Is that true? And, if so, what does it mean for the other seventy-five percent? What does it mean for people with a cumulative GPA under 3.0?

There’s no doubt about it — your law school GPA is important for your first job (or two) after law school graduation.

If you review job ads (which are a fantastic research tool), you’ll often see law firms and other employers demanding top academic credentials.

At times, employers will even specify a GPA cut-off in the application process. They will indicate that they will not consider any applicant whose GPA is not at least, for example, a 3.0. Or they will not consider any applicant who is not in the top ten percent or top twenty-five percent of their law school class.

Does Law School GPA Matter?

If you weren’t a top performer in law school, it’s helpful to consider why some employers care so much about cumulative GPA and grades.

• Many law firms care about the “prestige factor” itself. For better or for worse, name-brand law firms want to hire attorneys who’ve gone to name-brand law schools and who have other marks of prestige, including academic honors. It can be difficult — although not impossible — to break into those employers without an academic pedigree.
• GPA and academic performance are proxies for potential. Law students and junior attorneys usually have little on the job experience that employers can use to judge their ability to be good hires. When hiring, any employer must gauge an applicant’s potential to succeed in the workplace.

  New and Recent Graduates  

One of the best ways to predict future work performance is to examine past work performance.

However, if you are new to the profession, then you don’t have a track record the employer can use to predict your success.

In that case, the employer must find a substitute predictive indicator — academic performance. This is what I mean when I say that the law firm is using academic performance as a proxy for job performance.

  Experienced Attorneys  

Academic performance may be important during the first few years of your career, but as you gain experience as an attorney, employers care less and less about your grades and judge you on your work instead.

It’s unlikely you’ll be asked much about your class rank or grades after about four years of law practice.

If you’re an experienced attorney, then you have a track record of performance as a lawyer that an employer can use to predict your success.

Employers may still require you to produce a transcript proving you graduated from law school, but they’ll be more focused on what you’ve accomplished since graduation and what you bring to the table now.

Managing the Bad Grades Issue

So what do you do during that critical time when employers really do care about your grades? Some go to their law school career centers for help.

Unfortunately, some employers are very GPA-focused. Since law schools care a lot about their hiring statistics, some law school career centers seem to concentrate their efforts on helping their top students land employment even though, by definition, the majority of students are not “top” students.

Not every student can be valedictorian or salutatorian. Nor can every student be in the top ten percent or even top twenty-five percent of their law school class — but that doesn’t mean they won’t be great attorneys, and it shouldn’t mean that they can’t land a great job as a lawyer.

So what can the other seventy-five percent of graduates do to improve their odds in the job market that uses GPA, grades, and class rankings in the hiring process?

  Use Honest Self-Reflection to Understand Your Strengths and Weaknesses  

First of all, do not fudge, even a little bit, with your GPA. Your grades are what they are.

Instead, really think about why you earned the grades that you did and whether you think those grades actually reflect your ability to function as a lawyer. Let’s examine three of the reasons I most often encounter.

Notice that, inherent in the below exercises, is the need to distinguish between overall GPA (the traditional predictor) and two better predictors:

• Trends in your GPA
• Individual class grades.

You’ll likely still be expected to disclose your cumulative GPA and your law school transcript, but alongside that information, you can provide the better predictors and explain to your target employer why those are better predictors.

  Presenting Explanations to Employers  

Let’s take a look at possible explanations you can present, and how to present them to potential employers:

  Strength:   Prefer Hands-On Learning

Are you just not a book-learner? Do you prefer hands-on learning or on-the-job training?

Let’s face it, not everyone excels in the classroom. There are many different styles of learning and many different talents. Perhaps you found that you learned more and performed better in your clinical courses and internships than you did from cracking the books.

Presentation to Employers:

Focus on employers who value your style. When interviewing for jobs or writing your résumé, highlight your ability to learn quickly and think on your feet.

While the AmLaw 100 firms often place the most value on pedigree and grades, there are many others — including smaller law firms — that place more value on performing well on your feet than they do in performing well in the classroom.

In many small firms, junior lawyers are often working directly with clients, going to court, negotiating with opposing counsel, and conducting depositions right away. Those employers don’t care as much about researching and examination of esoteric areas of law because that’s not what they do.

  Strength:   Excelled in Some Topics

Did you perform poorly in certain topics, but excel in others? Few students perform well across the board.

Many students find they perform best in the areas of law that interest them the most, and perform less well in classes that don’t interest them.

Presentation to Employers:

Focus on your performance in courses that are relevant to the job and the employer. When at job interviews and on your resume, focus on the grades that are most predictive of your success in your chosen practice area and at your target employer.

Did you earn A’s in your property-related and business-related courses, but only a D in your international human rights course? Well, if your goal is to be a commercial real estate transactions lawyer, then your grade in international human rights law is arguably non-predictive of your ability to succeed in real estate law.

  Strength:   Improved Law School Performance after Slow Start

Did you get a slow start in law school? The transition from college to law school can be a rough one.

Because law school is only six semesters (in most cases), it can be mathematically impossible to graduate with a GPA above a 3.0 if your first semester or 1L grades were lower than you’d like.

Presentation to Employers:

Focus on your upward trend. If you started with a 2.3 GPA, but earned a 3.9 in your final year while taking more sophisticated courses, then that higher GPA may be a better reflection of your academic abilities and thus a better predictor for law firms to use.

When at on-campus interviews (OCIs) or other job interviews, as well as on your résumé, focus on that upward trend and your highest semester GPA.

Find Employers Who Value What You Offer

Identifying your strengths is critical so that you can emphasize them throughout the professional branding, networking, job search, and hiring process.

AND, for your job search to be most productive, you’ll also need to find employers who value those strengths. That way, you don’t set yourself for a long and frustrating job search chasing after employers who are unlikely to hire you. (I’m not saying not to apply for long-shot opportunities. You should. But you should keep your odds in perspective.)

The Bottom Line on Being Successful After Getting Low Grades in Low School

For new/recent law school grads, your academic performance will be reviewed before you are interviewed or hired for a job. To overcome not being at the top of your class, pick the more productive route by aligning your job search with employers who will be most likely to hire you. Then, focus your communications with them, written and verbal, on the most effective presentation of your law school history for those employers, as described above.

More About Attorney Job Search

• The Best Length for an Attorney’s Resume
• Launch Your Legal Career Via Management Consulting

The post Landing a Great Job After Graduating Law School With Low GPA appeared first on Job-Hunt.

If so, be assured that you’re not alone.

Scarcity of entry-level attorney roles is an endemic problem of the current legal hiring market.

Why is it so hard to land that first job out of law school? And, even more importantly, what can you do about it?

Law students and recent graduates may turn to contract attorney work, predominately e-discovery and document review, even though, unfortunately, legal employers place little value on that work.

There is another way…

Advantages of Work in Management Consulting

Now comes the good news: there are places to build technical and real world skills necessary to succeed as a lawyer outside traditional law firms — management consulting.

These management consulting firms:

• Are typically highly regarded, name-brand employers
• Hire entry-level employees throughout the year
• Provide phenomenal technical on-the-job training
• Build real world problem-solving, critical thinking, and analytical skills
• Offer cross-disciplinary exposure to wide variety of industries, business models, business problems, and legal practice areas
• Value your JD or other law degree, and yet
• Do not require admission to the bar

Management consulting firms usually offer a wide variety of experiences and options for new lawyers who are unsure what type of law they’d like to practice. They can take the time to explore before making the commitment that many law firms require.

As bonuses, those same employers also often value international and multicultural backgrounds — including language and cultural influences. They may offer domestic and international travel and can be the place where non-traditional or second-career law students are more successful than in the traditional hierarchy of many law firms.

Something to remember when considering working at a management consulting firm: you won’t be practicing law.

Benefits of Work in the Management Consulting World

By working in a management consulting firm, you will learn:

• How businesses (the bedrock clients of most law firms) actually work.
• How executives and managers think.
• How federal laws and other legal issues impact business.
• How different business models operate.
• How different departments or divisions within a business interact.
• How changes in economic, geopolitical, and technological landscapes affect business.
• How compliance, risk management, and other concepts play out.

This is, of course, just a brief listing, but I hope is sufficient to show why launching your legal career in a management consulting firm can make you a more attractive candidate for law firms (and corporate legal departments) and help you later compete in the job market as a lawyer.

How Management Consulting Firms Work

At the risk of oversimplifying, management consulting firms help other businesses run better.

They analyze a business’s problems, develop a plan to address those problems and move the business forward, and then help implement that solution.

Those businesses can be in any industry, from healthcare to entertainment to real estate management. They can be any size, from Global 100 / Fortune 500 companies to regional players.

The business models range from massive public companies traded in multiple stock markets to closely held, family-owned businesses. Some have sprawling, de-centralized networks of subsidiaries, joint ventures, and business alliances with vertical and lateral presences. Others are tightly-focused centralized singular entities.

Like any business, these organizations may be growing or shrinking. They can be any business with any problem — and that’s exactly why management consulting companies hire and train many types of professionals at different levels and skill sets, including entry-level lawyers and graduating law students.

How to Launch Your Legal Career in a Management Consulting Firm

Some of the biggest consulting companies are names you’re likely already familiar with: Deloitte, KPMG, PwC, EY, Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company, McKinsey, Booz Allen, Capgemini, and Accenture, to name a few.

Guess what? They hire attorneys.

The first step to working in a management consulting firm as an attorney or law school graduate is to find a firm that is a good fit for you.

You’ll want to do some research:

• Start by comparing the various rankings for consulting companies. Look at both overall rankings for best consulting firms, as well as rankings in industries that interest you, for example financial consulting.
• Next visit the website of each consulting firm. Most of the websites I’ve checked contain a tremendous amount of valuable information for a prospective employee: locations, news, and more. Look at their areas of expertise.
• If the website has a career development section, take a look. See the types of roles available (they sometimes have their own job boards, other times, you’ll need to use a consolidated job board).Don’t limit yourself to looking at jobs with “attorney” or “lawyer” in the job title; remember that in a management consulting firm you won’t be practicing law.
• Search Google using the firm’s name plus other terms like “reviews” or “revenue growing” for more information about the employer. See 50 Google Searches to Avoid Layoffs and Bad Employers to get a sense of what the rest of the world thinks about the firm.
• Head over to LinkedIn, and do an advanced search for employees with JDs.
  
  See what positions they hold within their consulting firms, and use their individual career journeys as an instruction guide their positions.
• When in LinkedIn, search for current and former employees of the firm. Check out their backgrounds, job titles, schools and education, years with the firm, and other details that interest you.If you are connected to anyone in the firm (current or past), you have an opportunity to reach out and ask for more information. Current employees may give you a referral for a job.
• Then, search Facebook for the firm’s name and, again, to find current and former employees. Learn more about the organization and, again, possibly to connect with an employee referral.
• When you identify someone who could be a good contact, reach out. An informational interview can be a good way to learn about the firm and others in the area as well as providing more contacts.

Once you’ve investigated, apply!

At a management consulting firm, you will have gained an invaluable inside look at companies — a perspective your former classmates who went directly to law firms will not have. That perspective and experience will not only open law firm doors, but other potential career paths.

The Bottom Line on Consulting Jobs for Lawyers

Starting your legal career by working for a management consulting firm can be a very good option that serves as a prelude to your career in a law firm or as a corporate counsel for a business. Or, once you launch your career in consulting, you may never look back — leveraging your legal education for a career in an interesting field which values that knowledge outside of a traditional law career.

More About Attorney Job Search

• The Best Length for an Attorney’s Resume
• Landing a Great Lawyer Job With Not-So-Great Grades
• How to Make Employee Referral Programs Work for You
• LinkedIn for Job Search
• Informational Interviews
• Using Google for Your Job Search

The post How to Launch Your Legal Career Via Management Consulting appeared first on Job-Hunt.

It’s the most common question I hear from lawyers needing help to write their resumes.

It’s a question that doesn’t just plague law students or junior attorneys; senior attorneys ask as well.

No matter whether you’re actively looking for a new job or volunteer role, in stealth job search mode, looking for boards or director positions or other leadership roles, or just thinking ahead about the direction you want to take so that you have a resume ready, the answer is always the same…

One Size Does Not Fit All

Wondering whether I’m about to endorse the one-page rule? I’m not.

The rule that “every resume must be one page” has an indefinite origin, but it has a definite effect: it forces candidates to shoehorn their content into a prescribed design.

The one-page rule makes no concessions for the candidate’s individual journey or career goals. It makes no concessions for the employer or reader’s individual needs.

The result is candidates feel forced to edit out some of their most interesting qualifications and experiences, as well as the context, scale, and impact of their work. Their contributions start to disappear, as does their vision, leadership or work style, and philosophy.

Rather than serve as narrative that allows the candidate to shine as an individual lawyer, the resume becomes a stale collection of mere names, dates, and places. The meaning is gone. The individuality is gone. The purpose is gone.

Neither side of the hiring table benefits from the one-page rule.

When their stories are gone, all candidates look pretty much the same. Attorneys are left frustrated that their resumes don’t reflect who they are, what they’ve accomplished, or what they offer.

Employers are left frustrated because there is precious little to base hiring decisions upon when faced with 200 — or 2000 — indistinguishable resumes.

The Only Rule You Need to Know

A colleague of mine, former executive recruiter Jared Redick, and I use the model that he has described as content > purpose > design.

Although we arrived at the paradigm separately, we came to it from our shared recognition that the candidate’s individual journey and the resume reader’s needs should be prioritized over an arbitrary and inflexible mantra that every resume must be one page and only one page.

The only resume writing rule you need to know is this:

Your resume should be a long as it takes (and no longer) to tell your story to your audience for your particular purpose.

For some, like the vast majority of law students, this means their resumes will in fact be one page. It’s the rare law student who needs two pages to tell her story.

In my 20 years of law and legal hiring, I can only think of a handful of law students who needed a two-page resume — and all but one were second-career or non-traditional law students.

That’s right: in 20 years, I’ve had one traditional law school student who we decided should have a two-page resume.

Although technically a traditional law student in that he went straight from high school to college to law school, he had highly unusual and substantive experiences that were directly relevant to his career goals and the non-traditional job to which he was applying.

On the other hand, I’ve frequently coached and written for high-level lawyers who have needed four, five or even six-page CVs: chief legal officers (CLOs), general counsels (GCs), chief compliance officers (CCOs), and rising stars at Global 500 or Fortune 500 companies; some law firm partners; heads of state agencies; and other executive-level attorneys.

These experienced individuals have long track records of accomplishment and sophisticated career histories.

Make the Resume a Compelling Read

The legal recruiters and hiring attorneys I’ve interviewed over the years have all said the same thing: if the resume or CV is a compelling read, then they will read it regardless of page length. Even recruiters and hiring attorneys who initially told me they want a one or two-page resume immediately backed off this “rule” when gently challenged.

As it turns out, when hiring professionals talk about a resume being “too long,” they often aren’t talking about the absolute page length of the resume.

What bothers them is that the resume is longer than it should be because it contains irrelevant information, is unfocused or unorganized, or otherwise doesn’t meet their needs.

The reader is forced to either to slog through it, or to put the document down and go onto the next candidate. You can guess which option most hiring folks choose.

I often note that attorneys are risk adverse and proof-oriented, both by nature and by training. Hiring professionals are often cynical, and with good reason, given more than 50% of resumes contain false or misleading information.

So hiring attorneys present a double challenge to candidates. When reviewing candidate resumes, they generally mistrust overblown or salesy language. They view hyperbole as an invitation to challenge the candidate.

All of which means to succeed in passing the resume screening —

You need to provide an engaging yet straightforward resume, filled with facts that you can defend without reservation in a job interview or other setting. Make it a powerful tool for your network to use when advocating on your behalf.

What legal resume readers are looking for — and respond to — is a resume which is:

• User-friendly, easily read by both humans and applicant tracking systems (ATS).
• Well-organized, with appropriate use of emphasis and organizational tools like bold, italics, and bullets, so that the reader can quickly find any particular bit of information she needs.
• Evidence-based, backing up any superlatives with proof, meeting the legal industry’s standard aesthetic preference for modern classic.
• A demonstration of your value (in marketing this might be called your unique value proposition) and where you’d fit into the organizational culture and structure.
• A demonstration of your understanding of the employer, its industry, its business model, and its customers or clients.
• Focused, whether explicitly or implicitly, on how you can help the employer and the problems you can help the employer solve.

In short, the structure and language of resume must reinforce your claims that you’re organized, detail-oriented, and understand the demands of your audience.

The Bottom Line

You can see what this means for the length of your resume. Nearly all law students can accomplish these goals within one-page resume. Many experienced attorneys can accomplish these goals in two or three pages.

However, for executive lawyers, content and purpose are almost always at odds with a one-page design. Compliance with an arbitrary one-page rule means that it’s nearly impossible to fulfill the purpose of the resume, including providing content that the reader needs in order to take positive action.

Focusing on the content and purpose of the resume means that it’s nearly impossible to comply with a one-page rule.

The key is to let the resume’s length flow naturally from its purpose, rather than use “rules” on page length as an absolute constraint.

More About Attorney Job Search

• Landing a Great Lawyer Job With Not-So-Great Grades
• Launch Your Legal Career Via Management Consulting
• Guide to Resumes and Cover Letters

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