Housing: My wife is getting stationed at Walter Reed, so I’m moving to DC. (Because she has been stationed overseas and in Iraq while we’ve been married, we’ve never lived together) I doubt I’ll have a job when I move, but I know I’ll want to be near mass transit. And we also want it to a relatively easy drive to Walter Reed.
We want something like a lower middle/middle class rental house. We have no kids so don’t care about schools, but want at least moderately safe–an artsy bohemian area would been be good.
Job: I have 4 years of litigation experience, trial and appellate, and 3 years experience as a CPA auditing Forbes 100 financial services companies. But because I will be starting a new household with a new wife in a new city and even contemplating a new family, I don’t want to leap right into high-end law practice. I want a job that will not overload my personal life, and I only require a modest income. Should I consider finding a firm that does financial services regulation or litigation and getting a paralegal job? (do big city paralegals have lives?) Or are there very laid back law attorney jobs? Or other laid back jobs where I could use those skills? I’m very politically aware, so lobbying would be OK, but I don’t want to work for the Federal government, unless necessary, at least not for my first job.
Thanks for ANY ideas. I am ice cold on DC and moving there in a few months.
Come down for the 1st annual Couchsurfing"DC Couch Crash". We’ll give you a tour. I know it’s only a weekend away but hey, it’s important, right?
As for where to live, I’d stay out of Petworth if I were you. Is Silver Spring too far north for you? Oh, and for Artsy Bohemian, you might want to check out Dupont Circle.
I would live in Columbia Heights. Walter Reed would be a short ~15 ride/drive up Georgia Ave. There are express buses going that way as well. The neighborhood is diverse, safe, and has plenty of things to do within walking distance. There are two metros near by (Georgia-Petworth & Columbia Heights), and buses going downtown regularly (which is where you will likely work). And if you move to the area, I will buy you your first drink.
As far as law firms go, you will find very few high-end firms that don’t require you to work a lot. One options is to try to find a job as a staff attorney, or in-house counsel somewhere. Staff Attorneys often have a little more free time, and fewer demands. The salary can still be good (six figures), and the hours are a little better. It’s a good way to ensure that if you do decide you want to be an associate at a high-end firm, that door would still be open to you. Being a paralegal for an extended time might make that a bit harder. Plus, paralegals often work as much as some lawyers, with far less pay.
I would first try to find some fellow law school alumni, or contacts that work in the area to try to get your foot in the door. You can also temp or volunteer in the meantime if you want to get a lay of the land.
With regard to housing, Mt. Pleasant/Columbia Heights may be a good choice - near the metro, not far from Walter Reed, and relatively affordable. There have been a few well-publicized shootings at the metro station, but not lately - and for what it’s worth, I always feel quite safe visiting friends there. The neighborhood is rapidly gentrifying - were I to move back into DC proper, I’d probably move there.
As for jobs - the market is highly, highly competitive. You’re lucky, insofar as you’re not going to be competing for the true entry-level positions with all the newly minted lawyers coming out of DC law schools. But getting a job will not be easy - especially if you’re determined to avoid Federal service, as the feds are (unsurprisingly) the biggest employers in the city. You will not just walk into a lobbying job, nor a BigLaw job, nor a nonprofit position - in fact, especially not a nonprofit, as they’ve got a glut of deferred BigLaw associates willing to work for free.
This is what you do: Go on Idealist, your law school’s job database, and any other job search site you like. Apply for anything that looks like you might be remotely qualified for it. It doesn’t matter if you think you’d like the job or not - you can look for a job you like once you’ve got a job that’s paying the rent. Don’t be surprised if you apply for well over a hundred jobs before you even get an interview.
As I mentioned in the last thread on this subject - if you haven’t done so already, you must start the process of waiving into DC immediately. Legal temp agencies will often place you if you can demonstrate you’ve applied, even before you’re admitted.
Legal work in DC can be very rewarding, but the job market is insane. You’ve got to take it very, very seriously.
For that matter, the housing market can be sort of insane as well. I highly recommend checking Craigslist frequently - several times a day - to see if there are new listings in your desired neighborhood and price range. Affordable housing goes fast.
With your CPA, some obvious places to consider are legal jobs at the big accounting and consulting firms. Because they are in-house, the hours may be a bit better and more under your own control.
Non-profit jobs can be stressful and demanding because your clients tend to have lots of needs, some of which you will be able to address and some of which will break your heart because you can’t fix them.
Do not consider becoming a paralegal if you can reasonably avoid it. You will have difficulty transitioning back into an attorney role later. Also, at big firms they work just as long (albeit getting paid overtime to do so), but they have even less control over their schedules.
I know you said that federal service was not for you, but it does tend to represent the best possible tradeoff of compensation for free time, IMO. The SEC is always hiring, just to pick one possibility. One drawback is that the hiring process takes forever.
The other advantage of federal service is that, with rare exceptions, the feds don’t care where you’re admitted to the Bar - so long as you’re admitted somewhere.
I’m not sure I would tell any lawyer to quit his job and then move to a huge and highly competitive legal market like D.C. in this economy. Maybe if you were HLS and practicing at MoFo could you swing it. Frankly, my first reaction to your question was “Well, if you’ve waited this long to live together, what’s one more year?”
Otherwise, you might want to contact D.C. doc review agencies. The hours shouldn’t be that bad, and the pay is OK (I think I’ve heard somewhere in the neighborhood of $30-$35 per hour—but I’m not certain).
Also, can you still waive in/be admitted on motion to the D.C. Bar? If so, you may as well.
The last time I pointed this out on the Straight Dope some random doper lawyer went so far as to explain to me that whatever the federal agencies might say, I am a program employee and plain old civil servant, not a lawyer.
What exactly about the Federal service do you object to? Have you considered all the alternatives? Many people say this, forgetting that there are choices from GSA to NIH to EPA to DHS.
Try tooling around on USAJobs before you throw the baby out with the bath water.
That seems incorrect to me - if your job title has “attorney” in it, you’re doing legal work, and the job requires admission to some bar, in what sense are you not a lawyer? The mere fact that you’re not practicing in the jurisdiction you’re admitted to can’t be sufficient - otherwise, we’d be forced to the conclusion that no State Department attorney assigned to an embassy overseas is working as a lawyer, save those few who’re admitted to the local bars.
But hey, you can call me whatever you want, so long as you don’t call me unemployed.
Kimmy_Gibbler is very wise. I wouldn’t wish the DC job market on anybody. I’m not even talking about just the legal job market - do you have any idea how many wonks of every stripe we’ve got here?
Slight nitpick - when I was looking at doc review gigs, they were more in the $25/hr range. Those were only the relatively few available to folks who’d not yet passed the bar, though - the ones available to real lawyers might pay more.
Flipshod, if I may be frank - have you thought this through all the way? From what you’ve said in this and the earlier thread, it really sounds like you just don’t know much about working in DC. Nothing wrong with that - but moving here with no job offer and no real understanding of how the job search process works in this market strikes me as a Very Bad Idea. Let me put it like this - have you considered how long you can get by without a job? On just your wife’s income and your savings? Can you manage without a job, or with only sporadic temp work, for a few months? Six months? A year? Have you told your wife that you might be spending a lot of time just bouncing around the house, clicking “refresh” on Idealist and applying for gigs? (Rhetorical question - you needn’t answer).
I have friends from law school who were still working in a Starbuck’s over a year after graduation. I’ve others who had to go back to their hometowns to find work, either in law or in their old pre-law careers - they just couldn’t find anything in DC. These are folks who went to a top-tier law school in DC, and did all their law school internships in DC - people intimately familiar with the DC legal scene, and with really good connections.
You’ve got some advantages by virtue of your litigation experience - but it would be much smarter to try to leverage that experience into a job offer before you quit your current job. You can travel to DC for interviews, if you get any - take a year to apply for jobs.
ETA: You should also understand that even doc review is far from a sure thing. There are legions of new law school grads and new lawyers applying for every new doc review gig that pops up.
One more point, and then I’ll shut up (at least for now). I really want to make sure you understand this, Flipshod:
Unemployment sucks. Even if you have the savings or other resources to keep a roof over your head and food in your stomach, it sucks. It makes you feel worthless, it makes you feel stupid. It makes you become stupid, as your skills atrophy. If you’ve got four years of litigation experience under your belt, then you got out of law school before the recession really trashed the job market - I wouldn’t be surprised if you had an offer before you graduated, and never needed to worry about being deferred or rescinded.
I’m making a point of this because, if it’s been a while since you really had to struggle to find a professional job (or if you never had), you might not fully get just how bad it can feel to have made a really big professional leap with no idea where you’re going to land.
It’s your call, dude. But for what it’s worth: I’d kind of like to move to NYC in a year or two. But there is absolutely no way that I’d consider moving there without a job offer and bar membership (or at least a brand-new bar passage notice) in hand.
Walter Reed Army Medical Center is supposed to move from its current location on Georgia Ave to the “new” Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, during the next year or so. You might want to make sure which facility your wife will be working at.
Walter Reed on Georgia Ave is not terribly difficult to drive to from many places in DC, but places convenient to that may not be convenient to Bethesda.
Are you looking for city living or something a bit less so?
A friend of mine is an attorney and works for a government agency. As she described it, when comparing herself to a neighbor who is also an attorney: “I don’t get paid as much, but I get to watch my kids grow up”. Check out OPM’s website (I think it’s usajobs.com) and see what they have.
FWIW - I think Walter Reed is still expected to be BRACed in a year or two. While I don’t know if your wife would still be there, I think most of the caseload is moving to Fort Belvoir in Virginia. That’s not all that near any Metro station so your wife would need to drive (the closest stations are Huntington and Van Dorn Street). Of course if you lived in the city, she’d be largely counter-commuting.
(added): Sorry - I just noticed that you said you did NOT want to work for the Federal government so perhaps you can ignore that advice; however, may I ask why? I know several folks who are lawyers and employed by Uncle Sam, and are happy. I also believe there are some protections in place if your spouse is military and gets posted elsewhere - preferential treatment for jobs at the new location etc., but I’m not 100% sure on that.
