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Emory Law School seeks an Assistant Director of the Center for Transactional Law and Practice to teach in and share the administrative duties associated with running the largest program in the Law School.  Each candidate should have a J.D. or comparable law degree and substantial experience as an attorney practicing or teaching transactional law.  Significant contacts in the Atlanta legal community are a plus.

Initially, the Assistant Director will be responsible for leading the charge to further develop the Deal Skills curriculum.  (In Deal Skills – one of Emory Law’s signature core transactional skills courses – students are introduced to the business and legal issues common to commercial transactions.)  The Assistant Director will co-teach at least one section of Deal Skills each semester, supervise the current Deal Skills adjuncts, and recruit, train, and evaluate the performance of new adjunct professors teaching the other sections of Deal Skills.

As the faculty advisor for Emory Law’s Transactional Law Program Negotiation Team, the Assistant Director will identify appropriate competitions, select team members, recruit coaches, and supervise both the drafting and negotiation components of each competition.  The Assistant Director will also serve as the host of the Southeast Regional LawMeets® Competition held at…

WCU

Western Carolina University has posted an opening for an assistant professor of legal studies.  More information is available here. The position is fixed-term and non-tenure-track, though it comes with the title “assistant professor.” 

Last year, I greatly enjoyed my time presenting at Western Carolina University. WCU is in a beautiful part of the country, about an hour from Ashville, NC. WCU has a strong group of legal studies professors and has one of the nation’s few Business Administration and Law degrees at the undergraduate level.

I’ve updated my list of legal studies professor positions in business schools. Many of the positions have now been filled, but I placed the newer postings in bold font. 

It’s always nice to be validated. Day two into torturing my business associations students with basic accounting and corporate finance, I was able to post the results of a recent study about what they were learning and why. “Torture” is a strong word– I try to break up the lessons by showing up to the minute video clips about companies that they know to illustrate how their concepts apply to real life settings. But for some students it remains a foreign language no matter how many background YouTube videos I suggest, or how interesting the debate is about McDonalds and Shake Shack on CNBC.

My alma mater Harvard Law School surveyed a number of BigLaw graduates about the essential skills and coursework for both transactional and litigation practitioners. As I explained in an earlier post, most of my students will likely practice solo or in small firms. But I have always believed that the skills sets are inherently the same regardless of the size of the practice or resources of the client. My future litigators need to know what documents to ask for in discovery and what questions to ask during the deposition of a financial expert. My family…

In response to my earlier post entitled “So . . . You Think You Want a Business Law Job . . . .,” a reader commented as follows:

I have also seen the shift of students in my college going from other areas of law into corporate law. . . . What advice in general would you offer up? Is it a good, secure job market to want to get into in this economy?

My initial response was that, ” . . . in general I would not suggest that anyone become a lawyer of any kind merely because it is a good job in this or any other economy. You should want to be a lawyer before venturing off to law school.”  

Bottom line: the market for business law or any other legal jobs is not a uniformly good, secure job market.  Law school is not and never has been a “job ticket” in any case.  But those who have a desire to be business lawyers and work intelligently and diligently at finding a job in business law typically will be business lawyers.  I undertook to post further this week.

So, what else shall I say to pre-law students and law students interested in business law?  I will be relatively brief here and in my posts for a number of weeks since I am typing with one hand (my left, non-dominant hand) due to a broken right wrist–an extra-articular distal radius, or Colles’, fracture.  But I invite further observations in the comments.

Joan Heminway and I must be thinking similar thoughts because before I even saw her helpful post on business law jobs, I asked my former research assistant Samuel Moultrie to share his thoughts and advice on finding legal employment in this economic environment.

Sam is one of the hardest workers I know and took his job search seriously. He also took a big risk by going beyond the typical employers we had recruiting on campus when we were at Regent Law – mostly non-profits, government agencies, and a few VA and NC law firms. Sam wanted to practice in the state that has the greatest influence on U.S. corporate law and has made it happen. His journey was not and is not easy, but I thought his story might be inspiring. Recently, Sam was also selected as a 2015 Leadership Delaware Fellow. Sam’s thoughts on finding legal employment are reproduced below. 

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By: Samuel L. Moultrie

The job market for recent law school graduates is, without a doubt, miserable.  While the statistics seem to vary, I think it is safe to say that the supply of new law school graduates exceeds the number of legal job openings.  Nevertheless, graduates should not lose all hope.  Any law school graduate can find a job, if they are motivated, willing to work hard, and take steps to distinguish themselves. 

[More after the break]

It may just be my students, but it seems there is a renewed interest in business law careers among law students.  Several of my students this year who had originally started down a path toward a career in another area of law have happily and passionately settled, somewhat late in the game, on being business lawyers.  Somehow, after taking Business Associations and other foundational business law courses, they’ve been bit by the business law bug.  And they are incredibly talented students–high up in their class in terms of rank and well worthy of employment in a firm or business or government.  One is my research assistant.

We have been working together and with the folks in our Career Center to identify relevant geographical and employer markets.  But I am seemingly engaged in a continuous struggle to help each of them (a) to enhance his resume to reflect his new-found business law passion (given that each already had accepted a second summer job somewhat or totally outside the business law area when he refocused on business law as a career path) and (b) to make the new connections that he needs to make in order to successfully pursue his revised career path.  How can a middle-aged academic almost 15 years out of practice help a 3L business law job-seeker to make his resume more relevant, his contact list deeper, and his interviews more effective?

As one of Belmont University’s pre-law advisors, I have been getting an increasing number of e-mails from law school representatives across the country who are trying to recruit our students. One thing that I have been pushing for is better employment data. For the most part, the law school representatives simply send me the ABA required data, which I can already find on my own. 

The ABA required data is somewhat helpful to me as an advisor, but the data is insufficient. We really need better salary data and complete (or near complete) employer/job title lists. Longitudinal studies, though difficult to do well, might be interesting.  

The ABA required data tells us how many of a law school’s graduates for a given year are employed in law firm jobs, judicial clerkships, government, public interest work, etc. The ABA data does not distinguish between an associate attorney position (~$160,000 + prestige + career mobility) and a staff attorney position (~$50,000 + no prestige + dead end, in most cases) at the same large firm – assuming both are full-time, long-term positions, which they can be. While I readily admit that salary is often not the most important part of a…

Grades are in–a few hours late, but in nevertheless.  It must be almost time for New Year’s Eve, syllabus and first-assignment posting, the AALS conferenece, the first day of classes, . . .  and more job searching for our students!

I was reminded in an email from a student this morning that the hunt for summer and permanent law jobs is revving back up again after the holiday doldrums.  The student, a 1L mentee seeking summer employment, was asking a few questions about my cover letter post, to which I eaerlier had referred him.  I expect to start getting more of these communications from students about their job searches over the next few weeks.

Our brother bloggers over at the Law Skills Prof Blog have already struck while the iron is hot on this issue.  Specifically, Lou Sirico posted a quip on dressing for job interviews the other day.  The quoted advice?  “The interviewer should remember what you said and not what you were wearing.”  

Hmm.  Yeah.  I guess so.  Well, maybe not.

Certainly, that’s the advice I was given by NYU Law’s fabulous placement folks in “the day.”  Then, that meant wearing: a black, navy or midnight blue, or gray skirt suit; a neutral (white, ivory, gray, black) collared shirt or jewel-neck blouse; skin-tone hose; dark, solid-colored, medium-heeled pumps or really lovely flats; and either Barbara Bush pearls (the double strand) or a silk floppy bow tie (like an Hermes twilly, only not as fashion-forward).  Bo-ring.

I am proud (but call me lucky) to have gotten my job wearing (to the initial interview) a deep pink–almost fuchsia–silk-blend skirt suit (midi-length skirt, hip-length jacket), with a white collared blouse, neutral hose, black flats, and a patterned (pink, blue, etc.) floppy silk bow tie.  (This is where the folks in the UT Law Career Center lose faith that they are sending students to the right place when they refer them to me for career advice!)  I was confident and radiant in that suit (although I am not sure I realized that fully at the time), and I am convinced that made a big difference in the reception that I got from people when I wore it.  However, it’s true that I  was interviewed by a woman (a female senior associate in a multicolored silk dress with straight blond hair down to her derrière) and I was seeking employment at an entrepreneurial, individualistic firm–Skadden.  

Over the past few months, I have received a number of e-mails from the alumni associations of each of my two former law firms.  

In theory, I think these alumni networks are good ideas. They could help us keep in touch and could introduce us to people with common ties to those law firms. They could also help the law firms maintain ties with alums who could become clients.  

In practice, however, I rarely use any of the alumni services offered.

One of the main reasons is that my former firms do not have offices where I currently live (in Nashville) and they rarely, if ever, have events here.  If I still lived in Atlanta or New York City, I would probably attend some of the offered alumni CLE events, but I am probably never going to travel for them. 

As to the online alumni networks on the law firms’ websites, I think the contact information for alums probably stays relatively out of date (as people choose to update their information on major social networks, but may forget about the ones at the law firms).  LinkedIn law firm alumni groups are probably the most useful thing that the law…