Going Into Law: Beyond The Glamour
The following is a guest post by Kenn Goldblatt. His bio follows.
It’s not necessary to have a degree in law to establish yourself in a meaningful career within the legal profession. There are a multitude of levels for you to enter depending on your level of education, your professional skills, and your capabilities to do the work required by the role you choose.
Opportunities at the Entry Level are Varied
At the entry level of non-professionals, you can find postings for clerks, secretaries, legal assistants and paralegals. Each role requires progressively more skills and capabilities. As a clerk, you’ll probably be offered a minimum compensation, and find yourself doing mainly repetitive work keeping track of schedules, documents, and other repetitive tasks. Secretaries’ roles are largely support and communication activities: telephone work, correspondence, and document preparation as well as client support.
Paraprofessional Roles are the Next Step
Legal assistants and paralegals are “paraprofessional” who provide direct litigation support to their supervising attorney (or attorneys). In most cases, there are no formal requirements for legal assistants and paralegals, and attorneys are often willing to train personnel in these roles if applicants can demonstrate they have the basic skills and capabilities that the attorney’s specific opening requires. But you can also find various educational organizations that offer various types of training and certification as well. These range from correspondence and on-line courses to community college experiences and even four-year degree programs.
Depending on your native skills, your education and/or training, and your experience, compensation can range from minimum wage positions to handsomely compensated professional positions. Some employers require their paralegals to hold certificates, others don’t care and will train you themselves. What you’re offered can vary substantially from firm to firm and opportunity to opportunity depending on these variables. So careful consideration and planning is required to avoid leaving money on the table when you’re looking for one of these jobs.
Lawyering and Beyond
Graduation from a law school and passing the state bar examination can increase your compensation substantially over the paraprofessional ranks. High ranking in your law school graduating class, graduation from a prestigious law school, and other factors can help a candidate get high salary offers and envied positions within established law firms. Lawyers who decide to set up individual practices may struggle at first while they establish their reputations and build a client list, but may find that role more satisfying personally. Between those two extremes, there are unending kinds of roles to establish a career and support themselves.
Outside the legal professional you’ll find lots of individuals who have been to law school by are working in business roles from professional support and management positions to entrepreneurial activities of establishing their own businesses or participating in startups with others. In these cases, the theoretical knowledge and discipline that comes from a law school education forms the basis of their business skills they apply to their new experiences.
Flexibility as You Move and Grow
Once you are working within the legal profession, you can often move from role to role and you demonstrate to your employer that you can take on progressively challenging roles and requirements within the firm. If you decide to move to another firm, you have an enhanced ability to move to another firm by having successfully mastered the task required for the role you performed. From there, you also can take advantage of opportunities at other firms or even in other states as your experience grows and your skills improve.
If you spent a lot of money on education and training to establish your credentials for the role you occupy – or want to move into – you owe it to yourself to stay alert to new and emerging opportunities that will allow you to use what you know to the best advantage of your employer and yourself.
There’s No Reason to Stay in a Job You Hate
Sometimes jobs just don’t turn out to be what you expected. When that happens, roles within the legal profession at all levels are varied enough that you can often find an alternative without starting over from scratch. Sometimes a move within the same firm will do the trick. Other times a move to another firm or even a different area may be required. Once you have established certain basic skills and understand the various processes of the part of the legal profession within which you’re working, you should be able to find a position you can live with or even thrive in.
If there are certain aspects of your role you hate – whether it is clerk, paraprofessional, or attorney – then it may be time to move to laterally or vertically, inside your current firm to someplace else. The next step is to make your plan and decide how to accomplish it: What are the requirements of the position you want to move to? Is it available inside your existing organization or will you have to look elsewhere? What do you have to do to prepare yourself for the new position – other experience, further education, networking, or something else?
Leaving is Often Easier Than You Think
Entry level jobs often require minimal education or training, and the employer will often offer the training. A college degree that demonstrates that you have basic writing, math, speaking, and critical thinking skills is usually more than enough for moving into a paraprofessional position. While a paralegal certificate can be helpful, in most instances it’s not actually required. It may give you a faster start, but on-the-job training will often suffice.
The trick is to focus your resume on the various aspects of educational, training and career experiences that will allow you to perform successfully in the role you’re seeking. Don’t be afraid to send specifically tailored resumes to the different employers. Their postings for the person they are seeking are often different, so a “standard” resume may well be inadequate to get their attention.
Kenn Goldblatt
Kenn Goldblatt is the author of The Pro Se Litigant’s Civil Litigation Handbook designed to give average readers an understanding of the civil litigation process from pre-litigation investigation through trial on the merits and beyond.
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