JD Bliss

Working Mother Magazine and Flex-Time Lawyers Announce Their 2009 List of the "50 Best Law Firms for Women"

It’s a late summer tradition: Working Mother magazine and Flex-Time Lawyers team up to publish their annual list of the top 50 law firms for women. Working Mother magazine is a major publication dedicated to serving and supporting all mothers who are committed to their careers. On its Web site, Flex-Time Lawyers identifies itself as “a national consulting firm that advises law students, attorneys and legal employers on work/life balance, retaining and promoting women and law-firm restructure.”

Together, these two companies invited law firms with at least 50 lawyers to apply for recognition of their leadership in providing working mother-friendly workplaces, and used several criteria to evaluate the firms, including the following:

• workforce profile,
• family-friendly benefits and policies,
• flexibility,
• leadership,
• compensation, and
• advancement and retention of women.

The results appear in the 2009 edition of the “50 Best Law Firms for Women.” If you would like your firm to be considered for 2010's "top 50," you can apply here.

Congratulations to all this year’s winning firms on being recognized for their commitment to working mothers.

By Steve Imparl, guest blogger

Technorati Tags: attorneys, law firms, lawyers, women, working mothers

Guy Kawasaki Shares 10 Ways to Use LinkedIn to Find a Job

In a recent blog post, startup guru Guy Kawasaki explained how to use LinkedIn to find a job. For those not familiar with the site, LinkedIn is a professional networking site with over 35 million members in over 140 industries. Members "connect" to each other to form networks, and then share business referrals, marketing tips, job opportunities, and much more (check out LinkedIn for Lawyers 101 for a short LinkedIn tutorial tailored to attorneys).

Below, in summary form, are Kawaski's ten tips (see Kawasaki's full blog post referenced at the link above for further details for each point). While Kawasaki's tips are tailored to a general job search, one can modify the tips to apply to a law firm job search.

1. Get the word out (that is, tell all of your LinkedIn connections that you are looking for a job).
2. Get LinkedIn recommendations from your connections
3. Find companies where people with your background and skills are working
4. If you are interested in a particular company, find out where people at a company came from to give you some idea what kind of "pedigree" the company is looking for.
5. Find out where people from a company go next (to see what kind of career path the company might open up for you).
6. Check if the company is still hiring.
7. Get to the hiring manager.
8. Alternatively, find a connection who can get your resume to the right HR person.
9. Find a connection who can help you learn more about the job requirements.
10. If you'd prefer to try joining a startup, you can also search LinkedIn for startups to join.

One extra tip: start building your network on LinkedIn today so you'll have one available when you need to tap it.

Technorati Tags: job, lawyer, LinkedIn

Michelle Obama Puts the Spotlight on Work-life Balance for Lawyer-moms

On January 20, 2009, Michelle Obama will become the First Lady of the United States.  Arguably, she is going to be the most prominent example of a woman dealing with the challenges that working lawyer-moms face as they work to balance their professional careers with their roles as mothers.  Obama, an attorney with a successful career in private practice, city government, and corporate law, has recently spent a great deal of time working on the campaign of her husband, President-elect Barack Obama.  Oh, and Ms. Obama is also the mother of two young daughters.

How will Michelle Obama juggle her legal career, her new role as First Lady, and being a mom?  It's too early to answer that question, but this article in the Washington Post explains some of the pressures, difficulties, and internal conflicts she will face in her unique role.

Technorati Tags: attorneys, lawyers, Michele Obama, moms, mothers, work-life balance, working

In Challenging Economy, U.S. Lawyers Increase Pro Bono Service

What do lawyers do during an economic downturn, when there is less work available?  A lot of them are doing more pro bono work in their spare time.

ALB Legal News reports that many attorneys in the United States are increasing the time they dedicate to handling pro bono matters.  Those volunteer lawyers work at such firms as Dechert LLP; Cadwalader, Wickersham and Taft; Akin Gump; and Paul Hastings, to cite a few examples.

Technorati Tags: attorneys, economy, law firms, lawyers, pro bono

Careers Are Like Marriages: Find the One You Want -- or Fix the One You Have!

By Olga Artman, Celia Paul, and Stephen Rosen

Careers are like marriages in the sense that we spend a significant amount of time with both and put years into making them work. So what can you do if your marriage—or your career—is in trouble? As the old proverb states, you can either find the one you want or fix the one you have. How do you choose which approach to take? One answer to this question lies in careful evaluation of your compatibility.

Like a couple experiencing marital problems, lawyers experiencing career difficulties can turn to professional counselors for help. And just as modern psychologists have developed a wide variety of tests to assess “marriage health”, professional career counselors can evaluate career compatibility thorough well-designed questionnaires and other assessment tools. In our practice, we use a “Career Well-Being Inventory,” a diagnostic tool that we developed to measure ”career health.” This instrument measures your career attitudes and behavior patterns against “career-change champions,” people who have changed careers successfully and easily and are highly compatible with their chosen professions. The closer your inventory results are to 100 percent, the closer your attitudes and behaviors resemble those who possess career health or career well-being.

As in romantic relationships, there are some career relationships where separation is the best option, whereas others are worth saving and trying to work on. We generally observe two types of career relationships.

Technorati Tags: law, marriage

Women Lawyers Transition to More Satisfying Careers

Even in the best of times, the law can make for a difficult career.  These days, a combination of various economic conditions and lifestyle factors are prompting many women lawyers to make changes in their careers and to find better opportunities for themselves.

This article, by Christy Burke, profiles five women lawyers who have made successful and satisfying career changes:

Technorati Tags: alternative, attorneys, careers, lawyers, women

Matt Homann Shares His "Ten Rules About Hourly Billing"

Last week, we looked at the billable hour in light of current economic conditions.  Economic factors provide a context in which to reevaluate hourly billing, but it is also useful to continue to explore more generally the merits and potential problems of billing our services by the hour.

Some questions we can ask about the billable hour include:

• Why do we bill hourly?
• Does hourly billing represent the true value of what we provide to our clients?
• Does billing by the hour provide the best assurance that we will be paid for our services, without any client disputes or hassles?

These are just a few basic, preliminary questions.  At the [non]billable hour, Matt Homann, a lawyer, mediator, and entrepreneur, offers his Ten Rules About Hourly Billing.  Each of his "rules" provides an important point to ponder about how we bill for our work and invites us to consider whether we want to bill by the hour or according to some other fee-calculating method.  It is helpful to consider each of the "rules" in relation to our practices and our clients.  Doing so will help us make informed decisions about whether to keep hourly billing or to adopt some other billing model.

By Steve Imparl, guest blogger

Technorati Tags: billable hour

Susan Cartier Liebel Explains Why Now is a Perfect Time to Go Solo

Gloom.  Plunging stock prices.  Layoffs.  "Negative growth."  Does any of that sound familiar?  It does, if you've been following mainstream news and blog coverage of the current global economy.

In these tumultuous times, law firms are laying off lawyers and lateral positions and first jobs are increasingly difficult to find.  So, what can you do?  You can keep looking for employment.  You can lie awake at night and beweep your adverse state.  Or you can hire yourself.

Technorati Tags: attorneys, economy, lawyers, solo practice, Susan Cartier Liebel

Today's Economy Prompts Rethinking the Billable Hour

We've written a lot about the billable hour from various perspectives, and have considered some alternative billing arrangements available to lawyers and clients.  Lately, the health of the global economy has been making news headlines daily and, as a recent article in the Washington Post observes, the larger and more intense economic pressures are forcing many clients and lawyers to seriously reconsider how fees for legal services are billed.

In-house lawyers are leading the efforts to question, and perhaps abandon, hourly billing by the law firms that represent their companies.  Today's economic challenges are compelling in-house attorneys to significantly reduce their own costs, while fees paid to outside law firms have tended to increase at rates higher than employee salaries, energy costs, and other business expenses.

Technorati Tags: alternative billing, attorneys, billable hour, economic pressure, economy, in-house, lawyers

"Alternative Lawyer Jobs" Site Helps Attorneys Find Alternative Careers

Earlier this year, we featured several law school graduates who are pursuing career alternatives to the private practice of law. Now, there is a Web site dedicated to the quest for such work.  Alternative Lawyer Jobs, subtitled as "Careers for Lawyers Who Want Something More," says it will help those attorneys who are "[t]ired of traditional law practice" to find their "jobs."  In fact, the site's FAQs page points out that Alternative Lawyer Jobs posts "just about every other job opportunity" that would interest individuals with law degrees, except for private practice jobs.

At the time of this writing, the site lists 312 different jobs in a variety of cities throughout the United States and Canada, and allows employers to post job descriptions or links to descriptions on other Web sites at no charge.  The site itself has a number of interesting features including a "Job Alerts" e-mail system to notify subscribers of new job listings, and a Career Blog that features stories about alternative forms of employment for lawyers.

Technorati Tags: alternative careers, attorneys, lawyers