happy accidents
i’ve been hearing from an increasing number of law school alums that their own careers weren’t the result of their directed, dogged search for an area of law in which they wanted to practice, but instead was the culmination of a series of coincidences. i had a hard time swallowing this at first. i realize that right when you get out of law school, you’re not immediately going to find your dream job, that it might take a few years to be practicing in your favorite area of law. but until now i very much believed that on the Quest for My Career®, i’d find some amazing subset of law while in school and follow its thread out into the real world.
but with what happened tonight, i’m starting to believe the happy accident stories. earlier today we’d heard from the school that our grades, long kept in captivity in some secret, dingy vault miles below the school’s foundations, were going to be released. finally i could learn whether or not i flunked out, or flunked out with style. turns out i didn’t flunk out after all. i also had a practice mock interview scheduled tonight with a law school alum who graciously volunteered to help us burgeoning law students practice our interviewing skills. having happily established that i get to stick around for at least another semester, i went in to the interview expecting to just “shoot the shit” with a random alum.
the alum i interviewed with was a newly-minted associate attorney with one of the larger law firms in town. he was working in corporate litigation, a field that i have almost no interest in whatsoever. but figuring i needed to emphasize my “excellent research and writing skills”, i go on to explain a little about my past semester (studiously dodging the grades question) and how that must be very on-point with business litigation memo and brief writing. i mention the names of the professors we had last semester, and my interviewer’s eyes lit up at the mention of one of the professors. it turns out that he had had that professor for a corporate law class, and that, like myself and a lot of other people, he too struggled with what turned out to be an economics class in disguise. we spent the rest of the interview jovially talking about the craziness that is law school. at the end, i got the requisite business card, and a mention that if i needed some help figuring out the San Diego legal community, he would be more than happy to help. the professor coincidence made the interview a hell of a lot smoother than it could have been.
we head back to the career services office, me relating an anecdote from when i was still working in Boston and some of the bizarre corporate ethics issues we ran into in some immigration cases. as we enter the office, one of the career services counselors more or less thrust a box of sandwiches at us and asked us to stay and eat a bit. being a law student, it is a moral obligation for me to accept free food. my interviewer grabbed a few sandwiches, chatted a bit more, and then took his leave. during this last bit, another student in the room, a 2L, overheard that i had been working for an immigration firm. we started talking a bit about H-1Bs and PERM and how the economic turmoil of late has been upending hiring of foreign nationals. it turns out that the guy currently works at a local branch of one of the major multistate immigration law firms. he immediately asks me for a resume copy and says he’ll check if the local office needs 1Ls for the summer. job opportunities +2! then, out of the blue, he asks me if i had heard of a company where one of the other alumni interviewers was general counsel. incredibly enough, the company was one of my old firm’s major clients; we’d done a ton of various immigration cases for them, and the general counsel was someone with whom i’d chatted on a daily basis. we immediately launch into a long conversation about the company’s immigration work and what the company was like as a whole. turns out that my new immigration buddy was looking to apply with the company. i let this insane coincidence stir in my head a bit.
at this point, the career services counselor comes by to chat a bit about our interviewing experience, and then mentions that the alumni interviewer from that company wanted to talk with my immigration buddy about a job offer. i hung out a bit in the office to see if i could say hi to this alum before i left; a few moments later, he walks into the office and conducts an informal, friendly interview with immigration-buddy. i step off to the side to avoid being rude, but listen in on the job opportunity, a legal research position over in China. i can’t help but be amused, since i had done a good deal of work before with the China branch and knew some of the staff there. after the alum finished the interview, i step up to “introduce” myself, and the alum’s eyes brighten like a flash bulb. he asks me about how i’m finding law school and a bit of the recent immigration scuttlebutt, and then invites me to visit his office near LA on a free day and have lunch. he even mentions that his own paralegal, a person whom i also talked with frequently and knew very well, would be glad to see me. he offers me his card, briskly shakes my hand, and leaves for the evening.
it only hit me then that the entire night was a string of coincidences. the odds of these discrete events happening all in a row were ridiculously low. i’m idly considering hitting the local poker club around the corner just to see if this luck holds.
the notion that this all happened in the space of a couple of hours has me bewildered. but on a detached level, i recognize that i just had three very good ways to find a jobby job for the summer, and perhaps for something more substantial later on, presented to me during an evening i thought would consist of going through the motions of a fake interview. i’m still going to have to invest a bit of effort to find work, sure. but the next time i hear an attorney tell me that they found a job or even a calling they liked through a combination of happy accidents, i’ll be more inclined to believe them.
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