Author: TSA Press

Last week, I wrote an article about how law firms sometimes treat job candidates poorly throughout the hiring process. The article generated some positive feedback, and I received a number of emails from readers about how parts of the hiring process are tough and even annoying for job candidates. Fortunately for me, it has been a while since I sought a law firm job, and now I run my own law firm. However, I definitely remember some annoying parts of the law firm hiring process that are somewhat unnecessary and can be eliminated in order to relieve the stress experienced by job candidates.

Thank-You Emails

Probably one of the most annoying parts of the hiring process is thank-you emails. As many people within the legal industry already know, job candidates are usually expected to write thank-you emails to the people with whom they interviewed. These emails are not only supposed to convey gratitude to the interviewer but also relate continued interest in the firm to which the candidate has interviewed.

When I was a job candidate, I experienced a lot of stress around thank-you emails. I read each of my thank-you emails probably ten times before sending them in order to make sure that I did not make mistakes and that everything sounded okay. In addition, some of the recruiters with whom I worked even asked to review my thank-you emails before I sent them out to ensure that they were satisfactory. This demonstrates how important thank-you emails can be, and the substantial impact they may have on the hiring process. During my interviews, I made sure to jot down notes about the people with whom I was interviewing to make sure that I had plenty of material to write about in my thank-you emails.

However, what benefits can really be derived from thank-you emails? Of course, it makes sense that people should covey continued interest in a position in order to stay on top of the heap of job candidates looking for a role. However, thank-you emails do not really convey too much information about job candidates and are usually treated as an annoying task that needs to be checked off when applying for a job.

When I interviewed candidates for jobs, I usually never even read the thank-you emails I received. I would usually just see the email flash up on my Outlook, and kind of feel bad that the job candidate had to comport with the convention that she or he had to send a thank-you email. If individuals involved in the hiring process want to make things easier for job candidates, they should tell people during interviews that no thank-you emails are necessary. This would eliminate one source of stress for many job candidates and ensure that reviewers focus on the attributes of a job candidate that have a bigger impact on whether that person is a good fit for an open position.

Cover Letters

Cover letters are another annoying part of the law firm hiring process. Don’t get me wrong, cover letters can sometimes be helpful for law firms and job candidates. In certain instances, job candidates might need to explain why they are interested in a given position because of a nontraditional background. However, when a job candidate is applying to an ordinary job for ordinary reasons (i.e. to do legal work at an average firm and earn a paycheck) it is oftentimes annoying and time-consuming to draft a cover letter.

Usually, the function of a cover letter is supplanted by an email, and writing an email is generally easier than drafting a document in Word that is separate from other application materials. However, when I was searching for jobs earlier in my career, some firms explicitly required a separate cover letter and noted that applications would not be considered if a cover letter wasn’t included. Perhaps such a requirement was established merely to weed out candidates who were applying to jobs en masse or at random. However, firms should not make cover letters mandatory, because the vast majority of positions do not require the additional explanation that is typically conveyed in a cover letter.

Asking Questions During Interviews

The first time I was interviewed for a firm job, the interviewer asked me if I had any questions for her, and I said I didn’t. The interviewer seemed surprised by my response, and I was not hired for the job. I later found out that you are supposed to ask questions at job interviews, purportedly to show that you’ve done your research and are interested about a job. Also, people generally like talking about themselves and their firms. As a result, in every subsequent interview, I did cursory research about firms with which I was interviewing and had questions in the can to ask.

However, when people apply to ordinary jobs for ordinary reasons, there may be situations when a job candidate does not have questions. And there shouldn’t be an artificial expectation that job candidates should ask questions, since this just imposes more burdens on people searching for jobs.

All told, job candidates need to deal with a number of annoying practices while searching for jobs, and this adds to the stress these folks already experience. Law firms should take a hard look about certain norms of the hiring process that may be eliminated in order to streamline the process of looking for jobs.

Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothmanlawyer.com.

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You’ve likely heard of “feeder judges” — that is, the federal judges who send the most clerks on to work for Supreme Court justices — but we suspect you’ve not yet heard about the new phenomenon of “academic feeder judges.” According to a study by Florida International University law professor Howard Wasserman, if one of your career goals is to eventually become a law professor, then your best bet may be to get a clerkship with one of the judges named in this new ranking of sorts.

Law.com has some more details on Wasserman’s study:

The paper, titled “Academic Feeder Judges,” is the first comprehensive look at which jurists have the most former clerks working in legal academia. …

“Given the intimate (if not essential) connection between clerkships and the legal academy, the time is right to identify academic feeder judges—the judges for whom significant numbers of law professors clerked at the beginning of their careers and the judges who ‘produce’ law professors from the ranks of their former clerks,” reads the paper….

In all, Wasserman and his team of researchers examined the résumés of about 10,000 full-time law professors, nearly 38 percent of whom had worked as judicial law clerks in the past, to see compile the list of which lower court federal judges had the most former clerks working as law professors (by a measure of eight or more).

Here is the ranking for the top five academic feeder judges, out of a list of just over 101, each of whom launched the careers of more than 14 academics:

Judge Guido Calabresi, Second Circuit: 42
Judge Stephen Reinhardt, Ninth Circuit (deceased): 32
Judge Stephen Williams, D.C. Circuit: 29
Judge Dorothy Nelson, Ninth Circuit: 28
Judge Richard Posner, Seventh Circuit (retired): 28
Judge Harry Edwards, D.C. Circuit: 22

Here are some additional fun facts from Wasserman’s study:

• For lower court judges appointed since 1995, Judge Merrick Garland of the D.C. Circuit leads the way, with 15 former clerks now teaching.
• Former law professors who later became judges have more former clerks working as law professors (e.g., Judge Calabresi, former dean of Yale Law; Judge Williams, former professor at Colorado Law; Judge Nelson, former professor at USC Law; and Judge Posner, former professor at Chicago Law).
• On the Supreme Court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has the most former clerks who are now working as law professors (29), followed by Justice Stephen Breyer (24), with Justice Clarence Thomas in third place (13).
• Traditional feeder judges largely overlap with academic feeder judges. Since 2004, 11 lower court judges have placed 20 or more clerks at SCOTUS, and seven of those judges now have 10 or more former clerks in legal academia.

Congratulations if you were able to land a coveted job as a law professor after you completed your judicial clerkship. Not only did your valuable clerkship experience help you get your job, but it also helped your judge earn a spot on a new ranking.

Want to Be a Law Prof? Clerk for These Judges [Law.com]

Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

* A Baltimore man is claiming a constitutional right to sell pizza out of his food truck. Didn’t Patrick Henry say “give me pizza, or give me death”?… [Baltimore Sun]

* A New York lawyer has been suspended from practice for assaulting a woman he met through an online dating service. [Bloomberg Law]

* A Utah man charged with dealing drugs claims he was “breaking bad” to pay a lawyer to handle an unrelated sexual assault case. [New York Post]

* A man has sued the city of Honolulu and its police force for purportedly making him lick a urinal. [Fox News]

* The lawyer for the alleged Monsey Hanukkah attacker has been scolded by the judge on the case for allegedly tipping off media to a sealed hearing in the matter. [New York Post]

Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothmanlawyer.com.

“This year’s drought is unprecedented, causing food shortages on a scale we have never seen here before,” said Dr. Michael Charles, Head of the International Federation of the Red Cross’ Southern Africa cluster in a public statement. “We are seeing people going two to three days without food, entire herds of livestock wiped out by drought and small-scale farmers with no means to earn money to tide them over a lean season.”

Families hit by the deadly threat of famine can find some support in relief agencies, but as the World Food Programme (WFP) has made quite clear, this level of need will overwhelm relief capacity.

“As things stand, we will run out of food by [the] end of February, coinciding with the peak of the hunger season – when needs are at their highest,” said Niels Balzer, WFP’s Deputy Country Director in Zimbabwe in one statement.

Trees for the Future Executive Director John Leary says both farmers and relief agencies are making the same grave error.

“There is too much reliance on maize,” he says. “Smallholder farmers living on the edge of poverty are gambling with their livelihoods, health, and lives when they only plant one crop. What happens when the rains don’t come or a pest ravages the produce? You’re left with nothing.”

In particular, Zambia has historically produced maize as a staple crop, but in the last five years drought has decimated the country’s production. In 2019 the country’s harvest neared a decade low with the national harvest falling to 2 million metric tons, that’s compared to a 2017 high of 3.6 million. Decreased supply and inflated prices has left more than 2 million Zambians food insecure.

“Zambian farmers, and farmers in other developing countries, will continue seeing inconsistent yields as long as the planet continues to warm,” Leary says. “But farmers can protect themselves from those inconsistencies by protecting their land and diversifying what they grow.”

In semi-arid regions like Sub-Saharan and Southern Africa, the low rainfall and unrelenting heat means that farmers should be strategic about what they grow. Periods of drought are to be expected. Families in this region of the world are well-accustomed to lean seasons when there is little to eat because of growing conditions.

Trees for the Future (TREES), an international development organization, uses agroforestry and regenerative agriculture training to help smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa escape hunger and poverty, while improving their ecosystems and the environment. Contrary to the monocropping intensification techniques (one crop) used by farmers around the world, TREES teaches farmers to plant productive polycultures. The Forest Garden Approach teaches families to protect, diversify, and optimize their land by planting fast-growing trees, fruit trees, and permagardens.

Leary says the first step smallholder farmers can take toward achieving food security is to plant a wall of trees around their farm. In zones across Africa where livestock roam free much of the year, living fences provide a free and renewable barrier to herding animals as well as harsh winds. Once land is protected he says the soil improves and farmers can plant a variety of crops. Just as a financial portfolio should be diversified, so too should a farm.

“The maize may fail due to drought one year, but hardier crops like sorghum and cassava would fare much better,” Leary says. “And though an early or late start of the rains could ruin an entire monocrop, tree crops like avocados, macadamia nuts and cashews will be a lot less affected.”

While there are barriers to acquiring seeds and learning new farming tactics, stakeholders in the region are recognizing the need for crop diversity in the region. A notable voice on the issue is Zambia’s Vice President Inonge Wina. Wina has been publicly encouraging Zambians to reduce their reliance on corn in their diets and look to more nutrient-rich and drought-tolerant options.

“The Vice-President has appealed to all Zambians to focus on diversifying diets at household-level,” said Permanent Secretary in the Office of the Vice-President Stephen Mwansa in a statement. “The switch is one of the low-cost and effective ways of also addressing stunting and malnutrition in the country, as well as assurance of food security at domestic and community-levels.”

“It’s promising to see a national leader advocate for crop and nutrient diversity,” says Leary. “The next step is convincing local farmers that there is a better option out there and helping farmers to think differently about their production systems.”

Leary’s organization began implementing and measuring the benefits of the Forest Garden Approach in Sub-Saharan Africa in 2014. Since then, Trees for the Future has helped more than 73,000 people revitalize their lands and achieve food and income security. Using the FAO Household Food Insecurity Access Scale and the Household Dietary Diversity Score, TREES saw farmers’ food insecurity rates drop by 33 percent and dietary diversity scores improve by 44 percent.

“We’re working in some of the hottest, driest places in the world. But we see Senegalese and Tanzanian farmers using climate-smart permaculture and agroforestry to sustain themselves through drought,” Leary says.

Changing weather patterns and increased frequency and severity of droughts are unquestionably tied to global warming. This is exacerbated by unsustainable land use techniques, particularly the widespread use of fire to clear land for monocropping. Shortsighted slash-and-burn tactics are widely used in Southern Africa — in satellite imagery, fires in Australia and the Amazon pale in comparison to those burning on one-hectare farms in Sub-Saharan and Southern Africa. The lack of rain hasn’t kept Zambian farmers from burning their fields either. And sadly, these practices contribute to the cycle of drought and warming.

And while agribusinesses and farmers are leading contributors to land degradation and a changing climate, they are also the solution.

“The solution to climate change in the long term, is also the solution to hunger and famine right now,” says John Leary, Trees for the Future Executive Director. “When we transform the way we grow our food, we will reduce our impact on the environment, and we can also become more resilient, and less vulnerable to drought, natural disasters, and disease.”

Trees for the Future currently works in Senegal, Cameroon, Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. Their training materials are free and open to the public in Trees for the Future’s Forest Garden Training Center.

Post published in: Featured

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