How To Land A Job At A Law Firm

Summary

In this episode, Zinda Law Group CEO and founder, Jack Zinda, gives you quick tips on how to give yourself the best chance of landing a job at a firm.

Discussed in this Episode:

• Customize your resume
• Identify the firms
• Look for Opportunities
• How can you help the firm?

Customize Your Resume

Why do you want to work for a particular firm? Be specific with your resume and share your intentions. When you join a firm, you’re a part of a team and a generic resume doesn’t show why you’d be a good fit.

Identify the Firms

Find 3 law firms that you really like and get to know everything about them. For one, so you can give a good interview and two, so you can know if you really want to work there.

Look for Opportunities

Don’t just submit resumes, look for events or other opportunities to meet lawyers. Sometimes all it takes is one really good recommendation from a trial lawyer.

How Can You Help the Firm?

It’s not about how they can help you. If you want to get hired, you need to be able to show what qualities you can bring to the table. 

You can reach Jack at:

jack@zindalaw.com

512-246-2224

Transcript

Welcome to The Effective Lawyer, a podcast for ambitious attorneys who want to improve their practice. My name is Jack Zinda and I’ll be your host today. I want to talk about how to land a job at a law firm or a trial law firm, or a personal injury law firm. I get approached all of the time by young attorneys saying, “hey, I want to get a job at X firm. How do I do it?” Or, “hey, I want to get a job at your firm. How do I do it?” I see them overlook some really easy opportunities to help land those jobs.  I’m a little hesitant to do this because I’m worried that every applicant we get at our law firm moving forward is going to follow these steps verbatim. But I guess that shows a lot of aptitude and effort if you’re going to reach out and listen to this and follow these steps.

Number one, customize your resume and cover letter. We get tons of resumes and cover letters that are generic. Let’s say I want to work at a law firm that handles cases in a particular state. Talk about why you want to work at this particular firm. Number two, identify the firms that you really want to work at. Don’t go after a hundred, pick your three favorites and go after them. Put all of your energy to getting a job at the one of those three law firms. Number two, research the place you want to work. Know about the people. Know the culture, know the history, look at the website, looked at LinkedIn. Look at the bios of the partners, one to make sure you really want to work there. And two, so in your interview you can talk about how great they’re or in your cover letter or things you like about it. Number three, be persistent. Um, one of the partners at the firm currently I think applied two or three times before they got an interview. And it wasn’t because they were getting turned down. We just had a lot of applicants at the time and they were persistent and they finally got an interview and got the job and they’ve been here forever. So, be persistent when you want to work somewhere.

This podcast is presented by Zinda Law Group, a nationwide personal injury firm. For over 10 years, the experienced lawyers at ZLG have been partnering with outside counsel across the United States on all types of personal injury and wrongful death cases with over 30 attorneys Zinda Law Group has paid out millions in referral and joint venture fees since 2015. To learn more about partnering with Zinda Law Group, please email us at referrals@zindalaw.com. We’ll schedule a time for you to meet with Jack Zinda or one of our trial lawyers to discuss your case.

Next, look for opportunities to meet either associates or partners at different events. Check out LinkedIn, state Bar Association, local, uh, bar associations, happy hours, and don’t just try to focus on meeting the partners. Meet the associates cuz that’s a good foot in the door. I know when someone in our firm recommends someone, we take that really highly into consideration. And so meeting people is really helpful. Reach out directly to lawyers at the firm, either associates or partners and just ping them directly. You can usually find their email on state bar or LinkedIn, um, to say, Hey, I’m interested in working there. And trust me, people are always flattered when you say that nobody’s offended that you’re asking to work at a firm or saying you’re showing some interest. Um, I always take it as flattery, even if we’re not looking for someone, um, in the interview itself, paid a vision for how you can help the firm.

This is another area I see a lot of interviews go the wrong direction. They talk about how I can help them. Hey, I want to move to Austin so bad. Can I work at your law firm? Side note, that’s the worst reason to say you want to work at somewhere because where they’re physically located. Okay? Your employer does not care that you want to live in Austin. They want to know how you can help them. Okay? And I, I kinda look at that as almost a red flag cause maybe they’re just applying to work here cause they want to live in a certain city. Um, so paint a vision for how you can help them and be dogged. I mean, I have a rules, I probably shouldn’t say this again. If someone drops off a resume in person that they get an interview. Now I I don’t want to say that’s always the case in case you don’t get an interview and you dropped off your resume.

But in general, I like to follow that rule cause that’s how I got my first job. So be dogged, be persistent. Find the firm you want to work at, talk to people in the community and hopefully that helps you get the, your job over your dreams. Until next time, or if you want questions answered about how to, uh, interview somewhere, just want to, you know, chat about where I should go work, feel free to reach out to me. I love talking to, um, newer attorneys about their careers and their growth. Uh, feel free to reach out to me directly and until next time, thanks.

Thanks for listening to today’s episode of The Effective Lawyer. You can learn more about our team and find other episodes of our podcast at zindalaw.com. As always, we’d appreciate that you subscribe, rate and review the pod. Thanks.