Attend a local bar luncheon or join a local bar committee or the Young Lawyers Division in the location where you would like to work. Local bar associations welcome recent law graduates and frequently offer reduced membership fees or will permit you to attend a meeting or two as a their guest. Their Young Lawyers Section also will be very pleased to have you get involved with them.
• Check out the local bar event calendar in your area. Perhaps they need volunteers to help with their Law Day, or working on a Habitat for Humanity site on a Saturday or doing advanced directives outreach at a Law in the Mall session to provide forms and information to the public. Working side-by-side with attorneys away from the pressure of the office can be not only insightful but also rewarding.
• You can gain essential contact with local attorneys who can tell you about their practice areas, share their career paths and provide you with perspectives on the local job market. These contacts may lead to other referrals and information on openings in town.
• If your schedule permits you to join a committee, you will not only gain wonderful networking connections, but experiences that you can include on your resume to demonstrate an interest in the area. If an attorney is writing an article or compiling materials for an upcoming CLE program –offer to perform research. Offer to make phone calls to other committee members to help organize an upcoming event. Then the “attention getting” second line of your cover letter when you later are performing your job search can begin with, “ We spoke in August when I was helping to organize the Law Week Panel for the Tallahassee Bar Association.”
• Also consider getting involved in specialized bar organizations such as:
• local chapter of the Federal Bar Association
• local chapter of the Florida Association of Women Lawyers http://www.fawl.org
• Puerto Rican Bar Association of Florida
• Catholic Lawyers Guild
• Bankruptcy Bar Association
• Hispanic Bar Association
• Asian Pacific American Bar Association
• local Chapter of the National Bar Association
• American Immigration Lawyers Association
• Christian Lawyers Association
An exhaustive list is available on the Florida Bar website under www.flabar.org “voluntary bars”.
