Coaching

If you look online, you would come across countless articles on the topic of legal job search. Some are pretty helpful, while others . . . not so much.

Advice is great, but without actually practicing how to effectively deploy it real-time during your interviews, its value is very limited. Knowing all 1,431 possible interview questions is fantastic, but unless you know how to deliver (in substance and form) a thoughtful answer to each of them, reading and even memorizing the questions are fruitless per se.

To judge whether your practice is leading to better interview answers, you need a qualified person with extensive experience on the hiring side to give you a meaningful feedback. Practicing in front of a mirror can accomplish only so much. Only the adjustments made to your answers from this feedback process would incrementally improve your interviewing skills.

You also need to "flesh out" each piece of advice. Too many purported experts do not explain adequately how you are supposed to incorporate their advice effectively in your interviews. A good coach would go over that with you in great detail.

You know instinctively that students with mediocre grades at a second-tier law school must approach the job search process differently than someone who is on the Harvard Law Review. Similarly, it’s common sense that introverts must prepare differently than extroverts, and a 40 year-old part-time night student must approach the search differently than the typical law students. So on and so on. One size fits all is insufficient, and that’s why online resources by themselves are not nearly enough.

We will work with you to craft a plan that best leverages your background, academic achievements, work and volunteer experiences, and your personality, all while mitigating or deemphasizing any weaknesses to the maximum possible extent.

Contrary to what you might believe or have heard, interviewing is a learned skill that anyone can always improve on with proper guidance and dedicated effort.

While everyone starts with varying baselines, you can catch up to, or close the gap from, other candidates through hard work and smart preparation.

By making intelligent, incremental adjustments based on each successive interview (mock or real), you would improve quickly and significantly. An experienced coach makes such adjustments possible with perceptive and practical feedback.

By the time you interview in the Fall of your 2L year, much of your academic credentials have been set in stone. Your undergraduate school and GPA, prior work experience, your law school, first-year grades, law review and moot court selection, etc. Basically, the only thing you can really change that truly matters is your interviewing ability.

We find that many of the advice and information on the Internet on the topic of legal job search are unfortunately outdated, too generalized (i.e., not law specific), overly politically correct, unduly encouraging, misleading and/or impractical.

We pride ourselves on only providing the most pragmatic, realistic and results-driven advice and instructions to our clients. We are concerned only with helping you achieve the job results you desire, and we are accountable only to our clients. We promise to be straight with you at all times and express our honest opinion. We are not here to waste your time or give you unrealistic expectations; we strive to give you information to make your own informed decisions about your career.

In another words, no non-sense. Ever.

It has been shown time and time again across many fields and contexts that one-on-one mentorship and coaching are extremely effective in improving the likelihood of obtaining the desired outcome, whatever that may be.

In fact, the studies show that one-on-one mentorship is often the best way to enhance the mentee’s performance.

The focused attention, extensive knowledge base, perceptive feedback, and customized strategy are some things that a good coach offers.

One of the most valuable things we would do for our clients is to actually demonstrate with great specificity what we preach. In other words, showing you how exactly to correctly carry out or implement our advice. Without this, any advice or information would be pretty much useless.

We will also encourage you to maintain your focus, excitement and enthusiasm for the legal job search process. In the inevitable peaks and valleys of legal job search, some times you just need someone with more experience to hold you accountable, help you maintain a positive outlook, and be your cheerleader.

Think of everything that a good sport coach does, and why even the most naturally- gifted athlete knows that s/he needs a coach to achieve the optimal performance.

Everything that you learn in connection with a legal job search will prove to be extremely valuable not just now, but also down the road when you apply for future positions. It’s like riding a bike — you will never forget.

If you invest your time and effort now, you will continue to reap dividends for the rest of your professional career, in law or otherwise. Over and over. It's worth making an investment now.

Most laypersons, including law students, do not seem to fully realize that the legal job search process is quite different from job search in other fields.

Although many of the fundamental principles for regular job search apply to the legal job search, you must know the specific distinctions if you want to do your best. Don’t assume that they are the same, because they clearly aren't.

This is where most of the online resources seem to fail miserably. Be wary of this.

There is a lot of information available online concerning how to best approach your legal job search. As with many things on the Internet, it is often impossible to quickly sift through all the available information to determine the relative quality and veracity of each. Nevertheless, if you spend enough time, you will eventually come up with good information from relatively trustworthy sources.

However, we can help you cut through this frustrating exercise and quickly guide you to the best information available on legal job search. You are a busy law student — why waste hours looking for information on the Internet from largely dubious sources?

Also, we can also offer our thoughts on the many unsolicited and sometimes unwelcome advice you will surely get from family and friends.

To achieve the best outcome possible for yourself, you should learn from an experienced coach a slew of proven tactics and techniques relating to each aspect (including the mental aspect) of the legal job search process, and learn and practice sufficiently to properly apply such techniques real-time, under pressure, during interviews. That requires guided and disciplined practice to make them feel second nature.

Learning how to do well in legal job search is not that hard. But just like a DIY renovation project, by the time you have learned from your mistakes and finally become pretty good at it, your project is already finished and, thanks to your inexperience in the beginning, looks way worse than if you had simply hired a professional help from the outset Yeah, kinda like that.

No matter how much you have read, or talked to someone, about the legal job search process, it is impossible not to have questions or doubts about some specific aspects of the process pop up in your head from time to time, often randomly. In particular, doubts creep in at the worst possible times . . . when you haven't had much success (yet).

Now, if you don’t have a friend or family member with adequate knowledge of this subject matter, you might have to let those concerns linger or, worse, end up getting a very bad advice. An experienced coach can quickly address your “Am I being crazy” moments, so that you can regain your confidence in time for the next interview. There are no stupid or obvious questions.

You can also bounce some of your ideas off of a coach, and get his or her reaction and input.

When necessary, we would not be shy about giving you a reality check if we feel that it is in your best interest.

We will review your cover letter and resume to provide our detailed assessment of these documents and any revisions that we recommend with respect to content, formatting/style, length, presentation, etc. We will advise you on how to customize these documents to fit a particular situation, if necessary. Be forewarned that resume and cover letter used in legal job search can be quite different in some respects from those typically used by job applicants in other fields.

For most law students and recent graduates, this is undoubtedly the most crucial part of the interview preparation. For those who do not know, “mock interview” basically is a fancy way of saying a practice interview.

To be effective, mock interviews must be a very realistic representation of the typical law firm interviews. Attention to detail is paramount when it comes to recreating the tension and pressure of actual interviews. Mock interviews would be conducted by a video call for that reason (unless you request otherwise).

First, we would quickly assess your attire for appropriateness. Before the interview, you would be given a realistic research assignment beforehand about a fictional firm and attorneys that you will be “interviewing” with that day.

These interviews would be made as realistic as possible (including some designed surprises), and would usually take about the same amount of time as the real ones.

After that, we will provide you with our comprehensive assessment and advice for improvement. You will also have an opportunity to record these interview sessions for future reference.

Depending on the plan you select, you can opt to do multiple rounds of mock interviews to perfect your presentation incrementally each time. Multiple rounds are highly recommended.

You would have an extended opportunity to discuss with us any questions that you have regarding the legal job search process. Nothing is too dumb or too insignificant.

We can also delve into other related topics such as a long-term career development strategy, doing better in law school, knowing the etiquettes expected out of summer associates, how to secure a permanent associate offer after the summer, etc. So, ask us pretty much anything.

You should definitely take advantage of those resources, particularly your school's career placement office. The career placement offices have experience helping thousands of law students find, and interview for, job opportunities. They are staffed with career professionals (many of whom are licensed attorneys) who are dedicated to finding employment for their law students.

It should be kept in mind, however, that the quality and depth of relevant experience of the career placement office staff will vary greatly from school to school. Moreover, the sincere desire of the staff to proactively help you find a job also greatly varies from school to school.

You have to ask who has real-life experience reviewing cover letters or resumes on behalf of a firm hiring committee, or conducting actual interviews for a law firm recruiting committee. We have been told by law students that the advice they had received was often just conventional wisdom, or overly simplistic or generalized.

While mock interviews sponsored by the career placement office are typically conducted by practicing law attorneys who have some connections to the law school, ultimately they are volunteers. Attorneys who serve on the recruiting or hiring committee rarely participate in this type of mock interviews. Even though these volunteers usually have at least some experience interviewing law students and lateral candidates, they typically have no experience looking at things from the perspective of the recruiting committees. This makes an enormous difference.

Finally, because of the time constraints, these volunteer events consist of a brief mock interview and a very quickly and informal feedback. There is no further opportunity to incorporate the suggestions in another mock interview session, and get another critique on the implementation of the same.

Having said all this, we recommend that you take advantage of what your career placement office offers. Those folks are professionals who are charged with a mission to help you find a job.

That’s for you to decide, but keep in mind that you have spent:

• the last 3 years of your life;
• upwards of $200,000 in tuition, fees and expenses; and
• perhaps $120,000 in opportunity costs.

Comparing our fees to the investment you have made thus far (and will make in the future) would put everything in proper perspective, particularly when you consider that the legal job search is easily the most critical step for many law students. Realistically, all of your hard work and financial sacrifice culminate in the job search.

Also, as mentioned above, the skills that you will learn during this process would stay with you for the rest of your life. In your lifetime, if you are like the most, you will have several jobs. Our coaching will pay dividends each and every time that you seek a new position.

So, in our opinion, the short answer is definitely yes. You have absolutely nothing to lose. Try us out and you risk nothing thanks to our 100% hassle-free refund guarantee.