Legal temping: boon or curse?

My brother passed the bar a couple of years ago, after receiving his law degree from a second-tier school (he did respectably but wasn’t at the top of his class). Since then he has gone through periods of applying very actively to law jobs in the state where he qualified, but to no avail. Then he got into legal temping. So for the past two years or so, he has gone through a series of legal temp jobs, averaging about two months each. These jobs pay pretty decent money by my standards, so he isn’t suffering financially. And he is deliberately working as many hours of overtime as he can so as to pay back his huge student loans as aggressively as possible. I am guessing in the average week he puts in about 70 hours.

The problem (in my eyes) is that my brother has almost completely stopped looking for a permanent job. I think it is largely due to the long hours he is putting in temping, but I also get the feeling that he is discouraged by the lack of success he had in the earlier search (is the job market still bad in the US?). He doesn’t seem to be worried, and the temp opportunities keep coming in.

So my question is can someone make a career like this? Will the temp placement people eventually start wondering why he is still doing this rather than getting a permanent job and take him off their rolls? And how does temping translate on a legal CV? Will it look bad to have 2 years of temping on a CV? Do these years count toward experience in the legal sector?

Any advice appreciated.

Doesn’t temping mean that he’s getting a wide variety of experience - something that should stand him in very good stead?

Legal temping is ok. Some companies overuse it. Some companies could clearly benefit from it. It’s best for your brother to stay in one gig for as long as he can. Jumping around looks like he isn’t doing substantive work. Even though he’s approaching his 3rd year out, it doesn’t look that great on the resume to have all those names (even if they are big ones). If I were to see his resume, I would be asking myself, “What does he know? He most likely has no formal training. What could he be picking up, or rather, what value can he add to my organization?”

If your brother does short stints, it looks like he was on to do some paper pushing project that no one at the company wanted to do, like, for example, go through all the vendor agreements and see if it’s ok to transition those agreements to the new owners of a sector that was just sold by the employer company. This is true legal work, but it’s also busy body, no much value work. He might gain some experience if he is asked to draft letters to these vendors and field all their questions.

People, suprisingly enough, do make a career out of this. But, those people are typically consultants, and they have a lot of experience in the field. They are pretty specialized and have undergone some formal training from at least one employer (preferably a law firm, though I disagree with my director’s assessment). These people are pretty expensive from an organization standpoint (about $100/hr starting, less if they are through an agency, more if they swung the deal by themselves). However, they also prvoide planning and insight and also influence the direction and strategy of the company.

Not really. Around here, you invariably wind up doing document production for a very large firm. What this means is you are sitting in a large conference room with as many as forty other legal temps going through boxes and boxes of documents looking for which ones might be responsive to the case at hand. These in turn may be QCed by another person. Usually, you have a checklist of some description which has broken down the requested documents into several broad categories.

You may be looking for docs that are privileged but that in turn depends. Usually they tell you to mark any thing with a certain set of names on it and then those in turn are reviewed by someone else.

As work goes, it is mind numbing. For the most part, you can wear a music player of some description. The better projects will feed you as well. I did it for a short period of time while looking for something permanent and from what I recall, the money was pretty decent and with overtime you could do quite well when the work was steady. There were fringe benefits in that they would feed you on the projects and if you worked past 8:00pm, they would send you home via a car service. I always thought that the entire experience was dehumanizing since for the most part you were completely expendable.

I don’t think that it will hurt you in the long run, but it really doesn’t count for legal experience like working as an associate might. However, my answer assumes that what he is doing is document production and not actually something else.

My experience doing legal temp work in Miami mirrors Caffeine.addict’s description perfectly. It was all document production, easy to the point of mind-numbing, but the money was great as long as the gigs lasted. Overtime was just stellar, and they almost always fed us (great stuff too, gourmet sandwiches, even sushi platters). Somehow I fell out of favor with my temp agency and they stopped calling me for gigs after I was their golden go-to guy for a few months, but by then, I started applying for permanent jobs out of South Florida and eventually escaped entirely. It’s great work if you don’t mind the rug being pulled out from under you at any time, for any reason (or no reason at all). There is no loyalty to temps whatsoever – you are completely expendable cannon fodder at all times.

Generally speaking the large law firm community is about the most elitist bunch of prestige whores you will find in this country that still work for a living. If your brother didn’t get a law firm job out of law school, he is not likely to get one at a large law firm anytime soon. I don’t know how you define second tier but at large law firms the first tier is basically the top ten schools or so, the second tier goes to about 25 or so, anything below this and he is trying to overcome a pretty large handicap. If he wants a real legal career, he will have to set his sights on smaller local firms and this may very well mean a pay cut from his temping gigs but in the end he will have to make some sort of move because you don’t want to be 40 years old and temping.

At my old firm, if you were top of your class from a second tier school, you were swimming upstream. When the Yale grad underperforms, they say "everyone is human but when the Fordham grad underperforms people start wondering if they did the right thing to hire them.

I remember the food being pretty good. We got to know a lot of the delivery places in DC. When the food was catered, it was good too. We had rack of lamb one night even. The drawback is that you can be let go at any time and there is no guarantee of the work. Nobody really trusts anyone. I knew someone who was a scab. She got paid a little more to keep tabs on us by the temp agency. The temp agency in turn feeds off of one or two law firms so you have an incentive to sign up with several if that is what you want to do. Some people get on these long projects which may last for a year. Those tend to pay well because of the overtime, but are crushingly dull and will suck the life out of you. I knew of one which regularly worked people for 80 hours a week over a period of months.

I’m glad I got out of it although if I had to I would do it again.

Some good feedback here.

Yes, I would say that my brother is doing document production, and from what he says it is definitely mind-numbing and he is very expendable. He doesn’t seem to have any trouble in getting gigs, but they are very short term. I haven’t even asked him about what he is putting on his CV, but can’t really imagine how he could list these as separate jobs, or showing any kind of skill or career development.

So the feeling I get from a couple of you is that it will keep bread on the table (good bread actually), but not amount to anything in the long-term. Basincally a stopgap measure which he should make real efforts to get out of and to find permanent employment.

I don’t think he is trying for the big firms. When he was applying he was sending CVs everywhere. For sake of background, I guess I should mention that he is in Washington DC and got his degree at Villanova.

I see a couple of you are in DC. Is the job market still soft? Strange, being an NGO-type lyself, I somehow always assumed that being star professionals, lawyers and doctors never had trouble getting jobs…

If the big firms are not biting at the resume, which means he is not at the top of his class at a big-name school (which is most of us), I would try to get a full time associate position at some small-mid-sized business law, personal injury, or insurance defense firms. Shotgun resumes and cover letters. Check the local legal employment ads. Call some legal headhunters.

Get some good experience for maybe 5 years, then consider hanging a shingle. Get the book How to Start and Build a Law Practice by Jay Foonberg

The market is fairly variable. It really just depends on your timing and where you are in your career. I would tell your brother to contact career services at his school and see if they maintain an alumni network where jobs are posted. This should help him out greatly in finding something.

Any kind of temping can be looked at as actively searching for permanent work. You may get picked up by the company. I think it’s absolutely legit.

If your brother isn’t already doing it, he should also be doing some pro-bono legal work in the community. It’s a great way to build a network and to fall into a job you may never have know existed, otherwise.

This doesn’t really hold true with legal temping. You may if you are lucky, be offered a job as a staff attorney with those firms but those jobs aren’t career track and they don’t really lead to anything better.

I would list it on a resume and indeed the way I did was to list the agencies that I worked for and list what I was doing. Most legal employers will know enough to know that you were legal temping and won’t inquire further.

I would think experience is always better than its absence.

Aside from which legal temping has got to beat heck out of illegal temping, right? :stuck_out_tongue:

See below

Still bad? No. The job market has been more or less normal since 2003. What your brother is experiencing is a phenomenon largely limited to “prestige” jobs like lawyers, investment bankers and management consultants. That is to say there is more or less a set career track that starts freshman year of undergrad and ends at being a partner/managing director making seven figures. If you deviate from that track you may have trouble getting back on.

As a management consultant that works for a firm that specializes in providing services and support to law firms defending investment banks (which makes me the most evil person ever), my observation is that legal temping is probably the most tedious job I can imagine. I routinely give software demos and whatnot to these guys when they do their document reviews. Let me tell you, even with the aid of special software, there is no way I would be able to tolerate having to review 100,000s or millions of documents (yes that’s right) for months on end.

Temping’s fine in the short term or as a foot in the door, but depth of experience tends to weigh more heavily than breath of experience. Ultimately want you want is a ‘career’, not a string of jobs giving you a taste of lots of different things.

See below

Still bad? No. The job market has been more or less normal since 2003. What your brother is experiencing is a phenomenon largely limited to “prestige” jobs like lawyers, investment bankers and management consultants. That is to say there is more or less a set career track that starts freshman year of undergrad and ends at being a partner/managing director making seven figures. If you deviate from that track you may have trouble getting back on.

As a management consultant that works for a firm that specializes in providing services and support to law firms defending investment banks (which makes me the most evil person ever), my observation is that legal temping is probably the most tedious job I can imagine. I routinely give software demos and whatnot to these guys when they do their document reviews. Let me tell you, even with the aid of special software, there is no way I would be able to tolerate having to review 100,000s or millions of documents (yes that’s right) for months on end.

Temping’s fine in the short term or as a foot in the door, but depth of experience tends to weigh more heavily than breath of experience. Ultimately want you want is a ‘career’, not a string of jobs giving you a taste of lots of different things.

Ooooh, that reminds me of a good story interviewing season story. I attended a glossy magazine ranked Top 25 (though we slipped 2 notches last year) and because I had good grades got interviewed at some seriously big law firms. They won’t send you to New York, but they’ll hire you for their Midwest branches-25$ entree lunches, everything.

I will always remember the day some bitch had the gall to ask me how I could “truly fit in to such a prestigious environment given that * only went to a state school.”

Now, maybe if I were hearing this out of some twat from Hah-vud I’d brook the insult. But her? Attended a state school ranked lower than mine.

Unfortunately I made the mistake of glancing at her degree and then sneering visibly and was escorted out post-haste saying that my session with her was over.

Needless to say, I didn’t get that job.

Incidentally, she verbally italicised the “state school” part of that sentence like I was matriculating at “Bob’s Mailaway Internets School of Law & Pigpokery.”

I was both laughing and crying on the taxi back to the airport. Good times, good times.

Oh girl, now you have to dish! What firm did that pretentious biatch work for?

I tell ya, my experiences with law school and practice were so uniformly horrible, and the people I met along the way were so stereotypically awful, I don’t miss it at all. I left my job as a lawyer one year ago this week (actually on Halloween) and I’ve been happy ever since, even if I’m back in school and making less money.

Sorry, dude, I may be a paper jockey in the molasses slow hands of the guvment but I can’t do that.

I WILL however tell you some other “WTF were they thinking?” moments-

  1. BigLaw interviewer telling [minority] classmate that her grades are horrible (okay, cruel comments about grades is normal ground) and she should look for employment with Johnnie Cochrane or some other racial firms. I kid you not. It was a pretty big scandal during OCI.

  2. Classmate (younger) who graduated Order of the Coif, law review, the works…but was getting steadily turned down for 2nd round interviews at any firms though the firms would cream themselves over her when they saw her paper resume up on that software everyone uses to regulate OCI now. One of the interviewers finally admitted that it was because she wore religious headgear (I’ll let you imagine which religion she may have been practicing). ADMITTED it…to her face!

There were also several instances of firms asking people to drop from the OCI schedule because their gpas were .02 less than the cut-off. I guess I can understand that, though these firms generally had such high cut-offs (like 3.4 or above) that you’d imagine someone who could pull that high a GPA to begin with would manage the .02 over the course of the year.

I think my biggest irritation was that the employment office managed to make you feel like you were practically flunking if you were not in the top 10%. Also, they completely refuse to help, are generally pretty rude and discouraging about your own attempts…but then looooooove to take credit when you do find a good job.

Oh well. I’m ambivalent about all of it but I like my paycheck and I enjoy my job. But I do find the social aspects of it all very demoralising. It’s very sad but years out of school people still seem to try to lord it over others based on where they went to law school.