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Law

Industry Overview

"Pursuant to its mission as a purveyor of employment-related information, and subject to the disclaimers set forth herein, WetFeet.com (hereafter, the COMPANY) will describe the current state of the legal profession to you (hereafter, the JOB SEEKER). . . ."

We've all seen this type of language, seemingly related only tenuously to English; we all know that it's the lawyers who speak it. But lawyers do more than that.

Law is the means by which society regulates its own behavior. The intent of law is to create rules of conduct that are widely understood and respected and to create normalized processes for adjudicating disputes. Because law is considered to be a technical profession not easily comprehended by the untrained, individuals and companies hire professionals-lawyers-to help them comprehend it and conduct the procedures it defines.

Although television dramas might have you believe that you only need good looks and a fashionable wardrobe to succeed in the field, in reality, completing three years of law school and passing a tough bar exam barely prepares you for the practice of law.

Most of what lawyers do is paperwork. They research legal precedents, spending hours or months in law libraries or with online databases. They prepare contracts, briefs, and other documents, assembling boilerplate paragraphs or writing text from scratch. They plan and conduct depositions, which in complicated cases can generate thousands of pages of testimony, all of which has to be read, analyzed, and refined into usable information. Sometimes, especially if they are litigation specialists, lawyers actually argue a case before a judge or jury.

Many lawyers work for big corporate law firms or as in-house attorneys in corporations, while others hang out their own shingles and represent individuals or small companies in divorces, bankruptcies, estate planning, and the like. Other lawyers work for the government, in various agencies or as district attorneys or public defenders. Still others work for advocacy groups such as the ACLU or the NAACP. There are even people who, although technically lawyers because they've gone to law school and passed the bar exam, do not practice law, working instead in business, banking, academia, or politics. There are also many high-caliber support people, known as paralegals, who do everything from word processing to legal research.

Although popular wisdom has it that there are too many lawyers, the legal industry is a growing one; there are probably too few lawyers right now to handle the increasingly complex transactions of corporate America.

Decentralization
Despite tough economic times, decentralization of major firms means that attorneys can choose from a greater variety of geographic locations when conducting their job search. It used to be that major firms limited themselves to offices in legal hubs like New York, Washington, D.C., and Chicago. While these remain prominent locations, other hotspots are emerging. For example, many large firms have set up satellite offices in California, Texas, and Virginia, to capitalize on business from the tech sector, while some regional firms have risen to national prominence by expanding outward from their local bases of operation.

Globalization
Another major trend is globalization. Increasingly, bigger firms are setting up offices in foreign countries and merging with local firms to handle legal aspects of international trade and other issues. This growth has created jobs for lawyers with expertise in international relations and cross-border transactions, and it bodes well for the future as the legal industry continues to integrate with the global economy.

Mergers & Acquisitions
Bridging the diminishing gap between the spheres of law and business is the trend toward merging and acquiring. Consensual takeovers are occurring in everything from technology to health care, inviting a host of legal uncertainties. Counsel is involved in all facets of the transactions, including tax issues, liability concerns, and matters of intellectual property.

Like doctors, lawyers have many specialties. Two main categories of private-sector lawyers are transactional (corporate) lawyers and litigators. Transactional lawyers deal with a wide range of business issues: corporate financing, contracts, acquisitions, bankruptcy, and others. The goal of this work is to get deals done and avoid future legal problems. Transaction-law centers include New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Litigators, in contrast, deal with legal problems after they occur. Litigators handle issues that could land their clients in court: breaches of contract, securities-law problems, rogue trading, class-action suits, antitrust actions, employment-related problems, white-collar crime, and the like. They are found in every city, but especially in New York and Washington, D.C. Other specialties include: intellectual property, tax, real estate, labor and employment, environmental, personal injury, and family law, to name a few.

So how do you decide what kind of law you want to practice? And, more important, how do you find the firm that's right for you? First of all, keep in mind that you don't actually have to join a firm if you want to practice law. Many recent law graduates take on clerkships or government positions, as well as jobs as in-house counsels for a variety of companies and non-profits. However, the most coveted positions for new lawyers are at large private firms with 100 or more lawyers. The high salaries ($125,000 a year plus bonuses for most new associates), the chance to work on high-profile cases, the prestige that comes with jobs at these firms, and the pervasiveness of their on-campus recruiting make them extremely attractive. Many experienced lawyers are also drawn to large firms because they tend to have more diverse practices, offering greater job security and opportunities for professional development.

Now, before you get too excited about working at a large firm, consider a few drawbacks. For one thing, you'll work hard for that big salary. Many large firms require a minimum of 2,000 billable hours annually. That could mean a ten- to 14-hour day for you, depending on your workload. And all those exciting cases you've heard about won't free you from what may be years of tedious grunt work as you climb your way up the ladder. Then there are the clients to consider. Large law firms are essentially married to Corporate America, for better or for worse. These companies can include everything from baby-food manufacturers to Big Tobacco, and lawyers are expected to defend both with equal zest, regardless of personal ethics.

Assuming all that doesn't scare you-if you struggled through three years of law school, we assume it doesn't-you can expect a decent job outlook in the near term. Since the legal industry tends to lag behind the economy, most firms have so far avoided heavy layoffs. Overall, the economic slowdown has been hardest for firms catering to high-tech and emerging growth companies, along with top-heavy firms focusing on initial public offerings, M&A;, and private equity. Those specializing in bankruptcy, intellectual property, and international transactions, and those catering to hot industries like biotech, have increased their caseloads.

Big-City Power Firms
There are about 150 big-city power firms in the country. Typically, these firms offer clients a full range of services or nationally recognized expertise in a specific area. They have anywhere from 150 to 2,000-plus attorneys on staff, often additional offices in other cities and countries, and a list of blue-chip clients that may spend millions of dollars on their services in a typical year. These firms typically pay the highest salaries and have highly competitive hiring processes that focus on top-ranked law schools around the country. They also require their associates to work long, hard hours and show exceptional brilliance in order to move up the partner track. Some have a single partnership level, whose members share in the firm's equity. Others have two or three levels of partnership, with only the top one conferring equity. A number of these firms have had a poor record on ethnic and gender diversity, though that seems to be changing, albeit at a glacial rate. Although turnover is quite high, even people who leave enjoy the luster of a well-known firm on their resume. These firms are located in the major legal centers. A few of the well-known names include Cravath, Swaine & Moore; Davis Polk & Wardwell; Sullivan & Cromwell; and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York; Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe; Morrison & Foerster; and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in San Francisco and Silicon Valley; and Baker & McKenzie; Mayer, Brown, & Platt; Sidley & Austin; and Katten Muchin Zavis Rosenman in Chicago.

Regional and Specialized Firms
In addition to the big-city power firms, there are a number of middle-tier firms that employ 80 to 100 attorneys each and provide legal services to local businesses and organizations: restaurants, hospitals, schools, insurance companies, department stores, mom-and-pop stores, startups, and public agencies. In some cases, these firms offer a relatively complete menu of services; in other cases, they may specialize in a certain type of client or practice (for example, intellectual property, employment, health, or environmental law). Often they include partners who left a big- city firm en masse, taking some clients with them. Regional firms offer slightly less pay than the big-city firms, but they typically grant equity partnerships after eight or ten years. They also give associates a lot more client contact, since the clients are smaller companies, not huge corporations. Examples of regional players include Hanson, Bridgett, Marcus, Vlahos & Rudy in San Francisco; Farris, Mathews, Branan & Hellen in Memphis; Christiansen, Miller, Fink, Jacobs, Glaser, Weil & Shapiro in Los Angeles; and Glenn Rasmussen & Fogarty in Tampa.

Corporate In-House Counsel
The same companies that hire law firms usually also have their own cadres of in-house lawyers, which advise them on day-to-day business activities. Typically, but not always, companies prefer to hire transactional attorneys with three or more years of specialized experience in, for example, securities law or contracts. The salaries here are usually fairly competitive, but the hours are far better. One other key difference is that there's only one client. So, if you're working for a company like General Motors, you might be working on a number of different types of issues (labor negotiations, hiring issues, contracts, a class-action lawsuit by an investor group), but they will all relate to General Motors.

Government Law
Federal, state, and local governments employ thousands of lawyers. One major employer is the Department of Justice, which hires lawyers to prosecute cases on behalf of the federal government.

The most common entry point for those seeking to become government attorneys is a job as an assistant U.S. attorney (AUSA). These positions are appointments; in many cases, to get one you must have connections as well as relevant legal experience. Virtually every other cabinet-level agency also hires legions of lawyers. Opportunities also exist within the regulatory agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodities Futures Exchange Commission-and in the military, in the Judge Advocate General Corps.

A slight variation on government work is a judicial clerkship. Each year judges hire a number of top graduating law students as law clerks. These clerkships, while not high-paying, provide aspiring attorneys with the opportunity to see the judicial process firsthand and to make valuable contacts. The main attractions of working in government law are job security, great benefits, and decent hours: You're not constantly worried about getting in as many billable hours as possible.

Public Defenders and Legal Aid
Public defenders are appointed by the court to defend those who don't have their own lawyers. Federal defenders are located in most major cities; the most important office is in Washington, D.C., but the offices in San Francisco and New York are also widely respected. In addition, states and counties provide publicly funded defense lawyers for those charged in nonfederal cases. Although the salaries for these positions are lower than those of most private-sector lawyers' jobs, they are often not as low as people think. The jobs are, however, extremely difficult to get due to the competition for them. The legal-aid lawyer provides assistance to the indigent in civil cases, as the public defender does in criminal cases. Funded primarily by the federal Legal Services Corporation and some states, salaries are quite low, but the work can be both frustrating and immensely satisfying.

Public Interest

Among the most prestigious jobs for lawyers are positions with impact-litigation advocacy organizations. These include the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Center for Youth Law, NOW, NARAL, the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, MALDEF, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the Environmental Defense Fund. Competition for these positions is fierce, and the pay is relatively low-with the exception of positions at environmental law organizations, which tend to be better funded. The advantage of these positions is that they're both intellectually stimulating and socially meaningful. The work usually consists of a lot of brief writing and advocacy, and in some cases there is a great deal of client contact, too.

Expect stiff competition for jobs, since the number of law school graduates remains well above the number of actual jobs-and the situation is worse than usual in the current economy, which sees law firms cutting back on hiring and even laying off attorneys in some cases. Lawyers wishing to set up private practice will likely do better in smaller towns, free from the competition and pressure of the big-name firms. Salaried positions will always be available in the larger firms and in in-house corporate legal departments, but increasingly law grads are using their training to secure positions in tangentially related fields such as real estate and investment banking. Legal temp firms offer an alternative to employment in an established law firm and allow lawyers to garner experience and knowledge in the field while looking for a permanent position

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