If You Are Waiting for Market to Improve to Find Your Perfect Job, Stop Waiting!

I understand that lawyers are risk averse (that’s our job to manage risk!). But if you are passively waiting for market conditions to improve and for your perfect job to appear, that’s a bad plan. Know instead that demand for legal services is at its highest since the Great Recession. Is there no place to go but down? Experts are monitoring the global economy for a slowdown, and the Bay Area housing market is cooling off.

To get a snapshot of the currently healthy legal market, go to job search engines like www.indeed.com or www.linkedin.com, and put in the titles of jobs you want in the locations you are interested in. This baseline will unlikely improve in the near future.

If you are concerned about a downturn, be aware that the legal market lags the business market. Why do we see business jobs impacted by the economy before lawyers’? I think it’s because the demand for a legal position has to be clearly justified before an employer will hire, so by the time there is a legal opening, demand for the role has built up. Employers will continue to hire lawyers until the req is filled, even if a downturn starts to happen. So the good news for lawyers is we usually get the heads up that legal jobs will be impacted by seeing what’s happening with business jobs first.