Posted on November 8, 2011 |
Bruce Blackwell, founder and Managing Partner of Career Strategies, has been invited to be one of three prsenters at a Bar Association seminar on career planning for attorneys.
The seminar, entitled “Starting Early: Your Career Plan,” is being sponsored by the New York City Bar Association. According to a panel organizer, Carol Welch of Pace University School of Law and a member of the Career Transition committee for the Bar Association, “The goal of the program is to instruct the audience on the importance of creating, maintaining and revisiting a career plan from the earliest days of their legal careers.”
The program, to be held December 7, 2011 in New York City, is the first in series of three that the Bar Association will be presenting in 2011-12 on the theme of “Starting Early.” The other two sessions will be on “Business Development” (Dec. 19) and “Building Your Brand” (Jan. 19, 2012).
“I think it is wonderful that the Bar Association has recognized the need for younger attorneys to start planning their careers, building personal brands and learning the ins- and- outs of rainmaking,” said Blackwell, who has counseled several thousand attorneys on career transitions.
“So often,” he noted, “lawyers don’t really have career plans except to hope for the best and try to grow within their firms. Many of my clients have been totally at sea when they suddenly find themselves having to compete for jobs against other lawyers with similar credentials and experience. They have no ‘brand identity,’ no way to stand out from the pack.
“Even more shocking to many, especially when they become partners, is that they are no longer given work — they have to go out and generate work! They are often totally unprepared to be rainmakers. Young men and women don’t go to law school because they want to be salespersons … but succeeding in the legal profession means you also have to succeed in the sales profession.”
Career Strategies has traditionally focused on the career needs of attorneys in mid-life, but increasingly over the last few years has been assisting much younger lawyers on career development issues.
Bruce Blackwell, founder and Managing Partner of Career Strategies, has been invited to be one of three prsenters at a Bar Association seminar on career planning for attorneys.
The seminar, entitled “Starting Early: Your Career Plan,” is being sponsored by the New York City Bar Association. According to a panel organizer, Carol Welch of Pace University School of Law and a member of the Career Transition committee for the Bar Association, “The goal of the program is to instruct the audience on the importance of creating, maintaining and revisiting a career plan from the earliest days of their legal careers.”
The program, to be held December 7, 2011 in New York City, is the first in series of three that the Bar Association will be presenting in 2011-12 on the theme of “Starting Early.” The other two sessions will be on “Business Development” (Dec. 19) and “Building Your Brand” (Jan. 19, 2012).
“I think it is wonderful that the Bar Association has recognized the need for younger attorneys to start planning their careers, building personal brands and learning the ins- and- outs of rainmaking,” said Blackwell, who has counseled several thousand attorneys on career transitions.
“So often,” he noted, “lawyers don’t really have career plans except to hope for the best and try to grow within their firms. Many of my clients have been totally at sea when they suddenly find themselves having to compete for jobs against other lawyers with similar credentials and experience. They have no ‘brand identity,’ no way to stand out from the pack.
“Even more shocking to many, especially when they become partners, is that they are no longer given work — they have to go out and generate work! They are often totally unprepared to be rainmakers. Young men and women don’t go to law school because they want to be salespersons … but succeeding in the legal profession means you also have to succeed in the sales profession.”
Career Strategies has traditionally focused on the career needs of attorneys in mid-life, but increasingly over the last few years has been assisting much younger lawyers on career development issues.
Bruce Blackwell, founder and Managing Partner of Career Strategies, has been invited to be one of three prsenters at a Bar Association seminar on career planning for attorneys.The seminar, entitled “Starting Early: Your Career Plan,” is being sponsored by the New York City Bar Association. According to a panel organizer, Carol Welch of Pace University School of Law and a member of the Career Transition committee for the Bar Association, “The goal of the program is to instruct the audience on the importance of creating, maintaining and revisiting a career plan from the earliest days of their legal careers.”The program, to be held December 7, 2011 in New York City, is the first in series of three that the Bar Association will be presenting in 2011-12 on the theme of “Starting Early.” The other two sessions will be on “Business Development” (Dec. 19) and “Building Your Brand” (Jan. 19, 2012).“I think it is wonderful that the Bar Association has recognized the need for younger attorneys to start planning their careers, building personal brands and learning the ins- and- outs of rainmaking,” said Blackwell, who has counseled several thousand attorneys on career transitions.“So often,” he noted, “lawyers don’t really have career plans except to hope for the best and try to grow within their firms. Many of my clients have been totally at sea when they suddenly find themselves having to compete for jobs against other lawyers with similar credentials and experience. They have no ‘brand identity,’ no way to stand out from the pack.“Even more shocking to many, especially when they become partners, is that they are no longer given work — they have to go out and generate work! They are often totally unprepared to be rainmakers. Young men and women don’t go to law school because they want to be salespersons … but succeeding in the legal profession means you also have to succeed in the sales profession.”Career Strategies has traditionally focused on the career needs of attorneys in mid-life, but increasingly over the last few years has been assisting much younger lawyers on career development issues.
Posted on May 19, 2011 |
We have studied the job market, career change, and job search over the years, and observed certain fundamentals about the process — “truisms” for developing and mounting a successful job search. We’ve formalized these observations into eleven Basic Tenets. Some of these points are simple, some are obvious, some need to be reflected upon … but if applied, each will help you achieve job search and career success.
Over the next week we are going to be adding additional tenets.
BASIC TENETS
1. Knowledge Is Power – The more you know about the search process, about self-marketing, and about prospective employers, the more efficient and productive the campaign you can mount. The information you need in order to win is out there … all you have to do is go after it and use it.
2. You Have Control – You don’t need to feel powerless over your career or job search. You can take control of the process and guide your own destiny…if you choose to.
3. Look For Unfulfilled Wants And Needs – You can create a job where none exists if you understand a targeted employer’s wants and needs … even if the employer isn’t aware of them!
4. All Change Creates Opportunity – Change is constant, and affects every organization everyday. Whenever a circumstance changes — the competitive environment, a political or regulatory change, a technological development, a market shift — that change must be addressed. Watch for changes in a company or industry, identify the opportunities those changes may create, and use them to your advantage.
5. Pitch The Benefits – Focus on what you can do for your next employer, and on how you can help them achieve their goals and objectives. People don’t buy facts, they buy benefits. Keep this in mind always.
6. Picture Your Desired Outcome – A positive attitude and envisioning success helps bring about success. If you think like a loser, you’ll be a loser. You must picture yourself being successful in something as you begin that process, then go for it!
7. Don’t React. Act! – Never wait for a company to call you. Call them! You can’t just send out a resume and expect a call. And you can’t simply react to opportunities that are presented to you … you must be pro-active and make opportunities happen.
8. Persevere – It takes time, patience and continued effort to be successful in a job search, or in any endeavor. Quitters don’t win … and winners don’t quit. Develop a plan, work the plan, and stay with it.
9. It Takes Just As Much Effort to Get a Job You Don’t Like As It Does to Get One You Do Like – You will spend most of your waking hours at work, and you have one life to live. Don’t waste it! Go for what you really want.
10. The Best Man Doesn’t Always Win — You’re competing against people who are every bit as qualified for the job as you, maybe even more so. The key to beating the competition is truly understanding the employer’s needs, effectively communicating your relevant strengths, and demonstrating how you, more than anyone else, can fulfill the mission of that job. The best man doesn’t always win; the man who is best prepared wins.
11. Don’t Assume That Just Because There Are No Vacancies, There Are No Jobs – If you learn about an organization, identify its unfulfilled wants and needs, show the benefits you can bring to it, persist in your efforts and picture yourself succeeding, you can literally create a job where none existed.
These are 11 simple concepts that work. They’ll give you control over your job search and enable you to achieve things you never before thought possible.
—- Bruce Blackwell
Posted on April 11, 2011 |
If you are an attorney looking for an in-house position, the competition is ferocious. It always has been. The quality of the people who are competing for in-house jobs is also extremely high.
In order to prevail over the competition, you need to be doing several things. Here is a quick check list of questions to ask yourself about your job search campaign.
1) Have you identified your Unique Selling Proposition? What makes you a better candidate than someone with like kind and quality of experience? If you do not have a clear “brand strategy,” your search will take much longer. You will miss out on interviews for jobs you could have won.
2) Do you have a well-defined Marketing Plan? Have you identified your target market, the people who can hire you, the companies where you best fit, and the information sources you need to stay current about changes affecting your potential employers? Have you established a specific methodology for your campaign? If you have not, you are trusting to luck.
3) Are you being creative in your approach to the job market? If you are merely posting your resume on job boards, responding to advertised positions on the internet, talking with recruiters and doing some networking, you are taking necessary steps. But, you are also doing what everyone else is doing! Even worse, you are missing out on literally 80% of the available positions, since that is the percentage of jobs filled each year that are not posted on the internet or listed with recruiters.
4) Do you have a strategy for reaching the Hidden Job Market? Since most of the available positions are not advertised or listed with recruiters, you will need more than old-fashioned networking to reach into this “hidden” market. There are many job search tools available if you look for them and know how to use them. (Part 1 of our “Innovative vs. Traditional Job Search webinar” lists 8-10 lead sources. How many can you name?) Knowledge is power. How knowledgeable are you about job search?
5) Does your resume show your accomplishments, or simply your practice areas? Your competitors have had essentially the same duties and experiences that you have had. What makes you more attractive than they are? If your resume isn’t showing results you have produced, you are under-representing yourself.
6) Do you have a compelling telephone introduction when calling the people who can hire you? If your plan for calling the hiring executives is simply to ask if they have seen your resume and would they like to meet you, your chances of arranging an interview are minimal.
7) Do you have a plan for reaching companies that are passively seeking candidates? Many organizations are thinking about adding to staff or replacing an out-of-favor attorney, but haven’t pulled the trigger yet on that process. Reaching organizations when new jobs are in the formative stage is a great way to pre-empt your competitors.
If you have (honestly) answered “yes” to these seven questions, then we applaud you and you probably don’t need us. But if you have answered “no” to even one or two of these questions, then you are likely to be spending a lot longer on your job search than you need to or want to.
We have guided about 2,000 senior lawyers through successful job search campaigns. Perhaps we can do the same for you.
One day not long ago I spoke with the General Counsels of six publicly held companies with capitalizations of $500 million to $1.5 billion. They each were looking to be GCs somewhere else.
These were very talented attorneys. Each had experience in compliance, SEC rules and corporate governance. They each had managed outside counsel in complex nationwide litigation. They each were experienced in negotiating domestic and international transactions, including licensing deals. They each had administrative management roles beyond just the legal department … they were integral members of their companies’ senior management teams.
These were six very smart and successful General Counsels, each of whom felt they were special and uniquely credentialed.
But the reality is that each one was the same as the other. Competitively, they were at parity. There was no way an employer could tell the difference between them. None of these six people had a clear “brand strategy” to differential themselves from their competitors.
Read More…
The law can be a wonderful profession, and indeed it is for many people. But it can also be draining. After doing something for 10 or 15 years, some people are simply ready for a change. Nowhere is it written that you need to stay with one career your entire life.
My colleague, Dr. Edward Speyer, and I have interviewed more than 20,000 attorneys and counseled more than 2,000 lawyers on re-careering and job search issues. Based on our nearly 19 years of experience, we have compiled The Top 10 Reasons for Wanting to Leave the Law. Last week we covered the lesser five reasons — now here are the biggies!
Read More…
Posted on |
10. Lack of appreciation — if you win, you were supposed to, so you don’t get thanked. If you lose, it was because you did something wrong. If you are looking for a profession where you can receive positive reinforcement and gratitude for your hard work, law is not the one..
9. Loneliness/Isolation — whether working for a large firm or as a solo, most of the work is done alone, behind closed doors. Moreover, a lawyer is always an outsider and never really a member of a team working together and sharing ideas to solve a problem.
8. Lack of control over work process and outcome — a client once told us that the legal profession is
the only one where you can do everything right and still lose. Unreasonable deadlines and unreasonable
clients, not to mention unreasonable partners and judges, are also problems.
Read More…
Posted on May 7, 2010 |
We are pleased to announce that attorney Holly Gilmore Moetell has joined our consulting team. She comes to us after having had a career in law firms and as an in-house counsel. Holly began her career as an Associate in the Washington, D.C. law offices of Shaw Pittman, where she represented real estate developers and lenders. After five years, she left to join
Hughes, Hubbard & Reed, where she handled real estate issues and Resolution Trust Corporation matters. Later in her career, she was an Assistant General Counsel at Clark Enterprises, Inc., a large real estate development company. As an GC, she supervised outside counsel with respect to partnerships, loans, leases and other commercial transactions. Holly has relocated from Washington, D.C. to New York with her husband, a tax partner at a national law firm. In addition to her work here, she is the co-founder and Vice President of a non-profit organization, the Women in Real Estate Foundation. Holly has a B.A. in Economics, with Distinction, from the University of Virginia, where she was a Jefferson Scholar. She is also a graduate ofHarvard Law School. Holly’s primary role will be will be as a spearhead for our Recruiting and Outplacement functions. She will also be developing our relationships in the Philadelphia / metro Washington, D.C. markets, and will providing career counseling to our clients nationwide.
So, you’ve done the hard part already. You worked your tail off through law school, managed to pass the bar and are ready for the next step: applying for as many attorney jobs as you can find. But is there more to life after a law degree than just being a lawyer? What if you’ve recently discovered that maybe you’re not interested in using your law degree to actually land one of the attorney jobs you’ve been applying for? What then?
To start, don’t freak out. A lot of people who have law degrees have made an attorney career change, and you can, too! If you spend enough time working on your career planning goals, almost anything is possible. Below are three alternatives to the standard attorney jobs:
1. Become a consultant. In this economy, lots of businesses are looking for ways to save cash wherever they can. For some, this translates to outsourcing their staff attorney positions to freelance consultants. As a legal consultant, you can use your law degree to give great advice, without having to step foot in a courtroom.
2. Take up freelance writing. You know all of those briefs you wrote in law school? It could be time to put your writing skills to the test and apply for some freelance writing work. There are a variety of websites online that you can use to get started, and you’ll be able to work on your own schedule (and from the comfort of your own home…in your pajamas!). This kind of career planning move could be just what you’re looking for, and is quite lucrative over time.
3. Change your legal specialty. If you haven’t been impressed with the attorney jobs from legal placement services that you’ve some across so far, maybe you should broaden your search to include attorney jobs that are outside of your specialty. Sometimes, a little change is all you need!
For a lawyer, taking the leap and making a career change can be a scary proposition. If you stop practicing law, are you throwing away all of your years of experience (and hard work!) and all of that training in law school? Is it ludicrous for an attorney to want to make a career change? The answer to both questions is not necessarily. There are all kinds of ways that you can leverage your education and work experience to land a job that is fulfilling and pays the bills. Here are a few steps on how to navigate such a career move:
1. Talk to employers about your overall experience. Did you write a compelling, persuasive brief? Did you negotiate a big deal? Did you manage a team of paralegals or other attorneys? Did you use your creative problem solving skills to produce results for your clients? Lawyers tend to think in terms of their practice areas. This kind of thinking short-sells their abilities. Your knowledge of your practice area can be obtained through studying. Your abilities to manage projects, supervise others, write effectively, analyze issues and negotiate deals are inherent talents upon which you can base a career change.
2. Consider becoming a consultant. Becoming a consultant is one of the easier way of making a career change. You can even start out on a freelance or ad hoc basis to gain some non-lawyer experience, all while keeping your regular job. This is a great way to test the waters and see what kind of positions are out there. It is also a way for potential employers to see the value you can bring to them. A recent “graduate” of our program wanted to transition into the computer industry. He offered to take on some non-legal projects for a technology company, and did the work on nights and weekends. They were so pleased with the results that they hired him full-time as Director of Special Projects. FYI — set your fees high – companies are much more willing to pay contractors a higher per-hour rate than hire somebody full time, so you should take advantage.
3. Expand your practice areas. Sometimes making a career change is more about getting away from a particular segment of law. One of our clients, a solo with a general practice, was very interested in financial planning. He took some courses and began studying for his CFP (Certified Financial Planner) designation. After a time, he was able to add financial planning to his practice. This new area involves making presentations before investors, typically in small groups, and this satisfied our client’s love of public speaking. Eventually, he was doing more financial planning for clients than he was lawyering! Expanding your practice area involves the excitement of learning new disciplines, and can also be a great additional revenue stream!
With the economy being what it is these days, more and more lawyers and law firms are feeling the pinch. Business in many segments has simply dried up. This may mean seeking a new position or career somewhere else, or it may mean you’ll need to pick up some additional income. Here are three of the easier ways to accomplish this:
1. Freelance legal work. If you’ve just been laid off from your big firm, or if you have a lot of extra time on your hands, and you do not want to make an actual career change, try doing freelance legal work. You can get in touch with the contract legal staffing or legal temp agencies and get on the list for document review or other short term assignments. You can also contact law firms that do not provide services in your practice area and work out a split for business that they can refer to you. You can also approach law firms to take on some of their over flow work.
2. Freelance writing. There are all kinds of journals, papers and magazines that could use a fresh legal perspective – your legal knowledge could earn you money, without having to do any actual legal work. Write up some query letters and send them off to as many editors as you can find. Publications like Writers Digest and Editor & Publisher will have names of companies. You can also do a Google search for publications. Lawyers doing freelance writing work can command a high per-word fee.
3. Consulting work. This is one of the easiest moves for a lawyer to make. There are lots of businesses, both large and small, that are in need of legal consultants. This work can often be rewarding, and is a fantastic way to break up the monotony of day-to-day legal work. As an added bonus, contracted consultants usually are able to charge significantly more per hour than their salaried counterparts. The hardest part of making this kind of career change is finding the actual consulting gigs, so having above average networking skills are important.
