Office of Career Services Blog: January 2007 Archives

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January 16, 2007

Winter OCI 2007 Introduction

An orientation session for Winter OCI will be held this Thursday January 18; 12:20; 100 Hutchins Hall.

This meeting will give an overview of the Winter OCI program, held over several days this February (generally on Thursdays, Fridays and Mondays) at the Law School. Bidding instructions, interviewing procedures and deadlines will be discussed.

First year students who plan to participate in Winter OCI should attend this meeting.

Posted by hafeezt at 04:02 PM | Comments (0)

UM Law Alum '97 Professer Jefferey Fisher recognized as one of the American Lawyer-Young Litigator Fab-50

Professor Jefferey Fisher, a '97 UM Law School grad and currently a professor of law at Stanford Law School, is a leading Supreme Court litigator and nationally recognized expert on criminal procedure, Jeffrey Fisher has argued several and worked on dozens of other cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. His successes include bringing and winning the landmark cases of Blakely v. Washington, in which the Court held the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial applies to sentencing guidelines and Crawford v. Washington, in which he persuaded the Court to adopt a new approach to the Constitution's Confrontation Clause.

In 2006, the National Law Journal named Professor Fisher one of the 100 Most Influential Lawyers in America. In addition to his Supreme Court practice, Professor Fisher has published several articles on various criminal and constitutional issues, and he speaks regularly to judicial conferences and leading legal organizations. He joined the law school faculty from the national law firm of Davis Wright & Tremaine LLP where he also offered his services pro bono to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. Professor Fisher clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.

Posted by hafeezt at 11:57 AM | Comments (0)

January 12, 2007

Resume Fraud

While there may be a fine line between advocating for yourself on your resume and inflating it, the truth is that the latter is not only unethical, it can land you in a lot of trouble with prospective employers. One associate at Bracewell & Giuliani's Washington, D.C., office was accused of inflating his resume by the DC Bar counsel. The associate quit Bracewell soon after the firm learned of the charge, which arose after the associate used a legal recruiter to help with the attempted lateral move. See the full artile at: http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1167732120905

Posted by hafeezt at 04:20 PM | Comments (0)

Upcoming Progams

Upcoming Programs

1) Introduction To Winter 2007 On-Campus Interviewing; Thursday,
January 18; 12:20; 100 Hutchins Hall.
This meeting will give an overview of the Winter OCI program, held
over several days this February (generally on Thursdays, Fridays and
Mondays) at the Law School. Bidding instructions, interviewing
procedures and deadlines will be discussed. First year students who
plan to participate in Winter OCI should attend this meeting.

2) Perspectives on Judicial Clerkships; Thursday, January 25, 2007;
12:20 p.m.-1:20 p.m.; 250 Hutchins Hall
Why clerk? What is the difference between clerking for an appellate
judge and a trial judge? What is a bankruptcy clerkship like? Is it
worth clerking if I don't want to litigate? Can I obtain a clerkship
if I'm not on Law Review? What is the value of a state court
clerkship?
What do magistrate judges do and what are those clerkships like? Come
hear the real scoop from a distinguished panel of Michigan law alums
as they discuss their clerkships and why you should apply for one of
the best jobs in law. Open to all students.

3) Reception of the Michigan State Bar Section on Taxation,
Thursday, January 25, 2007; 4:30 - 6 p.m. in 132 Hutchins Hall.
Interested in tax law? Come meet lawyers that practice tax law in
a variety of settings. Open to all students. Food will be provided.

4) Perspectives on State Court Clerkships; Thursday, February 1,
2007; 12:20-1:20 p.m.; 250 Hutchins Hall
State court clerkships are found at both trial and appellate levels
and deal with a wide range of subjects-everything from contract and
tort disputes, to divorce, custody and probate issues. Often
overlooked by students in the clerkship hunt, most legal disputes in
the U.S. are handled in state courts and these clerkships provide
excellent educational and mentoring experiences. A panel of UMLS
alums will describe their experiences clerking for judges in state
trial, appellate, and specialty courts. Open to all students.

Other Announcements

1) Employers continue to contact the Office of Career Services
seeking candidates so we encourage you to check the postings often.
We update job postings daily on our web site (
www.law.umich.edu/currentstudents/careerservices/jobbulletin.htm[1])
and in the job binders in our office.

2) Diversity Scholarships
To increase diversity in the legal profession in general, and their
organization in particular, many legal employers are offering
diversity scholarships, some of which include a summer associate
position with the organization. The Office of Career Services has
compiled the information that we have received on these scholarships,
and they are available for your review in our office, 210 Hutchins
Hall. Deadlines for applying vary, so we encourage you to review
them soon.

3) Employer Receptions
We have had more employers than ever inform us that they plan to host
receptions for first-year students this term in Ann Arbor. As a
service to the employer and to you, we will forward their invitations
to you on Mondays and Thursdays. Most will ask students to RSVP.
Professional courtesy dictates that if you RSVP you need to attend
and that if you want to attend you need to RSVP. Unless the
invitation states otherwise, business casual dress is appropriate.

Office of Career Services
University of Michigan Law School
210 Hutchins Hall
625 S. State St.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1215
phone: 734-764-0546
fax: 734-764-5228
lawcareers@umich.edu
www.law.umich.edu/currentstudents/careerservices

Posted by hafeezt at 04:17 PM | Comments (0)

What Are We Really Looking For in the Name of Work-Life Balance

Anrie Herz is a practicing attorney and prolific blogger on "Legal Sanity" found at www.arnieherz.com. He is also reknown as an expert in issues dealing with work-life balance for lawyers. He recently released an e-book on his blog entitled, "Beyond Balance: How to Cultivate Work-Life Synergy in the Law" It is available free of charge for anyone who visits his blog. It's a quick read, only 12 pages, but well worth the time.

Below is an excerpt from the e-book:

If you ask lawyers (whether male or female, seasoned or newly-minted) to describe their work-life issues, you’ll get many different responses, including:

· I love my work, but I don’t have time for personal pursuits

· I don’t like my work and have no time for personal pursuits

· My work life is dull and boring compared to my personal life

· My work and personal lives are both unfulfilling

· The people I deal with at work are draining

· My work tasks are unchallenging and depleting

At first glance, these complaints seem quite distinct.

But, on closer inspection, we can see that they’re all expressions of discontent with how practitioners are engaging and handling the lawyer experience and its three component parts:

1. Time

2. Relationships

3. Tasks

We feel distressed when any of these three components is deficient and depleting us. And if more than one of the triad is impaired (as is usually the case), our distress and discontent only increases.

Lawyers feeling the fallout from this impairment often wonder: “What is the purpose of this? I want to experience more meaning in life. How do I find my way to happiness?”

While some people dismiss work-life issues in the law as bunk, articles like this one about workaholics and this one about the best companies to work for evince that this is not a red herring matter for a profession populated by stressed, unhappy and defecting practitioners.

Work-life synergy is a subject that’s been near and dear to me as I’ve traveled my own career path and developed content for this blog.

I’d love for you to read the eGuide and share it with your co-workers and friends in the service professions. Also, please feel free to give me your feedback on the Guide and its core message about moving beyond balance.

Posted by hafeezt at 02:51 PM | Comments (0)

Networking Basics

As a law student seeking out the perfect job, and later as an attorney looking to expand your professional and personal experiences and client base, networking is a key element for success. The OCS Library has a great book on networking "Never Eat Alone" by Keith Ferrazzi. We will summarize portions of this book in this post and subseqent posts.

Ferrazi has an M.B.A. from Harvard, and former Chief Marketing Officer for Deloitte. Ferrazzi describes his book as "The Ultimate Networker Reveals how to Build a Lifelong Community of Colleagues, Contracts, Friends, and Mentors."

Networking Basics

•Be Generous: Key to networking is generosity. Networking should be viewed as connecting with others. The more people you help, the more help you'll have and the more hep you'll have helping others.

•Don't keep score: Networking is not quid pro quo. Real networking is based on recognition of mutual need. You give to others freely, and do not keep tally of how much equity you have in a relationship. Give freely, and more often than not, you will take freely.

•Be open to asking for help, advice, connections from others. Do not be shy. The biggest hurdle to effective networking is this feeling of not wanting to take a free bee from someone. Get over it.

Posted by hafeezt at 02:29 PM | Comments (0)

Etiquette for the Bar

Each fall, at the Office of Career Service's Resume/Cover Letter workshops we remind students to "Google" themselves on the web to make sure that their blogs (facebook, myspace, xanga, etc.) do not contain materials which students may find embarassing and prospective employers may find distasteful or outright inappropriate. Students usually get the point immediately, and endeavor to "clean" out their blogs.

For those students who have not taken heed (and for those who did heed our advice), the article below should prove to be very interesting (and entertaining):

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i19/19a03101.htm

From the issue dated January 12, 2007

Etiquette for the Bar

First-year students at Drake U.'s law school learn the value of online discretion

By KATHERINE MANGAN

A young lawyer named Christy loves Jose Cuervo and hot guys and tends to dump work on her uptight colleague, Dillon, who finds it really annoying when she goes crying to their boss to gain sympathy. He is eager to share details about an impending company buyout that he learned about during lunch with some corporate bigwigs.

They had not imagined that their boss might be reading such juicy tidbits on their Facebook pages, one of which shows Christy posing seductively in a low-slung miniskirt, holding a beer. Dillon's, while less shocking at first glance, reveals confidential client information and broadcasts a pending deal the company would prefer to keep under wraps.

The characters are fictional, but their habit of divulging information to employers, colleagues, and clients sounds all too familiar to the two Drake University law professors who created them. Lisa A. Penland, an associate professor of law, and Melissa H. Weresh, a professor of law and assistant director of legal writing, are on a mission to teach law students how to be more professional in an age of bare-all online communication.

"Our students have been raised in a culture in which they communicate very informally and put things out about themselves that we never would have dreamed of sharing with other people," says Ms. Penland.

Besides being overly informal, today's students sometimes show a lack of respect for authority, the professors say.

Both professors have received e-mail messages from students challenging their assignments or explaining why they are too busy to meet in person. (One student said he had an international business to run during his spare time.) Some of the messages are light on capital letters and punctuation marks.

"There's an assumption that you can be informal regardless of who your audience is," says Ms. Penland. Being professional "is not just merely being polite," she adds. "It affects your credibility in the legal and business world."

Last fall the two professors presented a workshop to 160 first-year Drake law students, titled "Professionalism and the Google Generation: What Life on the Internet Left Behind." This month the duo will present their work at the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools, in Washington, and they hope to take their show on the road to other colleges.

Public vs. Private

One of the pair's goals is to help students realize that many communications they consider private are actually out there for the world to see.

That became painfully clear last year when Celeste F. Bremer, a local federal judge who was cruising the Internet with her daughter, stumbled upon a Facebook page set up by Drake law students.

The rant-filled "I Hate Legal Writing" group page included comments that the two Drake professors, both of whom teach that subject, found threatening. Judge Bremer, of the U.S. District Court in Des Moines, also came across another group that called itself the "Drake Law Drunks." Judge Bremer, who had recently taught a course at Drake and had close ties to the law school, contacted the administration.

"In my e-mail to the deans, I said, 'No one's a bigger supporter of the First Amendment than the court, but students need to act professionally. They're not in high school anymore,'" she said.

University officials began an investigation that included background checks of a few students. "That made some of the students upset because they felt we had been snooping around on their Facebook," Ms. Penland says. "They genuinely didn't understand the public nature of what they were doing. ... Rather than simply saying 'You guys are stupid I can't believe you put this out there,' we wanted to do something constructive."

She and Ms. Weresh developed a workshop in which students break into small groups to analyze questionable exchanges and comments in blogs, Web pages, and e-mail messages. For entertainment value, the professors created exaggerated examples of boorish behavior, as well as more-subtle examples of disrespectful e-mail message and online chats. The goal is to force students to draw the line between appropriate and inappropriate conversation.

The professors started by looking for Facebook pages whose authors identified themselves as law students. "One student posted pictures of herself in a string bikini, and another picture showed her drinking with a caption like 'Just before I puked at Law Ball,'" Ms. Weresh says.

Working with the university's technology experts, they created Facebook pages for their fictional characters, Lawgirl and Lawboy. On the pages, the two young associates rant about obnoxious partners at their firm piling work on them and brag about how schmoozing and sucking up will one day help them become partners. The professors "howled" as they created the pages, Ms. Weresh says.

Monitoring Tone

The professors say that they are not trying to tell students to avoid MySpace or Facebook, but that students should restrict access to their pages and be careful about what they post.

Students can also hurt their images by sending out e-mail messages that do not show respect for the recipients, Ms. Weresh says. She and Ms. Penland have collected examples of such missives, including some that challenge professors' grading policies or teaching methods.

"This generation is more demanding and tends to feel more entitled to collaboration than we feel is appropriate," says Ms. Weresh, adding that students' messages often reflect this "lack of respect for a hierarchy of authority."

The students could be in for a tough adjustment when they land their first jobs, she says. "Even if you end up with a bunch of laid-back Millennials running a law firm, there's still going to be a hierarchy when you walk into a courtroom."

Trisha A. Fillbach, director of career development at Drake University Law School, says her office also warns students about the Facebook factor. Employers have told her that they regularly Google potential hires and learn more than they need to know about candidates who record their lives on blogs. Some employers go a step further, checking out MySpace and Facebook pages.

"Most of the students I encounter are very mature and understand that perception is everything," Ms. Fillbach says. But her office is telling students that "if anything is out there, it's time to clean it up."

She recently logged on to MySpace and typed "Drake Law School" to see what would pop up. A student who had applied to Drake, among other law schools, shared her impressions in a page "that was full of the F-word," Ms. Fillbach says. "She wasn't saying anything negative about the schools," but her language probably wouldn't help her chances of getting in to any of them.

A quick check on MySpace yielded an eye-popping array of entries from current and recent law students. One recent graduate of an East Coast law school starts his expletive-laden entry with "Sweet! I failed the Texas Bar." He then goes on to detail how miserable law school was, how pointless the bar exam is, and how he will probably fail it again. "Perhaps I should have just sat their [sic] and forced myself to write more regurgitated [expletive] instead of walking out of each of the five sections an hour early," he muses.

Jay Grimes, a 34-year-old first-year law student at Drake, says that he doesn't have a Facebook account, but that the workshop did make him more aware of the dangers of sending out hasty e-mail messages.

"Once you click the send button, whatever you have written goes out and is beyond your control," he says. "If you are not comfortable with shouting your comments from a street corner, you probably shouldn't convey them via electronic print."
http://chronicle.com
Section: Information Technology
Volume 53, Issue 19, Page A31

Posted by hafeezt at 12:13 PM | Comments (0)

Largest Law Firms Hire From Elite Schools

A recent article featured in the National Law Journal on January 10, 2007 discusses which law schools the largest law firms hire from in greatest numbers. Michigan, not surprisingly, was among the top ten schools. Some of the schools that did remarkably well with large law firms such as Columbia and University of Chicago send most of their students to New York and Chicago respectively. Not so for Michigan, which has a student body that tends to spread out geographically more than Michigan's peer school, according to Susan Guindi, Assistant Dean of Career Services at Michigan. You can read the full article below.

With a few exceptions, the nation's largest law firms continued to rely on renowned private schools in the eastern half of the country to fill their first-year associate ranks in 2006.

Columbia Law School was the top pick among the country's 250 biggest law firms for hiring first-year associates last year. Some 69.6% of the law school's graduates who earned juris doctor degrees in 2006 went to work for law firms included in The National Law Journal's 2006 annual survey of the nation's 250 largest law firms. Of the 450 graduates at Columbia Law School, 313 took jobs as first-year associates at NLJ 250 firms.

Not surprisingly, the nation's largest law firms, whose sizes ranged from 3,535 attorneys down to 172 attorneys, typically turned to elite law schools east of the Mississippi River for first-year hires in 2006. The lone showing from the West Coast among the top 10 schools most often tapped by big law firms was Stanford Law School.

Columbia Law School Dean David Schizer attributed his school's strong performance in part to the large number of applications to its juris doctor program that it receives each year.

"It allows us to be incredibly selective," he said.

Rounding out the top five schools that sent the greatest percentage of juris doctor graduates to NLJ 250 firms were University of Pennsylvania Law School, at 68.2%; University of Chicago Law School, at 65.1%; Harvard Law School, at 59.2%; and Duke Law School, at 56.8%.

Yale Law School, routinely ranked No. 1 in U.S. News & World Report's annual ranking of graduate and professional schools, ranked 15th among the law schools recruited most often by the NLJ 250 law firms. Among its 203 juris doctor graduates, 46.8%-or 95 graduates-went to NLJ 250 firms. Contributing to Yale's relatively lower percentage are the large numbers of graduates who apply for judicial clerkships after earning a juris doctor degree, said Janet Conroy, director of public affairs at Yale Law School. The same held true for Stanford Law School, ranked second in this year's U.S. News & World Report but eighth among the schools from which the NLJ 250 firms recruited.

The University of Minnesota Law School, ranked 19th in 2006 by U.S. News & World Report, sent a relatively low percentage of students- 18.1%-to NLJ 250 firms. Of its 270 graduates, 49 went to those shops.

Susan Gainen, director of career and professional development at the University of Minnesota Law School, attributed that percentage to about one-quarter of the school's graduates taking judicial clerkships after graduation. She also said that many graduates stay in the Twin Cities area. "We have some excellent firms, but not many in the NLJ 250," she said.
MOST POPULAR FOR HIRING
Law schools with the highest percentage of graduates hired by NLJ 250 firms.
Law School Percentage hired Number of J.D.s in 2006 Number hired
________________________________________
Columbia Law School 69.6% 450 313
________________________________________
University of Pennsylvania 68.2% 274 187
________________________________________
University of Chicago 65.1% 192 125
________________________________________
Harvard Law School 59.2% 571 338
________________________________________
Duke Law School 56.8% 220 125

________________________________________
New York University 56.6% 465 263
________________________________________
Cornell University 56.0% 193 108
________________________________________
Stanford Law School 54.9% 175 96
________________________________________
University of Michigan 54.3% 431 234
________________________________________
University of Virginia 54.1% 375 203
________________________________________
Northwestern University 54.0% 265 143
________________________________________
Georgetown University 53.0% 626 332
________________________________________
University of California-Berkeley 49.0% 300 147
________________________________________
Vanderbilt University 48.0% 202 97
________________________________________
Yale Law School 46.8% 203 95
________________________________________
Boston College 39.1% 284 111
________________________________________
George Washington 38.8% 482 187
________________________________________
Fordham University 38.8% 477 185
________________________________________
University of Texas 38.6% 502 194
________________________________________
University of Southern California 36.3% 215 78
________________________________________
Source: NLJ research
Duke edged out New York University School of Law, the sixth most popular supplier of first-year associates. Some 56.6% of the 465 New York law school graduates in 2006 headed to NLJ 250 firms.

Other schools among the top 10 were Cornell Law School, at 56.0%; Stanford at 54.9%; University of Michigan Law School, at 54.3%; and University of Virginia School of Law, at 54.1%. (Of the NLJ 250 firms, 19 did not respond to the survey's question about law schools.)

In 2005, when the NLJ looked at first-year associate hiring at just the top 50 law firms, Columbia was the No. 1 school. Other law schools among the top five in 2005 most often recruited were, in descending order, Northwestern University, University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, University of Chicago and Stanford.

A look at law firm hiring patterns in 2006 shows that the largest among the NLJ 250, Baker & McKenzie, recruited the largest number of its first-year associates from Georgetown University Law Center, which sent 53.0% of its graduates to NLJ 250 firms. Baker & McKenzie has 3,535 attorneys. Georgetown was ranked 12th among the most popular schools from which law firms recruited.

The second-largest law firm, DLA Piper, with 3,333 lawyers, hired from 38 different law schools, including some second- and fourth-tier schools. The greatest number of DLA Piper hires from any school was five graduates. The University of Michigan Law School and the University of Illinois College of Law each provided five first-year associates.

DLA Piper national hiring partner Benjamin Boyd said that some of the firm's most motivated and loyal associates have come from the upper ranks of less popular schools.

"They come in and want to knock the cover off the ball and prove something," said Boyd. He added that about 80% of the firm's first-year associates graduate from schools ranked in the top 50 by U.S. News & World Report.

The school relied upon the most by Jones Day, the third-largest law firm, was the University of Texas School of Law, which provided the 2,167-attorney enterprise with nine first-year associates. Jones Day also recruited six attorneys each from the University of Michigan, Georgetown and Case Western Reserve University School of Law.

Latham & Watkins, the nation's fourth-largest law firm with 1,951 lawyers, hired most of its 245 first-year associates in its U.S. offices from Harvard, which supplied 24 recruits. The law firm also hired 22 from Northwestern, 18 from Columbia and 17 from New York University.

The fifth-largest firm, New York's Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, with 1,915 attorneys, recruited most heavily from Columbia, which provided 14 of its first-year associates. Twelve graduates from Georgetown joined the firm, as did 11 from Harvard and 11 from University of Pennsylvania.

Law firms among the 250 largest also recruited from about 50 foreign law schools in 2006. Canada was the most popular source, where some 18 first-year associates came from University of Toronto Faculty of Law and 10 from McGill University Faculty of Law.

NLJ January 2007
What schools big firms hire from

Select 'Print' in your browser menu to print this document.
©2006 National Law Journal Online
Page printed from: http://www.nlj.com

Back to Article

________________________________________

FROM THE UPCOMING ISSUE
Largest law firms hire from elite schools
Leigh Jones/Staff reporter
January 10, 2007

With a few exceptions, the nation's largest law firms continued to rely on renowned private schools in the eastern half of the country to fill their first-year associate ranks in 2006.

Columbia Law School Dean David Schizer attributed his school's strong performance in part to the large number of applications to its juris doctor program that it receives each year.

"It allows us to be incredibly selective," he said.

DLA Piper national hiring partner Benjamin Boyd said that some of the firm's most motivated and loyal associates have come from the upper ranks of less popular schools.

Posted by hafeezt at 11:58 AM | Comments (0)

Top Ten Reasons To Become A Judicial Law Clerk

TOP TEN REASONS TO BECOME A JUDICIAL LAW CLERK

(taken from the University of Miami Law School)
1.) Sharpen your legal analysis
and reasoning skills as well as
research and writing skills

2.) No better way to get a
glimpse of the inner workings of
the judicial system

3.) Clerkship accustoms the
clerk to managing legal work,
meeting deadlines and evaluating
the merits of a legal situation
quickly and accurately

4.) Clerking affords you an extra
year or two after graduation to
determine what you really want
to do with your law degree

5.) Exposure to a wide variety of
practice areas can help you
better ascertain exactly what
type of law you want to practice

6.) Many firms will offer a Clerkship
Bonus ranging from approximately
$10,000-$30,000
(geographically determined) to
former clerks hired immediately
after the end of the clerkship
term

7.) Judges can assist you in finding
a job after your Clerkship
ends and can remain mentors
throughout your career

8.) Enables you to become more
comfortable and confident in the
courtroom

9.) Provides you with an opportunity
to observe and learn from
current practicing attorneys
(potential employers)

10.) The legal community views
judicial clerkships as highly prestigious
post-graduate opportunities
which aid new attorneys in
marketing themselves to firms,
government agencies and/or
public interest organizations

From the University of Miami School of Law

Posted by hafeezt at 11:56 AM | Comments (0)

Judicial Clerkships for the 2008 term

Dear 2Ls (and 3Ls). Welcome back to law school! And Happy New Year. I hope you had a restful break.

Believe it or not, it's time to seriously start thinking about applying for clerkships in the 2008 term. To that end I have attached a memo for you to read which outlines basic information about timing and the application process. Please read it, and more importantly, please review our Clerkship Handbook (the 2007-08 version will be online tomorrow) and the other resources on the Judicial Clerkship website: http://www.law.umich.edu/currentstudents/careerservices/judicialclerkship.htm

You are also now officially invited to join the lawclerks listserv. This is the primary method we use to keep you up to date on clerkship issues, announcements and current (and future) openings. To sign up for the listserv, please email either lawcareers@umich.edu or Tammy Sindlinger at sindling@umich.edu

Of course, I strongly encourage you to make an appointment for individual counseling to develop your clerkship strategy and to discuss your particular questions. Just call OCS at 734/764-0546 or stop by 210 HH.

We look forward to working with you. -Robin

*****************************
Save these dates:

Perspectives on Judicial ClerkshipsThursday, January 25, 2007, 12:20 p.m., 250 Hutchins Hall

Why clerk? What is the difference between clerking for an appellate
judge and a trial judge? How do federal and state court clerkships differ? Is it worth clerking if I don't want to litigate? Can I obtain a clerkship if I'm not on Law Review? Listen to several distinguished Michigan Law alums discuss their varied clerkship experiences and learn why you should apply for one of the best jobs in law. Open to all students.

***************************************

Perspectives on State Court Clerkships
Thursday, February 1, 2007, 12:20 p.m., 250 HH

State court clerkships are found at both trial and appellate levels and deal with a wide range of subjects-everything from contract and tort disputes, to divorce, custody and probate issues. Although most legal disputes in the U.S. are handled in state courts, they are often overlooked by students in the clerkship hunt-- yet these clerkships can provide excellent educational experiences. A panel of UMLS alums will describe their experiences clerking for judges in the state trial, appellate, and specialty courts. Open to all students.

Posted by hafeezt at 11:55 AM | Comments (0)

January 08, 2007

Wolverine Bar Association 2007 Summer Clerkship Program

(Taken from the UM Law Docket)

The Wolverine Bar Association is now accepting applications for the 2007 Summer Clerkship Program. First year minority law students are eligible to participate in the program.

Application packets are available in the Office of Student Affairs, 313 HH. All application materials must be received in .pdf or .tiff format by the Wolverine Bar Association Summer Clerkship Program Committee, c/o Cara Griffin at caragriffin@comcast.net, no later than Friday, January 19, 2007.

Applicants for the clerkship program must submit:
• Cover letter not exceeding one page in length, single-spaced, and explaining (i) the student’s career goals and he or she believes participating in the Program will further those objectives; (ii) the student’s commitment to practicing law in Michigan and connection to the Detroit area, and (iii) the student’s commitment to service through the WBA.
• An updated or current resume.
• An unofficial copy of the student’s law school transcript. Students who are selected to interview with the Program’s Committee must provide an official copy of his or her transcript at the interview.
• A writing sample not exceeding five pages in length, double-spaced, in the form of a legal memorandum or brief showing the applicant’s ability to identify and analyze legal issues. The writing sample may be an excerpt from a larger sample, if clearly identified as such.
• Two letters of recommendation from current or former employers, professors, or someone familiar with the applicant’s work.

Candidates selected to interview with the Committee will be notified by Friday, February 2, 2007. Interviews will be held on Saturday, February 10, 2007 at:

Dykema Gossett PLLC
400 Renaissance Center
Detroit, MI 48243

Applicants will be scheduled for three 15-minute interviews. Each student should plan on being available for 30 minutes before and after the scheduled interviews.

For further information, contact the Office of Student Affairs, 313 HH, 734.615.0019.

Posted by hafeezt at 09:53 AM | Comments (0)

Office of Career Services Blog

A forum to exchange ideas, advice, and news relating to the legal job search. Please refer to the Law School Career Services website for up-to-date information on programming and all job-search related tools.

January 16, 2007

Winter OCI 2007 Introduction

UM Law Alum '97 Professer Jefferey Fisher recognized as one of the American Lawyer-Young Litigator Fab-50

January 12, 2007

Resume Fraud

Upcoming Progams

What Are We Really Looking For in the Name of Work-Life Balance

Networking Basics

Etiquette for the Bar

Largest Law Firms Hire From Elite Schools

Top Ten Reasons To Become A Judicial Law Clerk

Judicial Clerkships for the 2008 term

January 08, 2007

Wolverine Bar Association 2007 Summer Clerkship Program