You consider yourself a relatively savvy job-seeker, and are doing what you think are all the right things as you’re in the home stretch of law school. You have a perfectly crafted resume, you’re a frequent visitor and user of your school’s career center, and you’re even organized about the job search, having laid out a plan to get you where you want to be. But now you’re wondering, what else? What else should you be doing to give yourself an edge, in a highly competitive legal job market? What can you do to make yourself stand out, to the extent that you’re not just going to be taking the first job offer that comes along, but in that you’re crafting a situation that will help you land the ideal job?
Landing that ideal job will certainly take more effort than the typical job search, but fortunately, it’s the type of effort that should come easily to you if you’re truly interested in the legal profession. First of all, you should have a profile on LinkedIn, and once you’ve done that, you should be seeking out any and all law-related groups that you can find. Yes, there are likely to be a lot, but by subscribing to more of them, you’ll soon be able to separate the wheat from the chaff and determine where there’s more traffic and where you should be focusing your efforts.
Your goal here is not just to look for postings about attorney jobs, though certainly you should keep an eye out for those. No, your plan should be to come across as a smart, engaged law school student who would be an asset to any firm after graduation. You do this by engaging in discussions about topics that are relevant to you, related to the law of course. Even if you’re just asking the right questions, this too will help you get noticed and establish you as perhaps not an expert, but a smart person willing to learn, who’s already engaged in the profession in which you want to work.
What else? Let’s presume that you’ve already focused on a particular area of law that you want to practice in, which is as it should be. Have you thought about starting a blog? This would be one that focuses on that particular area of law, and while you might not have a lot to say because of your lack of experience, you can certainly show that you know what’s happening in that area of law, that you know about recent verdicts and precedents, and yes, that you even have an opinion on them. Once you’ve established your blog as a place to go to for information and the latest news, make sure that you let everyone know about it. You never know when it’ll get to the right person – or rather, the right person who can offer you a job in your field, thanks to the intelligence and ambition you’ve already shown in so clearly setting yourself apart from the rest of the pack.