Write an article; find a job

Debra Bruce sug­gests that lawyers look­ing for work think about writ­ing an arti­cle to aid in find­ing a job:

Start now to gen­er­ate oppor­tu­ni­ties to dis­tin­guish your­self from the com­pe­ti­tion and widen your cir­cle of con­nec­tions. Remember, rela­tion­ships make the dif­fer­ence, espe­cially in a tight mar­ket. You prob­a­bly have more time avail­able for research and writ­ing now. Establish your exper­tise (or develop some), and give your resume some addi­tional sparkle by writ­ing an arti­cle on a legal topic you are inter­ested in. via lawjobs​.com Career Center — Aid Your Job Search: Get Published .

Importantly, she sug­gests that non-​​law review arti­cles may be the best bet here:

You don’t need to write a law review arti­cle. Contact indus­try mag­a­zines, legal news­pa­pers, busi­ness jour­nals and online pub­li­ca­tions. They need new arti­cles every month or even more fre­quently, and most don’t require blue book cita­tion. Many employ­ers are more likely to read arti­cles in such pub­li­ca­tions than in law reviews.

This is good advice, and very sim­i­lar to the idea behind blog­ging as a means for find­ing a job. By become an expert on a sub­ject, and demon­strat­ing both that exper­tise and your writ­ing abil­ity, you increase the chances of con­nect­ing with a poten­tial employer. In addi­tion, inter­view­ing other experts in order to write your arti­cle gives you a rea­son to speak with poten­tial employ­ers or col­legues with­out ask­ing for a job — which can be key for good net­work­ing. Again, net­work­ing is the key — which is not always some­thing I do very well!

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