous. So you want to demonstrate that you have, if not the ability right now, the desire to go and learn how to generate your own cases, the desire to take things off of. The lawyer's plate, the free them up to do the things that really make them happy. So that you can do the things that really make you happy. The other thing you've got to get along with the team. Like, so you have to be nice to everybody. I tell this story all the time. We had a paralegal who's interviewing here who seemed like she was going to be a really good fit. Pass the interview with flying colors. And then I did what I do after every interview. I walked around to the rest of my team and I asked what they thought of her and they all hated her. She'd been mean to the receptionist? I didn't actually hear this from the receptionist. I heard it from somebody else. And then she'd like failed to hold the door for somebody, either walking out of the bathroom or walking out of the building. And so somebody who I was about to hire, like that just killed it. You, you gotta be good to the whole team, especially if you're the young lawyer, because guess what? The team knows more about the practice of law than you do, even with your fancy JD. And the last thing is like humility and the willingness to do non-lawyer tasks. Doesn't in a small law firm. You're going to be doing things like licking your own envelopes every once in a while. It's just going to happen. And so you've gotta be willing to get your hands dirty, regardless of whether you have an Ivy league education. Because what we're building here is a practice and a building business. All right. So if you made it this far, Like, what do you get working at a small law firm? What's the benefit? Why would I not want to make.$200,000 a year, right out of law school. Working at a big firm. Would you have to understand about making that kind of money working at a big firm is that you're really working two jobs. If you're working. 70 or 80 hours a week to keep up with your billable hour requirements. You're really working two jobs. And so why not come and make a little bit less money in small law? Working 40 or 50 hours a week with tremendous upside potential. And one of the things that I was told, but didn't really believe when I got out of school was that in the long run, you're going to make more money at a small law firm than you will at a big law firm. Why because big firm people and they either burn out and then they go take government jobs where they move in academia. Or they go on and do something else or small, small handful of them. They make partner and they make a ton of money. So yeah, that might happen. But even then, like we were litigating our case against the head of a. The chief counsel for a big insurance company who told us he had worked 27 days in a row. I who wants to do that? I don't want to work 27 days in a row. Again, probably turned somebody on. Doesn't do it for me. And so at an effective hourly rate, like I'm waking way more money now. Then my colleagues who are still in big law are making, I think. The other reason to come work here is because we just define success differently. So yes, money is. Important. But 80% of law firm respondents to this small law firm survey listed work-life balance as one of the. Chief measures of success in their firm. Also client satisfaction, ratings, and overall revenues and profits were also above 80%. For respondents. So, you know, You should have a life outside of the office. Most lawyers, I think, get this wrong. And when you graduate and when you are sworn into the bar, somebody is probably going to use the phrase. The law's a jealous mistress and clients come first and. And I think all of that is bullshit. Like you should come first. Your clients being happy should be a byproduct of you being happy, doing the work that you want to do. For clients that you want to do it for and with teammates that you want to do it with, if those things are true, then of course the client is going to be well taken care of. And if they're not true, That's what leads to bar complaints and malpractice complaints If you've made it this far, I assume it means you got value out of this episode. And so here's my ask again. I don't have anything to sell you. Please share this with your classmates. If your career services is anything like it was at my school back in 2008. You didn't get any advice on how to get these jobs. And so your classmates needed to hear this as much as you do. And I promise you that if they get a job in small law, they are not taking that job away from you. So please share it. Please adopt that abundance mentality that there's plenty of work to go around and that helping people out is ultimately. Helping everybody out. The other thing that I'm going to do is five consults with law students. Again, I don't have anything to sell you. I'm not going to try to upsell you at the end of this phone call. I'm interested in your experience and I want to see if I'm able to help you. I'm going to put a link in the show description. To my calendar. And the first five students that book a call with me. I do. I don't know, like 30 minute calls, I'll answer any questions you have about small law. I'll give you tips on how to present yourself to lawyers. If you want that, I'll look at your resume. If you want that, I'll give you some career advice if you want it. And I've got a wide network of lawyers across the country. So it may be the case that. You know, if you're interested in doing personal injury in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I might know a lawyer there. So drop that in there. Also last thing, if you would do me the favor and hit the subscribe button, so you don't miss any more episodes. As a law student, a lot of what I'm talking about is going to be helpful to you somewhere in the long run. I talk about building great businesses. Client acquisition, running a great team. And I talk a lot about personal finance. If you're graduating with six figures in debt, this is the place for you to learn how to diversify your income. Make more money, keep more money and create passive streams of income. So I hope this has been helpful to you that has please share it. Again, if you want to schedule a call with me, I'm going to put that link in the show description. Take care guys.