It's fall recruiting season, which means there are some hundred law firms jumping over each other to offer students at my law school with no work experience a yachtload of money to work ridiculous hours doing the work of a very smart trained monkey. This is all well and good if you are one of the aforementioned law students with no experience, but having spent some time in the workforce, I want a job that matches my experience.
I don't need a yachtload of money, but I don't want to take a paycut versus my current, smaller boatload of salary for my day job. I've had this discussion with several other evening students - we want a job that values our work experience. In a cubical recruiting world, where the HR people want to shove you into a neat little box, we are an irregular polygonal prism (yeah, that's dorky even by my standards).
This isn't just my vanity thinking I'm too good for first-year firm life. One of my former coworkers who has returned to her big law firm to hopefully make partner very soon cautioned me against working at a firm. She is one of the few people I know who actually likes working for a firm, but she fears that someone with experience and outside knowledge would be undervalued at a firm like hers and it would essentially waste my talents.
I'm afraid to graduate law school without a legal job, but I think I'm going to have to take that leap of faith to be able to show up on an HR screen as a lawyer with experience in X, rather than a law student.
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