Archive for the ‘employment’Category

What it really means to be a new grad

Law_school_bubble_infographic

There isn’t much about this infographic we didn’t know. After all, law school is becoming more expensive and riskier all the time. But as long as the number of applicants to law school continues to increase, young people continue to be gullible, school is easier to handle than real-life, and there is money to be made, law schools will continue to mass-produce graduates.

Ironically, lawyers are blame for this crater in the market. But which lawyers really brought on problem? I published my answer here in connection with the ABA’s Legal Rebels project. Enough said. You can make up your own minds, but I think I made my case.

Posted via email from practice (redux)

19

09 2011


by practicehacker
posted in ABA Jounral, analytics, Article, Blogging, business, Career and Job, careers, community, competition, current-events, employment, graph, infographic, law, law office, legal marketplace, LegalZoom, practice, practice management, research, school, startup, the business of law, tips, work
No Comments

Open Plea to Legal Marketers … little help?

Me Learning to be Humble

Asking for Help ... Hat in Hand

Being the Practicehacker doesn’t mean I know everything. Take law firm marketing for instance.  
In real life I run a 3-lawyer suburban Chicago practice engaged in what I call “Small Business” law; i.e. we do pretty much everything a small business or its owners need their lawyer to do, including:
  • Business start-ups, incorporation, organization
  • Contracts: drafting, review, enforcement, terms
  • Hiring and firing of employees and contractors
  • Commercial litigation, collections, and defense
  • Real estate transaction, liens and construction
  • Business, stock and asset, sale and purchase
  • Divorce and estate planning for entrepreneurs
  • Bankruptcy, reorganization, crisis management
I can’t think of any aspect of practice organization,management, or marketing that I couldn’t improve. In fact, I am absolutely certain that I must learn to do a lot of things better. Of course, if I had to single out one thing for attention at the moment, it would have to be our law firm marketing.
Full disclosure: I’ve never been satisfied with my firm’s online or social media presence. I mean, my name is out there, but the picture that emerges of my firm seems fragmented and weak. Then again, my off-line presence is no better. I’ve prepared and delivered seminars, given talks both locally and nationally, and have had articles published all over. But to what end?
The worst part of the problem is that it feels like my office is being severely underutilized. After a harrowing couple of years in this see-saw economy, I finally have a stable team of trained lawyers and staff, with more becoming available all the time. But if what we have to offer does not reach the right Clients, it’s wasted. That’s the hardest part of the problem: matching the right skills with the right Clients and keeping the process going.
There is one final caveat: I need new marketing initiatives to have a measurable ROI so we can decide whether to stay with it, pivot, or abandon it and start over.  If anyone thinks they can take a crack at evaluating our situation, or knows someone else who can, please get in touch or leave that information in the comments to this post.  
Thanks to everyone who thinks they can help.

17

09 2011


by practicehacker
posted in bankruptcy, Blogging, business, Career and Job, competition, current-events, employment, facebook, Google, law office, Marketing, media, new media, old media, practice, practice management, referrals, social media, social media tools, the business of law, tips, twitter, Video, website, websites, Wisdom of Crowds, work, youtube
No Comments

What do you call 100 unemployed lawyers?

Sea_turtle_hatchlings_try_to_m

A good start! But seriously: according to this piece in the Wall Street Journal new law grads continue to enter the workforce faster than Starbucks can hire them. To quote the article:

According to jobs site SimplyHired.com… the hardest-to-place industry [is the] the legal field. Unemployed lawyers now find themselves in the country’s most cutthroat race for a job, with less than one opening for every 100 working attorneys.

But what makes us so hard to employ? Maybe the answer can be found in the 50 (and counting) comments to the ABA Journal’s anemic coverage of the topic, which is all of a paragraph long and is no more than a rehash of the original mention in Above the Law. Or maybe the answer is written into the Economist’s riotously off-target piece Not Enough Lawyers, which posits that we have uh, too few lawyers. But after all is said and done the truth is that lawyers are hard to employ for the same reasons we’ve known about for a good 20 years:

  • Law school costs too much and does not teach practical skills
  • Grads need to make a lot right away to pay their school loans
  • Big Law only hires a faction of grads; the rest are on their own

For the great mass of new lawyers in the market and those displaced due to the systemic shakeup in the law, the odds are lower than newly hatched turtles trying to make it out to sea. And it just breaks my heart to see that happen to such a nice bunch of baby turtles.

11

09 2011


by practicehacker
posted in Blogging, business, Career and Job, community, competition, current-events, employment, law, legal marketplace, media, outside counsel, outsourcing, practice, practice management, research, the business of law, tips, work
No Comments

Desperately Seeking Relevance …

Information-discovery-matrix

I started using the Web the minute it graduated from monochromatic bulletin boards to HTML pages. Of course I was unemployed like 70% of my law school class, so I had time to experiment. Now I’ve got an office, family, demanding clients, and employees to oversee. You might say I’ve grown up a little. But has the Web grown up with me? Almost every website still wants to monopolize my time as if I had nothing better to do but chat, tweet, poke, or whatever. Sure, today’s distractions are Facebook and Twitter instead of Chatrooms and Message Boards, but it’s not that different is it? So when does “.com” turned “Web 2.0″ need to produce something relevant to my life instead of one more way to waste time? Or is the Internet in perpetual adolescence? As unlikely as it sounds, I was hopeful when I spotted this article on Techcrunch – a blog that I really respect (started by an attorney, BTW). But it turns out the piece is mostly about the oncoming wave of information in our future and how Web Apps might deliver the information in a slightly different form.  In short, there is no reason to believe that the Web, or anyone making things for the Web, will deliver anything relevant to real life. So I guess I’m still desperately seeking relevance to come pouring out my browser. But I don’t see that happening anytime soon either.

Posted via email from practice (redux)

Tags: , , , , , ,

03

03 2011


by practicehacker
posted in Article, Blogging, Career and Job, careers, chart, comments, current-events, employment, facebook, friendfeed, hacking, jobs, Klout, knowledge management, law, law office, OneForty, social graph, social media, social media tools, social networking, tags, technology, the business of law, tips, tools, Tweeteffect, Twifluence, Twitalyzer, Twitoaster, twitter, Wordpress
No Comments

Unemployed Editor-in-Chief of Chicago-Kent Law Review Blames Book Author (ABA Journal)

Via abajournal.com

It seems the editor-in-chief of the Chicago-Kent Law Review, one David Freedman, was unable to find work. According to a piece in Above the Law sourced by the ABA Journal, interviewing, volunteering, applying for clerkships, and surfing the Internet had all failed to land him an entry-level legal job. So Mr. Freedman wrote to the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law, Attorney Mark Herrmann, who sent him a copy of his book. Freedman wrote back to complain that the book had gotten him excited about working, making him even more bummed out about being unemployed. Apparently Mr. Herrmann agreed to meet Mr. Freedman, gave him some job-search advice, and they all lived happily ever after. [Read the full piece].

Having interviewed law-school grads for the past few years (including just yesterday), I’ve found nearly all of them to be wildly unrealistic about what they are worth. I can only wonder who is more responsible for the current market cluster-fu@$: gullible students, arrogant practitioners, ambitious law school deans, or lying placement office personnel. It’s got to be some kind of toss up; but any way you look at it graduating law students have been screwed for decades.

All I can say to Mr. Freedman and the other graduating law students is “Welcome to the party, pal.” It’s a rough, tough profession and nobody will pay you for your charming company. If you cnanot produce, consider yourself a liability (hint: recent law grads are almost pathalogically incapable of producing anything but hot air). If you are a recent law school graduate in need of work feel free to call my office and prove me wrong.

28

01 2011


by practicehacker
posted in current-events, employment, funny, jobs, law, law office, legal marketplace, litigation, outside counsel, outsourcing, practice, practice management, the business of law, tips, work
1 Comment

$200K for Law Degree … taking all comers

Law Grad in ‘Severe Financial Distress’ Seeks $200K for Law Degree on eBay

http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/law_grad_in_severe_financial_distress_…

Posted via email from practice (redux)

Tags: , , ,

08

01 2011


by practicehacker
posted in ABA Jounral, Article, business, Career and Job, comments, community, competition, employment, law, legal marketplace, practice
No Comments

« Older Entries