Harrison Barnes' Legal Career Advice Podcast

It is common for people to go to excellent law schools and start in significant firms, then have lousy legal careers that go nowhere. You can have every advantage on a silver platter. But none of this will matter if you do not have the values and a perception of the world that supports your legal career. LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/bcg-attorney-search Website: https://www.bcgsearch.com/...

There is nothing more important for law firms than appealing to the right sorts of attorneys to get them to go to work there. It needs to look like the best option for the kinds of attorneys the firm wants to hire. A law firm will do all sorts of things to appeal to attorneys to get them to work for it and stay at work billing hours. To do this, law firms need to portray themselves as different fr...

Giving up your search is the most serious mistake you can make. Many people are not reaching their potential and unhappy because they gave up. The purpose of this podcast is to motivate you to persist with your job search, and teach you where 95% of the business of law is going on - outside of the largest law firms and all over. Why? Because those 95% of law firms will hire you if you persist with...

Many attorneys believe that if they do well in law school, get a good job and work hard, they will have happy and successful law firm careers. Failure is far more likely than success. Most attorneys put a ton of work into becoming attorneys, working in law firms, and failing. But there are so many factors you will be unable to control that your odds of failure are much higher than your odds for su...

Something occurs in the minds of attorneys that prevents many from realizing their potential for success. They get hung up on whether they are being taken advantage of by their employers. In contrast, most successful lawyers trust the system to take care of them. They believe that if they do their best and give their best, the system will work out for them. In most organizations, there is a confli...

The happiest and most successful attorneys are often surprised when their success comes. You will do better when you stop prioritizing how things make you look and feel. When you remove yourself from the equation and just concentrate on what you can do, that feels right and makes you and others happy. Too many people base their lives and careers on others' opinions, withdraw when they do not get t...

Many attorneys feel angry or upset when employers offer them a job they believe is beneath their skillset or pays less than they think they should be making. Others get upset when they are not getting job offers at all. In this episode, you’ll learn why you shouldn’t get bitter. Here are some easy fixes to get your job search back on track.

Once someone invites you for an interview, they do not care about your resume. They care about five different issues entirely—and the better you understand these, the better off you will be. Your resume says most of what needs to be said. A legal employer may say after an interview that they are not hiring you because "your experience is not right," but that is rarely true. The reason legal employ...

Daily I receive calls from law firms and others, rejecting some candidates and expressing interest in others. I want to be clear—there are specific patterns in people who get the most interviews and jobs, and those that do not. This all comes through on their resumes. If you want to get a position, you can listen to my advice, or ignore it at your own peril.

When you are looking for a position, the greatest danger you face is others controlling the flow of information available to you. Because others control the information, most attorneys, law students, and legal staff only apply to a limited number of places limiting their opportunities. In this episode learn about all the places you should be looking for work.

It's not magic or parlor tricks that have helped struggling attorneys to secure incredible opportunities. Harrison has helped place many attorneys in prestigious law firms that, on paper, had a small probability of being hired. However, the attorneys who got these positions followed his guidelines and were able to achieve what seemed to be impossible.

The most common method of getting a position is through networking. You are better off using networking to get defined positions than just applying on your own. You can also find positions in the emerging marketplace through networking. If you are not networking to find a position, you are making a huge mistake.

You do not know of all of the legal jobs out there—nor will you ever know about all of the jobs. The more job search methods you employ in searching for a legal position, the more jobs you are likely to find. In this podcast learn about all the places you should be searching to find the best job possible!

The law school you went to matters surprisingly little the longer you are out of law school. Do not get me wrong, the law school you went to matters – but it does not matter forever. The law school is simply a way to distinguish you from the tens of thousands of people graduating from law school each year. After that, no one cares for the most part. There are far more important factors law firms l...

Getting fired, or experiencing the disapproval of a law firm, is very difficult for most attorneys. I have seen many attorneys go off the rails after losing their job or having a negative experience in a law firm, and it never ends well. At work and in life, it is always important to react in a positive way when something negative happens to you. This episode will show you how. 

Attorneys who limit their search to the market they are in severely hamper their career. Whether you are unemployed, underemployed, underappreciated, or need a new position, the smartest thing you can do is look at other markets. 

We are in for a different kind of legal job market recession that will be meaner, longer, and more devastating than anything we have ever seen.  The coronavirus recession is going to destroy countless legal careers and prevent tens of thousands of them from ever starting. This podcast will help you survive this recession.

Most of the news about practicing law is consistently negative-in fact, there is so much negative news about practicing law it is difficult to speak to an attorney or read a legal publication without hearing or seeing something negative about it. However, practicing law is not really all that bad. In fact, it can be about the clearest path to security, wealth and prestige there is. The complaints...

The hottest practice areas of 2019, as a percentage of the total interviews and placements of our candidates, were 1) Litigation 2) Corporate 3) Labor and Employment 4) Intellectual Property 5) Real Estate In this podcast, Harrison Barnes, Legal Recruiter discusses the reasons why these practice areas have been so popular in the past year and how you can take advantage of their popularity to advan...

This yearly report from BCG Attorney Search summarizes our placement of hundreds of attorneys in law firms throughout the country. By closely observing this process and the trends that reveal themselves, we get a profound understanding of the legal market and what is in demand in markets and practice areas across the nation. In this podcast, we share the insights gleaned from our deep understandin...

If you commit yourself to the practice of law and follow the rules, finding work should never be a problem. However, if you are having a difficult time finding a job or finding work, then one of three things is probably wrong: (1) You are doing something wrong in your job search; (2) You have been doing something wrong in your career; (3) You are sending off the wrong signals to the world-or you a...

A law license is essentially a business license. Once you pass the state bar you are granted a license to practice law in that state. You are now able to go into the market and charge a fee for legal services. The true value of passing the bar is not necessarily that you can go to work for someone else-it is also that you can go to work for yourself in a business that not everyone can do. Today we...

On this podcast, BCG Attorney Search Recruiting Manager Brie Mills and Founder/CEO Harrison Barnes discuss the two primary sources of career anxiety when practicing law. Career anxiety can easily get in the way of having a happy, successful career, and the first step to overcoming it is identifying where it comes from. They explain how to overcome your anxiety once you identify the source. And tak...

On this podcast, BCG Attorney Search Recruiting Manager Brie Mills, Recruiter Jennifer McNeil, and Founder/CEO Harrison Barnes discuss how you can be happier and have a better quality of life as an average attorney. So many attorneys strive to be the very best at the expense of their mental and physical health. Once you learn to accept that there is nothing wrong with being average, you can begin...

On this podcast, BCG Attorney Search Recruiting Manager Brie Mills and Founder/CEO Harrison Barnes discuss how any attorney can take control of their destiny by generating a large amount of business for themselves. So many attorneys rely on partners and others at their law firm to give them work, which puts them at a disadvantage later in their career. Once you learn how to generate business for y...