Tag Archives: Christine Berger

Featured, Tips

How to Help Recruiters Alert You to Relevant Opportunities on LinkedIn

It won’t come as a surprise to you that virtually every recruiter uses LinkedIn to source candidates. You’ve likely received at least a few unsolicited LinkedIn messages from recruiters. Chances are, some of those messages were for positions that do not align with your practice area. This can be a source of frustration, leading some lawyers to become pretty jaded about the general notion of recruiter outreach.

But here’s the thing. If your LinkedIn profile doesn’t clearly communicate your skills and specific experience, recruiters are left to guess. The best way you can improve the quality of recruiter outreach is to maintain an informative, up-to-date profile. This gives recruiters quick and valuable insight into your background, enabling us to contact you if there’s a strong match and, conversely, to move on if you’re obviously not the right candidate. I can’t promise that a more informative profile will entirely solve the problem of messages for irrelevant roles, but it will definitely help.  

Introduce yourself effectively

The “intro” portion of your LinkedIn profile (the top section) is in many ways the most important. This is your opportunity to communicate crisply who you are and what you offer. The best way to enable a recruiter to find your profile is by inserting informative keywords into the “headline” (the line immediately below your name). Describing yourself simply as an “Attorney” is a missed opportunity: instead, tell us what type of attorney you are. The more specific, the better. For example, “Litigation Attorney” is better than “Attorney.” But the best is  a headline like “Litigation Employment Attorney Specializing in Discrimination and Retaliation.”

Double check that your location is current. Many lawyers moved cities during the pandemic, and some have neglected to update their LinkedIn profiles accordingly. It only takes a moment! While you’re at it, consider selecting the “open to opportunities” setting that is only visible to recruiters. This will confidentially communicate to recruiters that you’re receptive to relevant outreach.

Photos are another critical element of an effective intro section. Adding a photo increases the likelihood that a potential contact will accept your connection request by 9x. In addition to uploading a professional profile photo, make sure to include a background photo. Your background is a visual representation of your personal brand and is one of the first things recruiters will see when they visit your profile.

Fill in the details

A basic rule: if it’s there, fill it in. The more complete your profile, the better. Obviously, you have to fill out Experience and Education. But beyond that, add some content to Skills (in case recruiters are filtering on those keywords) and your licenses & certifications (you’re a member of a bar, right?). Other optional sections can help give your profile a more personal touch. Are you bilingual? Fill out the Languages section!

Ensure that your Experience section is more informative than a simple list of titles. The nice thing about LinkedIn, in contrast to a resume, is you don’t have to worry about fitting all the content onto a printed page. So go ahead and include a couple of bullet points about each of your past positions to indicate specifically what you did and what you achieved. Naturally, this will change over time as you advance in your career and accomplish new things, so don’t just fill in the Experience section once and forget about it — be proactive about keeping the description of your current role up to date. As a matter of style, note that it’s perfectly appropriate to write in the first person on LinkedIn, in a way that would be uncommon on a resume. Using “I” statements helps to humanize you.

Education should be fairly straightforward, but do keep in mind that this is not the place to be modest. If you graduated with honors, say so. You may also wish to list your GPA and/or class rank, especially if you’re early in your career, with limited work experience.

Stay active

At a minimum, you should log into LinkedIn weekly to check your messages. If you aren’t in the habit of logging in regularly, you can also put your contact info (personal email and/or cell phone) on your profile, enabling recruiters to contact you through those alternative channels.

As an optional bonus, consider creating content on LinkedIn. This will boost your ranking in search results and can be a great way to get noticed — not just by recruiters, but maybe even by law firm partners directly. Being active on the platform builds credibility, demonstrating that you know your area of law and are comfortable speaking about it publicly. This is by no means required, but when you do it well, it certainly helps!

Check your search appearances 

Be sure that you are getting noticed by the right audience. To do this, go to your profile page, look under the Analytics heading, look for the magnifying glass icon, and click on “search appearances.” This lets you see how often you appear in search results. In addition to the number of search appearances, it also shows you the keywords you were found for. If these do not align with your current practice area or industry, consider adjusting your headline and intro section until you are appearing in more targeted searches. 

Have fun 

Finally, have fun. Networking and being open to new opportunities can be intimidating, but LinkedIn makes it relatively simple and stress-free. Treat it as a no-pressure environment for you to be yourself and engage with like-minded people.

Associate Tips, Featured, In-House Tips, Partner Tips, Tips

An In-House Reality Check: The Grass May Not Be Greener

As a legal recruiter, one of the most common things I hear from law firm associates is that their goal is to go in-house. Law firm associates often can’t wait to leave behind the billable hour.

On the face of it, there’s nothing wrong with that — in-house roles can be a good fit for many lawyers. But the way law firm associates idolize in-house counsel positions often indicates an incomplete understanding of the realities of these jobs.

Having spent the majority of my legal career working in-house, I am deeply familiar with the tradeoffs associated with working in-house and can tell you it is not what you’ve been led to believe.

A lengthy interview process

If you land an interview, buckle up because it’s a long road.

You’re likely to get your first taste of the differences between law firms and companies during the in-house interview process.

Law firm interviewing tends to prioritize efficiency: you interview with some partners, meet a few associates, go to lunch, and get an offer. The whole process takes about a month and sometimes much less. 

For in-house roles, you typically apply online, send your resume into the ATS abyss, and hope for the best. If you are one of the lucky ones, you will advance to a recruiter phone screening. Once that is complete, expect to wait at least a week to meet with the hiring manager. After interviewing with the hiring manager, you will be scheduled to meet members of the legal team. If all goes well, you’ll be introduced to the functional leaders you would support. Finally, you may meet with the Chief Legal Officer. The time between rounds is usually about a week. In the interim, you may be expected to complete a take-home assignment or a case study, which you then may or may not present to your potential future colleagues. Overall, expect this process to take four to eight weeks or longer. 

From profit center to cost center

As a lawyer at a law firm, you are part of the profit center: you bill hours and directly generate revenue. You are paying for staff salaries and keeping the lights on. In contrast, an in-house legal department is a cost center, supporting the revenue-generating parts of the business, but not bringing in revenue independently. 

When you go in-house, all eyes are no longer on you, and you are somewhat less important. This shift affects every aspect of your job, including resource allocation, leadership focus, and budget.

No longer the profit center and no longer keeping time, in-house counsel must find ways to add value to the business and develop creative ways to measure those contributions. Adding value and measuring it is doubly important in times of economic uncertainty, when companies move to cut costs.

A change of pace — but not necessarily slower

Whoever told you that in-house counsel enjoy a well-balanced 9-to-5 was wrong. Let’s be clear: the typical in-house role is far from the relaxed 40-hours-a-week you’ve been pitched. In reality, 60-hour weeks are not uncommon for many in-house lawyers.

First, the decision to hire in-house counsel is made for a reason: there is a lot of work to be done. You are expected to take on the work of outside counsel independently, and to do so with fewer resources.

Remember that hearing you went to 30 minutes away or the time you spent sitting in court waiting to argue? As an associate, this counted as productivity. As in-house counsel, when you spend time on activities where your presence turns out not to have been necessary, you’re the one who bears the cost. You still have to get your work done, and frequently that means putting in time in the evenings or on weekends to catch up.

Finally, businesses move at an incredible pace. You’re likely to find that timelines are extremely short. Gone are the days when you had two weeks to complete a memo. Now you need to do it in 30 minutes. Your internal clients need quick answers, and if you don’t weigh in immediately, the business will take action without you.

Juggling many responsibilities

Private practice is all about specialization. But at most companies, especially smaller ones, every in-house counsel has a much more diverse range of responsibilities on their plate. That can be exciting, but it’s also time-consuming and stressful, especially when you are given responsibility for an area unrelated to your prior law firm practice.

Startups take this to the extreme. Not only will you be one of the few lawyers in the company (perhaps even the only one!), but you will also probably be one of the smartest people in the room. People will recognize that, and they’ll want to tap you for projects that aren’t squarely within the legal domain. Being involved in non-legal subject matter might sound fun, but it can be exhausting when combined with the legal work that forms the core of your portfolio.

Be realistic about the tradeoffs

There’s no denying that law firms can be a tough environment, and a long-term career in private practice isn’t for everyone. But it’s easy to take for granted the benefit of being surrounded by smart and well-credentialed colleagues. Not to mention resources like immediately responsive paralegals and subscriptions to any database you desire. Or a well-defined career progression with material increases in compensation every year. As an in-house counsel, you can’t expect a luxury building in a prime location, a private office, an assistant, a paralegal, or even Westlaw.

You may be more than happy to make those tradeoffs. But do think it through carefully. The grass isn’t always greener.