Lawyer Career Guide: How To Get Your First Job As a Lawyer in a Remote World

Searching for a job has never been easy for a law grad. With remote work gaining its momentum, the entire process seems to have become even more stressful — but only if you don't know how to use the power of online to your advantage.

That's why we've created a comprehensive guide to help aspiring lawyers to understand how to get a job at a law firm with no experience or find a remote job as fast and smoothly as possible. This guide would also be helpful for experienced attorneys with years of practice who want to become work from home attorneys and improve their personal online brand. 

With interviews moving to Zoom or phone, both law firms and rising talents are struggling to make informed choices: 

Although not disastrous, the chaos of job search in 2024 requires flexibility and patience from everybody involved.

Having numerous job options or none largely depends on where you want to work and which law area you are willing to practice. As one of the commenters on the Reddit thread noted, "For every practice area in the legal market that's taken a hit due to COVID, another practice area grew." It seems that the instability of the legal market accompanied by a boom of WFH (stands for Working-From-Home in case you haven't caught up yet) have created a perfect storm for the newcomers.

With a fluctuating legal jobs market, the least you can do is put in the work and adapt to the remote world. We hope this guide will help you increase your chances of striking a dream job right away. Let's start with the basics.

Some basic aspects of finding your first job (or any job, really) have hardly changed since 2019. Organizing your skills and achievements into a well-structured CV, writing an honest and moving application letter, or just knowing where to look for open online lawyer jobs — these are the things that remain crucial and largely unchanged.

The rise of remote lawyer jobs has only amplified the importance of making a good first impression. Let's go through the basics before moving on to more nuanced steps.

Your curriculum vitae is the first thing any recruiter sees. If you want to be considered for the role, you need to make a strong first impression. There are plenty of detailed guides to resume writing on the internet, so let's focus on the most essential elements:

Coming from law school or courses for legal professionals, you've probably written quite a few application letters in your life. No matter how experienced an application writer you are, try to always keep these suggestions in mind:

Sometimes, all it takes to find a dream job is to be in the right place at the right time. It may sound like a self-fulfilling prophecy, but let's mention it anyway: being on more specialized job search platforms increases your chances of finding the right work from home lawyer jobs. Pick up a healthy reading diet of main legal job platforms, and you'll be surprised to see how easy it is to keep up with the updates. Here's a list of websites that you might want to pay close attention to:

Networking has always been vital for building a successful career in law. Prestige law schools pride themselves on having direct pipelines to all the big law firms, and there's even a classic joke in the profession: "A good lawyer knows the law. A great lawyer knows the judge."

But how do you find the right people and connect professionally if the only window into the industry is your laptop screen? Here are the main strategies for finding remote jobs for attorneys.

Associates or legal professionals a few years ahead of you are the greatest source of relevant experience. Albeit probably starting before the pandemic, these people have just been where you are right now.

With most in-person meetups and networking events canceled, the best way to learn how to get a job as a lawyer from your seniors is to find them online and just reach out first. Go to LinkedIn, find junior lawyers from firms and companies that you'd like to work in, and just ask a couple of questions. Are their firms hiring right now? Looking back, what would they advise their younger selves if they could? Are there any other firms they can recommend knocking on? 

Don't overwhelm them with questions, but focus on 2-3 most important ones to start the dialogue. If they are willing to share their experience, maybe suggest having a quick call to talk in person. But don't push too hard if you see that a person is not willing to share — just make sure to reach out to several people to get diverse opinions.

You might be surprised how much wisdom, help, and fun happens behind the closed doors of professional groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Reddit. Don't try to exploit these communities for your benefit since it's easy to get banned there for pushing too hard. Just be there, watch the discussions, check attorney work from home jobs, and reach out if you need an honest opinion from fellow legal professionals.

Here's a non-exhaustive list of social media communities of lawyers, paralegals, and other legal professionals that you might want to keep in your sight:

Everybody's on LinkedIn, but few lawyers leverage this platform to create personal brands. Still, LinkedIn is by far the largest platform for your potential employers, colleagues, and clients. The good news is that you don't need to invest money or be a professional marketer to promote yourself on LinkedIn.

Start with these simple steps:

Read our 15-step deep dive into LinkedIn for lawyers if you want to dig deeper on this topic.

Extra curriculum stuff here. This might sound like a waste of time at first but try to approach your hobbies and interests more seriously. Go to online yoga group sessions if you enjoy practicing once in a while, or become a part of your local birdwatchers community if you enjoy observing nature.

Pick anything you love, but really commit to it and get to know other people with similar interests. You may never know where the next professional breakthrough will come from, but diving into other things you love will increase your chances of breaking through. Plus, it's just a great way to cope with stress and keep your mind curious.

Surviving law school may have been a challenge, but it's important to keep learning as you progress through your career. Naturally, you are going to deepen the expertise in your area of law practice, but there are other things you can start learning right now. 

Law school education is focused on practicing law, but in real life, the job doesn't end there. Daily communication skills are vital for reaching success in law. Lawyers negotiate with clients, resolve conflicts, and build working relationships with colleagues every day, and most young professionals come unprepared for these tasks.

The number of remote jobs for lawyers only increased the clients' need to stay in touch with their lawyers, so there's a growing demand for young legal professionals with outstanding soft skills.

Luckily, there's a lot of information on business communication ethics online, so you can catch up and be prepared for the avalanche of daily communications in work from home jobs for lawyers. 

If you have enough time and resources, search for Bridge-the-Gap courses for lawyers that cover extensively all the gaps between education and work. 

Conferences and learning events are places of extra knowledge and industry-specific insights that can only be matched by real-life experience. 

Thanks to booming remote activities, there's plenty of webinars to choose from. There's a monthly Career Development webinar from the American Bar Association or the already mentioned Bridge-the-Gap courses for legal professionals fresh out of law schools.

Once you choose resources that fit your career interests, make sure you take everything from them. Communicate with your mentors and fellow professionals, ask questions, and work them through. Remember that online learning events are about networking just as much as they are about learning.

Tech-savvy lawyers are a rare bird. The pandemic has urged many firms to pick up digital technology faster, but there's still plenty of room for improvement. A confident grasp of tech, from video conferencing software to the use of contract management tools, is an enormous competitive advantage for professionals doing their lawyer jobs remotely. And tech-savviness is one of the most prominent skills of future lawyers and, by extension, one of their greatest career assets. In short, get serious about technology and make sure to communicate your tech skills in your CV.

Not all tech skills are essential for lawyers. Despite all the buzz, you don't have to know how to code to be fit for the future. On the other hand, knowing your way around basic software tools widely used in the legal industry is vital. To make a great impression on your employer and to simplify your first month on the job, get familiar with these types of technology beforehand:

Most law grads face the same issue: they are qualified and ambitious, but they lack practical experience. Nobody expects recently graduated people to have years of practice behind their backs, but having relevant hands-on experience can give you just enough extra points to edge the rest of your competitors for the job spot.

Remember our list of legal job platforms? Those platforms are also great places to find internships, so don't be shy about browsing this section as well.

If you'd like to earn work experience while doing socially valuable work, look into public service opportunities. For instance, the American Bar Association offers a lot of pro bono and public service options for young lawyers. With the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, like mass evictions and the healthcare crisis, the demand for legal professionals is higher than ever. 

Let's say you followed every single piece of advice we mentioned above and received an interview invitation for the job of your dreams. Great, but where will you set this call and (hopefully) work eight hours a day, five days a week? If you haven't set up a proper remote workspace for yourself, you'll only add stress to your already anxious first weeks at work. Better take care of your workplace before you receive a job offer.

Law firms realize that the modern digital world is new to nextgen lawyers. In spite of their conservative reputation, firms around the world are tuning into remote work and picking up more and more online instruments to improve their work. It may take some time and effort, but law firms are ready to adapt.

In the long run, the best strategy for remote legal pros is to relax about the things that are out of their grasp and do the things that they can control. With this guide, we hope you'll focus on the former and get your dream job offer.