I'm not officially starting to look for my next professional gig until I get back from Montana on the 8th of July. But I've been doing some noodling around as follows:
I made a list of organizations that interest me, and then went crawling around their websites. A couple of those organizations have job openings. I plan to talk to people at all the organizations, whether there's a publicly listed opening or not. Organizations I respect, with people in them that I respect, are worthy of study regardless of whether they're a direct opportunity for me.
I thoroughly read the want ads in the paper, and imagine myself doing every single job. Parking lot attendant? Could get some reading done, and some writing. Might meet some interesting folks. Worker's comp attorney? Hmmmm. Don't know much about that, bet you must be up in Augusta a lot, wonder who I know who could tell me about that? Fire sprinkler installation apprentice: must be comfortable working in very high places. Travel required. Wow. Think of all I'd learn if I travelled around to new construction jobs installing sprinklers. Anyway, I've done this exercise for a couple of weeks, not planning to respond to anything in particular. Just as a way to see which jobs capture my imagination after I've put the paper down. Which ones do I remember? Why? Seems to me useful information. Mostly the jobs in the paper are non-legal jobs; legal jobs seem to appear through word of mouth.
Meanwhile the personal network is doing its magic. Every day, it seems, a phone call or an email comes in from a friend or an acquaintance telling me about a job they know about that they think I'd be good for. Most of these are legal jobs, either at firms that are not advertising or as corporate counsel to companies in the state. But there have been some others -- a finance job and a sailing job and a job building furniture. I can think of at least 10 unadvertised jobs that folks have told me about. In a few cases the people who told me about the jobs were the folks who would have the power to hire me; in the others the people either worked within the company or were closely connected to the person who was doing the hiring. Sometimes the suggestion was half made in jest but I think mostly folks have been serious. My response is always friendly interest and a deferral to follow through after I get back from Montana. And again, I'm trying to notice which of these suggestions stick in my mind as exciting and which fade quickly away.
I know how long it takes to get hired, even when you have very good leads. It takes a long time for folks to make the decision to bring you on board. I need to be sure to give myself enough lead time. I expect when I get back from Montana to begin the lunching, networking, follow-up phone calling, and forwarding of resumes in earnest. Interspersed with some cruising the Maine coast, bike riding, kite flying, swimming, etc. I expect that I'll both be looking for work with some focus and purpose, and doing summer playing, sort of simultaneously. I hope neither one overshadows the other.
The other thing, weirdly enough, I've noticed is that my calendar is filling up with some youngish attorneys who asked me to have lunch because THEY want to quit their jobs. You have no idea how much I admire your courage. You are my new hero. Whoah. On my last day of work I was talking to opposing counsel from a western state, and I told him that I was leaving the firm. He said, oh, where are you going, and I told him I didn't know; I'd just jumped. This is a guy I'd spoken to only once before, on the barest procedural administrivia, and he opened right up to me about how brave and admirable he thinks that is, about how much he'd like to do the same thing, and how he might just do it, etc. etc. etc. Wowsers.
I have a few comments. First, I sense that you would hate being a worker's comp attorney. I've seen the work they do and it looks extremely boring to me, although to each their own.
The other interesting thing you highlighted is how quickly your opposing counsel opened up to you. In my legal community, this is a common characteristic, and I find it to be a delightful aspect of the world of litigation.
Posted by: UCL | June 29, 2004 at 10:37 AM