Happy New Year From McCormack Schreiber

Tips for Interviewing During Cold and Flu Season

By  Rich Janney

I am coming down with something. I can’t yet discern what virus has come to visit, but it feels powerful. Right now I really don’t want to interact with strangers or with anyone I need to impress. But there are plenty of you out there who are in my situation (or will be soon) and you have an interview on tap right in the middle of the worst part of the cold. Here are some tips on how to survive this process without catastrophic failure.

1. In some cases you will need cold medicine to make it through the interview without leaving a mucous slime trail behind you. Do not ever take untested cold medicine on the day of your interview. Give it a whirl a day or two before. See what happens. Otherwise it’s an episode of Three’s Company just waiting to happen.
2. You know that ad they have recently been running for Tamiflu, the one where the guy is sick and he is giant compared to his surroundings? Try not to look like that.
3. Bring lozenges in case you have a cough. If you’re worried about sick breath, you can bring mints or those Listerine strips. A pack of those mini grandma Kleenexes isn’t a bad idea either. Maybe you should also bring a thermos of chicken noodle soup. If you can’t find a place to store all this on your person, consider wearing a fanny pack.
4. If you are lucky enough to have a cold that has given you ‘sexy voice’, run with it. Say sultry things during your conversation.
5. If you have to cough, try to mask it with some other ambient noise, like an air horn.
6. Hide swollen neck glands with a turtle neck sweater or ascot.
7. Under no circumstances should you look in a mirror before walking into your interview.

I truly feel for you if you have to motor though an interview while you are sick. If it’s the flu or something that really has you knocked down on your back, you might just have to reschedule the meeting though it pains me to tell you this. However, as much as we want to persevere and tough it out, no potential employer will look favorably on you if you were the carrier monkey that got the whole office sick. But hopefully you will have a nice holiday break to get over your sniffles (and maybe get a flu shot) so that when January hits, you are rested and ready for any interviews coming your way. And maybe wear a biohazard suit to any holiday parties--just a thought!

Customize Your Resume AND Your Interview Responses

By  Sabrina C. Spitznagle

Most people know that they should customize their resume for a particular position. A great way to do that is to mirror your resume to the job description or posting for the position to which you are applying. What candidates often forget, however, is to go through that process again when preparing for an interview. It is important to carefully review the job description and posting prior to any interview. If you are able to explain in an interview how your experience matches the skills the potential employer is seeking (ideally using specific examples and buzz words from the job posting), you absolutely will set yourself apart from and above the other candidates. The article "3 Ways to Tailor Your Resume For the Position", written by Gerald Buck for Vault Blogs, provides specific tips for customizing your resume, which are also helpful at the interview stage.

Interesting Article About 2015 Associate Salaries

At McCormack Schreiber, we have found 2014 to be an extremely busy year for associate hiring at large law firms, and we expect 2015 to follow suit. Of course a concern for all of our associate candidates and law firm clients is market compensation, and we thought that the article "Will Law Firms Increase Salaries in 2015?", based on NALP's 2014 Associate Salary Survey, was particularly interesting.

PICKING THE HOT PRACTICE AREA

By Rich Janney

You are a law student.  Maybe you are close to graduating. Maybe you’ve been out for a bit. Whatever.  You must figure out which practice area to pick.  You think: “I need to figure out the ‘hot’ area of law and do that.  That will make me in demand and I will have more job security and more money and will have a nice car.”

Maybe.  Or you might just look sad and lonely in a couple of years. 

Does anyone remember Y2K?  I do.  Around 1998 or 99, a lot of doomsayers were predicting all kinds of havoc being wreaked when the clocks and calendars were forced to roll into the year 2000.  Apparently, most computers hadn’t been set up to handle a new millennium (they only tracked the year with two digits and not four) and were going to revert back to January 1, 1900.  And that was going to cause banks to implode, missiles to accidentally launch, financial markets to collapse, and it would cause a dystopian future not unlike Mad Max.  Fires would burn.  Friends would turn on each other.  And the sun would cease to shine.

The lawyers got ready.  They called themselves Y2K attorneys, and they were ready for the onslaught of litigation resulting in the ripping of our social fabric as we pushed into a new frontier of lawlessness and cannibalism. 

But then nothing happened and they all looked kind of stupid.

Okay, that’s an extreme example of a ‘hot’ area of law that didn’t pan out.  But there are plenty of others that came and went.  I remember when I was graduating law school, everyone was talking about biotechnology being the hot new thing.  We were going to need bioethicists and patent attorneys to handle all this human cloning and to help protect the technology that would allow us to grow a house from a seed.  Don’t get me wrong, there was (and still is) plenty of demand for patent attorneys who could handle life science-related technology, but I would hardly say that we entered a brave new world of genetically modified friends.  It may still be coming, but my point is that it never really materialized the way people predicted 14 years ago so all the people who rushed into this ‘hot’ area of law may not have seen the tidal wave of work they were expecting.

Personally, I think that instead of finding the ‘hot’ area of law, you should pick something that interests you or one in which you have a unique skill set that will give you an advantage—within reason.  I mean, if you live in Chicago, specializing in oil exploration law might make you a hard sell on the market.  Or, if you like, just let the market pick for you.  When you graduate from law school, you are basically a stem cell—capable of growing into any kind of attorney.  If you go to work at a big firm, they may put you where they have a need and voila—you are now a real estate attorney.  You have big rolls of paper all over your office and blueprints taped to your wall.

I guess what I am trying to say is, just avoid the hype when you are deciding where you would like to specialize.  I really don’t think Y3K is going to be as big as they say.