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Former Jones Day lawyer advises legal job seekers
RICHARD WEINER
Legal News Reporter
Published: February 21, 2019
A former Jones day attorney is publishing a book about how to get a job in the highly competitive modern legal marketplace.
Rachel Tessa Gezerseh, formerly of the Los Angeles office of Cleveland’s Jones Day law firm, is expanding her passion project of teaching lawyers and law students about job searching in the “BigLaw” world.
“When law students look for work, it is often the case that help from their schools is minimal,” she said. “They get into a mindset that the school will take care of it. But that passive approach does not work.”
“It is usually left to the students” to figure out how to look for work, and that is a primary reason that only about half of law school graduates obtain full time employment in law firms right out of law school,” she said.
Her creation, The Law Career Playbook, a guerrilla guide to getting a legal job you actually like, was published on Feb. 12, intended for distribution to law students, undergraduates thinking about a law career and lawyers looking for new positions.
While her basic attitude is familiar to anyone: “if you do what you enjoy, it isn’t a job,” her specific advice to old and new lawyers looking for work is based on her own job search as a woman graduate of a not-first-tier law school looking for work, and landing a position, at the most prestigious firms in the country.
Gezerseh said that the key to finding the right job in law boils down to two simple things: resume building and networking. But the devil, as always, is in the details, and she goes to great lengths in her book to go into the details of both her job searches and in detailing how other job seekers can follow her path forward.
Gezerseh, now 44 and a mother of two, is a graduate of private, unranked Southwestern Law School, which is located in Los Angeles. She said that when she graduated the chances of landing a job at a major law firm were slim. But she had a dream to swim in the big water with the real sharks, so she set her plan in motion.
As described in the first parts of her book, Gezerseh used a background in documentary film making to create a plan that could be successful in a run at a BigLaw job. After being told that a graduate of her school had virtually no chance of that type of job, she set to work, first making a spreadsheet of every contact she had in the legal profession. Then, by chance, she made contacts with summer interns from the bigger firms at her summer internship with Public Counsel.
With all of those contacts, she reached out and got a few (bad) interviews. She did not land a job but said that she learned and grew with each failure. Eventually she connected with a Jones Day associate, who got her in a position to interview with the firm. At her hire, she became the only graduate of her law school to work at Jones Day.
Looking around at her law firm and back at her law school experience, she realized that, if other people in similar positions could follow her path, they could get the positions they wanted. She boiled it down to a few simple principles that emphasize persistence and the willingness to fail.
Primarily, though, to Gezerseh, her success was the result of the creation of a network of people who could help and a path toward creating that network. Once she had reduced her experiences to writing, she began to share it with other people seeking legal jobs. And she saw that her approach did work for others.
“I started a blog,” she said. “And people started getting jobs.”
That blog, which eventually had 16,000 subscribers, evolved into this book. Readers who would like to read Gezerseh’s entire story and access her complete set of job-hunting blueprints can get the book from her website.
Now, after 10 years as a business litigator at Jones Day, Gezerseh is now happily a member of a boutique Los Angeles law firm which has as a part of its client base referrals from her prior firm.
She has taught her job seeking skills at her alma mater and has recently accepted a position at the University of Southern California School of Law to do the same there.
She exists online at her blog, breakintobiglaw.com, on Twitter at @lawcareerlab, and at her new website http://www.lawcareerplaybook.com/
She has kindly made an offer to Legal News readers to send a free copy of her book to the first three people who contact her through her website and request one.