"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.

Alternative Lawyer Jobs enthusiastically advises prospective employers:

"Whether you have a large company, a small business or a start-up, you can benefit greatly by adding individuals with legal backgrounds to your team in a variety of roles...[and]...individuals with legal experience who no longer want to be in private practice are a great untapped talent pool for companies and entrepreneurs."

While the site is easy to use and informative, and allows visitors to search by terms such as job title, keywords, company name, and geographic location, it could benefit from a few enhancements, such as these:

• more job listings in a greater number of geographic areas;
• the ability to sort the search results by job title, employer, location, and date;
• more frequent updates to the Career Blog; and
• more specific contact information about the site and the company that owns it (currently, the only way to contact someone at the site is through a general form that allows a visitor to submit an e-mail message).

However, the inaugural post on the site's Career Blog promises to add more job listings and features, so the enhancements I have suggested above might already be in the works.

Overall, while Alternative Lawyer Jobs is still a very new site, it already shows considerable promise as a useful resource for attorneys who want to find jobs in settings other than private practice.  With more content and a few additional features, it will likely help many lawyers who would like to pursue a wider variety of career options.

By Steve Imparl, guest blogger