"I've Passed Three Bar Exams and Can't Find Work"
From 7 am to 11 pm every day, I spend all my time working for free as a legal intern, networking, and spamming my resume. But there just aren't any jobs.
With the release of new employment numbers on Friday March 4th, we at FrumForum decided that it was time to listen to the voices of the young as they face the challenges of this economic crisis. Over the next days, in an exclusive series, we will be featuring a number of their first-person stories in this space. If their experience is yours, we welcome you to join the conversation at Editor@FrumForum.com.
Click here for David Frum’s introduction to this series.
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I went to the right college, which is to say a top one. I went to law school to flex my mind and make just enough money to buy a small country. I graduated after three years with only tens of thousands of non-dischargeable debt, and that made me one of the lucky ones. I was in the top third of my class at the 50th ranked law school. I had been an editor on a journal – not law review, but still – and had a publication under my belt. Every semester and summer had been spent with a different sector of the legal market – judicial, academic, public, private – and my CV contained too many legal jobs to list on a one-page resume. Where I went wrong, apparently, was going to law school.
I entered law school in 2006 when the job market was mild, but the legal market was still tossing out $160K/year for first year associates at the large law firms who hired dozens of newly minted lawyers each year. Fast forward to 2009 and it was a bit like Mad Max. Those people lucky enough to have gotten summer associate positions didn’t have offers. Some who did had them rescinded. I was neither – I was in the “academic” and “public” bits of my CV those previous two summers. I had a fuzzy hat, a piece of paper, and there were no jobs. Not the kind of “no jobs” that requires scavenging Craig’s List and your personal network to find something. There simply was no position available. The legal press has taken to calling us the “Lost Generation.” So I went back to school.
In 2009, I got into the best Tax LL.M. program in the country, and right from the start things looked bad. Normally a handful of LL.M.s go looking for Tax Court clerkships and a sub-handful get it. I didn’t know anyone who didn’t apply, and I think I met one guy who got a gig. The annual tax recruiting event was oversubscribed and underwhelming – I wasn’t the only one who didn’t get a single interview. Because there were no jobs.
Fast forward a year and I’ve passed three bar exams. A relative knew a guy who was a partner in a tax practice. We spoke a few times and eventually he offered me an internship. The deal was that I would choose my own schedule, help support the attorneys in legal tasks (research, drafting, the odd meeting), and they’d help me learn how to actually help people, preferably using the tax code. In return, it was understood that the internship would never lead to a paying job because they weren’t hiring and I would not be paid. I decided that I’d work five days a week from 8am-6pm (5:30 when there wasn’t much to do), and whenever I finished an assignment I’d ask for a new one. Depending on the lawyer giving the assignment, I did basic research, filing, and sometimes took first crack at a memo. The partner let me sit in on a class, introduced me to people in the field, and let me watch really great lawyers do really great things. To be absolutely frank, I got the better end of the deal.
In the partner’s class, I met a guest speaker who worked for a nonprofit. The nonprofit had no jobs, but they did cool legal stuff with whistleblower laws (telling on your (crooked) boss and neighbors for fun and profit). There’s a growing field for tax whistleblower law, and it was a small outfit so I’d level up from intern to something that looks sort of like a lawyer. With the understanding that I would probably never be hired and there was no money whatsoever. My schedule is five days a week from 8:30am-5:30pm and I’m saving money on dry cleaning.
There are two career services offices that I access daily: In a good week, there are 10-15 new listings, half of which are for internships or summer positions that only current students are eligible for; the other half usually insist on 1-3 years of experience. It’s hard to get to that 1-year threshold with “lost generation” stamped on your resume where your first job was supposed to be. I have a paid subscription to a jobs website that claims it is the most comprehensive in the country and is supposed to email me daily with listings that match up to five saved searches (for the record, I use all five saved searches and one of them is for “tax lawyer jobs in the USA”). Lately, I get three search results on a good day, and those results contain as few as one and as many as six or seven separate listings; often, the search results overlap. I’m networking, volunteering, joining professional associations, spamming my resume and targeting applications and it’s like working from 7am-11pm seven days a week. And after a year of it, there still don’t seem to be any jobs.
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