- You'll be able to pursue any career
with or without your law degree
after watching these four tips
that I'm about to share with you,
stay tuned for a bonus resource at the end too.
Welcome back.
If you're new to this channel, I'm Annie Little,
I'm a former lawyer turned career coach.
And I created this channel for lawyers who are looking
for a practical process for finding and landing
their ideal job.
I know we hear this even before we applied
to law school, right?
You can do anything with a law degree,
just go to law school, it'll work out.
If you're a lawyer,
you've got the skills to do almost anything.
Well, I don't disagree with a lot of those statements,
I do disagree with how easy
it may be to get one of those jobs.
But that's what we're gonna talk about today.
So if you've been looking for an alternative career
or even just something kind of adjacent
to what you're already doing, this video is for you.
One of the most common things I hear from my lawyer clients
and students is that they don't think
they have any transferable skills.
I call bullshit, it's just not true,
but here's what's going on.
You've got the skills.
You're just not recognizing the value of your soft skills.
And then a common thing I hear after bringing up soft skills
with most lawyers is, what are soft skills?
To understand soft skills you have to first
know what a hard skill is,
and these are the types of skills that we get through
specific training, education.
For purposes of this video,
a good shorthand for hard skills could be legal skills.
So soft skills are how you complete your legal skills.
How you do your hard skills.
How do you go about doing them?
It's unique to you, for my fellow grammar nerds out there,
I like to think of soft skills as like the adverbs
of the career world and a shorthand for thinking
about soft skills can be like interpersonal skills.
So like, how do you interact with people?
Like, how do you communicate?
Are you a good listener?
Are you deadline driven?
Are you a self-starter?
So if you're curious about specific soft skills,
you can just Google soft skills and then you will get lists
upon lists upon lists.
But the whole point of me talking about soft skills
is so that you can recognize that you have these skills,
right, and give yourself credit for them.
Not everyone has the same set of soft skills that you do.
You need to do the foundational work to understand
what type of work you want to do,
as opposed to only knowing the type of work
you don't wanna do.
And I know, this isn't technically a skill
that's gonna help you to get into an alternative career,
but it is something that's going to help you
get into an alternative career that you actually
want much faster.
So what is this foundational work that I'm alluding to?
This is figuring out, getting clear on what your values are,
learning what your character strengths are.
Oh my gosh.
What are you interested in?
Yes, you can do work that's interesting and maybe even fine.
And then I just have a little aside here about assessments.
Okay, there's nothing inherently wrong with assessments,
like they are so fun to take.
I love Enneagram and Myers-Briggs
and all that kind of stuff, I was a psych major in college,
but what I want you to know about these assessments,
especially any that are geared toward helping you to know
what you're good at in terms of a career like a map test,
they are not a shortcut for you to figure out
what type of job you should have.
I've had clients come to me
where they get these assessments and it says,
Oh, this assessment says that I should be doing X or Y
and it doesn't make sense to me,
or I don't have any interest in doing that,
so I'm totally stuck.
I want you to look at any assessments that you take,
and just kind of think of them as fun,
take them with a grain of salt, they are not absolute.
You need to develop the skill of explaining
what you do to non-legal employers.
So here's the thing,
non-legal employers don't care about your legal experience.
In fact, talking about it can work against you,
and here's why.
People who work outside the law
have a perception of lawyers that is,
they make a lot of money, there's prestige,
you spend a lot of time and money becoming a lawyer.
Why would you ever want to leave?
Now you and I understand why you would wanna leave,
but most people don't like, why would they know about that?
Non-legal employers,
when they see you talking about your legal experience
in like legal type terms,
they immediately see you as a flight risk
because they assume being a lawyer is a pretty good gig
and this job isn't as good as a lawyer job.
So you must just be waiting around until a better lawyer gig
comes around and then you're gonna leave.
Okay, so that's part of the reason
why you need to be able to communicate your skills,
especially your soft skills to non-legal employers,
so that they can get a sense
of what your experience can do for them.
It's your job to connect the dots
between your past experience
and what you would be doing for this new employer.
So what does that mean for you?
That means that you need to look at your day-to-day job,
look at the things that you do as a lawyer
and break those things down
into their more basic components.
Spoiler alert, most of those things are soft skills.
Let's take me as an example.
I was a commercial real estate and finance attorney
for seven years.
So when I was applying for jobs outside of the law,
I wouldn't say,
Oh, I closed multimillion dollar loan facilities
for financial institutions.
That's just gonna go right over the heads
of like an admissions officer.
Like I applied for jobs to be a college admission officer.
They don't care, they're like, how does this apply?
But what I would do instead is I would highlight the skills
that allowed me to close those deals.
So one thing that I was really good at was collaborating
with lots of different parties.
If you're a transactional lawyer,
you understand that when it comes time for a closing,
there are a lot of moving parts and a lot of different
people who are involved in getting
that across the finish line.
So I would give examples of how I collaborated
with the title company, the bank, my client, the borrower,
the borrower's counsel, County offices.
Another thing that I would highlight
is that I was deadline driven,
because I was a transactional attorney and I juggled
a lot of deals,
I knew how to manage multiple competing priorities
such that I could still get projects done on time
without letting other things fall off to the wayside
as well.
So I know this might kind of hurt your brain a little bit
to be thinking about,
Ooh, how do I describe my legal experience
or my legal skills in these different way?
Listen, you're not alone.
As lawyers, we tend to overemphasize our hard skills
and just not even recognize our soft skills,
but you're doing yourself a huge disservice
if you're not recognizing the value of your soft skills,
especially because soft skills are the ones
that are most transferable across various industries.
So if this is still sounding kind of amorphous and tricky
and you don't wanna figure it out, I get it.
Guess what?
I have a free masterclass that I've created
just for helping to identify your transferable skills.
It's called, Three Simple Strategies for Uncovering
Any Lawyer's Transferable Skills.
It's linked in the description below,
and I'll be back next week with more practical tips
for helping you find and land your ideal job,
even if you might not be sure what that looks like yet.
(upbeat music)