Will and I have already covered our tips on what to do if you’re a law school student. Now, what should you do between graduation and going on the entry level market?
The thing that gets most people hired as an entry level law professor is demonstrated ability to do good research. In the last post, I said that the most important way to spend your time in law school is taking five steps that will help you figure out what to research:
So how should you spend your time in law school if you want to be a law professor? Spend it figuring out yours answer to these five questions: (1) what subject do you want to (initially) research; (2) what methods will you use to research it; (3) who are the leading people currently researching that subject; (4) what has been said about the subject; and (5) what’s an important point that hasn’t been made about the subject.
Here’s the good news. It doesn’t matter if you did those things in law school. It’s easier if you get them done sooner, but it’s not too late to start, even if you start years after graduating. Additionally, the other good news is that you only have to add three to that list before you go on the market.
(6) take the important point you figured out that hasn’t been made about your subject during step 5, and turn it into a published article; (7) repeat steps 5 and 6; and (8) make sure relevant people that research in your area know about your research.
Anyone can do these steps, and if they do them well, people won’t bother to rely on the signals they had previously used as proxies for research potential.
But here’s the bad news. Even if you do these things, the entry level market is brutal. This year, less than 25% of people that went on the market actually landed an entry level job.[1] And most people don’t go on the market on a whim. Preparing for the market takes a lot of time, actually going on the market is expensive, and if you’re one of the 75% of people that go on the market and strike out, it can still set you back in your non-academic career pursuits. In other words, this is a market with a 25% success rate where the people that dip their toe into it don’t do it lightly. As Brennan put it in his book on succeeding in academia, “Your least qualified competitors will be impressive people with decent credentials.”
So, given how tough the market is, what should you do to prepare for it? The first thing I’ll say is that advice about what would make you a good law professor, and advice about what will make it likely you’ll become a law professor, are often two different things.
Most notably, there is often a debate about how much practice experience is the right amount before going on the market. But people in these debate seem to be talking past each other. People in favor of more practice experience often focus on how having more practice experience prepares people to be good teachers, mentors, advocates, and scholars. But I’m not sure anyone on the other side of debate disagrees with that point. People on the other side of the debate typically just think that practice experience beyond a few years doesn’t do a lot to help you get the job in the first place.
So given how competitive the market is, it’s best to focus on the things that make it more likely you’ll actually become a law professor. What are those things that increase the probability that you’d get a job in the first place? It’s helpful to follow Brennan’s tip, in the book we are at least pretending to build off, and use backwards induction. The people that are the most successful on the market each year aren’t discovered by hiring committees that are scanning a stack of 500 CVs and just happen to pick one out of the pile randomly. They already have a good reputation with many relevant people in their field as an emerging scholar that has produced good research.
So how do you get a good reputation as an emerging scholar? It’s not just about going to a good school or doing well there. There are students from top law schools that strike out on the market every year, and students that didn’t go to those schools that succeed. Regardless of what you did in law school, or how you did there, there are concrete things that you can do to build a reputation as an emerging scholar. Like I said before, there is some randomness in the process, but it’s not a lottery.
There are many different ways people to get there, but all of them involve spending time producing research and engaging with law professors about that research. They also almost all follow one of two paths with the same intermediate stopping point before the market: an academic fellowship.
Path 1: Do a PhD in a Related Field. This is the surest fire way to improve your odds of producing good research, and thus getting a reputation as a good researcher. But it’s the highest opportunity cost too. If you’re going to do a PhD and you’ve already done a law degree, find ways to do it as efficiently as possible. You want to get through the program quickly and back on your way to legal academy.
Path 2: Practice for a Few Years. A few years of practice experience is helpful, but the tricky thing is finding a way to practice and still have time to do the things that will help you land a fellowship. Given the demands of legal practice, this can be extremely difficult. But a few things you can do to improve your academic prospects while practicing are:
Land a Clerkship. Clerkships can get students strong recommenders, expose potential professors to a lot of different areas of the law, and in some clerkships, there is time to write (or, at lest, most time than life as a big law associate).
Work in a specialized Practice Area. If you work in a specialized field – i.e. a patent boutique instead of generalized litigation at a major firm – you’re more likely to interact with people in that specific area, including practitioners with ties to academia. You’re more likely to get research ideas, come across scholarship, etc. It’s best if you focus on fields like corporate law, where there is market demand every year, but specialized focus usually works.
Continue to Work on Writing Papers. I know this is near impossible to do if you are in practice. But some people take advantage of breaks between clerkships and their jobs, find ways to take some time off, or focus on improving old research projects instead of starting new ones.
Attend Academic Conferences. Go to conferences like Law and Society, the American Law and Economics Association, or the American Society of International Law. Meet people, and when you do, talk to them about substance.
Whether you do Path 1 or 2, those paths should lead to the same place.
Do a fellowship. This should be the pre-market goal for almost anyone. The problem is that they are tricky to land because they have become so competitive. You should thus be taking the prior steps I just mentioned to improve your chances of landing a fellowship. Also, if anyone tells you “I became a law professor without doing a fellowship.” Ask them when they graduated law school. Because everyone now either does a fellowship or is a super-star, unicorn. Don’t believe me? Sarah Lawsky’s got the data.
Here is one final piece of advice that’s also cribbing from Brennan’s more general job market advice. The credentials of the people that succeed on the job market are more impressive each year. This isn’t anything to do with any law school specific pathologies. It’s not because law professors like prestige, erecting barriers, or anything else. This is trend exists in every single academic discipline, and it exists in plenty of other fields too.
So don’t just assume that doing what professors that got their jobs years ago did and hope it will work out. Instead, look at the CVs of the people that landed jobs this year. The research records of successful candidates will be better on average next year, and better on average the year after that. You need to plan to make your research record stand out relative to where the market is going to be in the future, not where the market was in the past.
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[1] This data is from Sarah Lawsky and available at PrawfsBlawg. Anyone interested in being a law professor should spend a lot of time with Sarah Lawky’s work documenting trends in legal hiring. The information she collects is the most important resource in the profession on what it takes to succeed.