For job-hunting new lawyers, not being civil is criminal

Our Head of Education Rob Marrs explains how simply being friendly and courteous to those you deal with can go a long way to helping you land a job.

There are many challenges in the world of work, and part of developing as a professional is how we choose to deal with those challenges. In a previous blog I looked at how professionals can choose to deal with and learn from mistakes.

I thought I’d start this year of blogging with something on how we choose to conduct ourselves in our day-to-day life especially during challenging times – a kind of mix of resilience, civility, and integrity if you like.

One of my favourite books on the legal profession is ‘The Good Lawyer’. It sets out several crucial qualities all lawyers should have: courage, empathy, clarity of purpose, diligence, realism, a sense of justice, an ability to transcend emotion, integrity, and civility.

We’re all in this together

I was most taken with the chapter on civility and the idea of the legal community as a – for want of a better word in a majority female profession - fraternity. The legal system and the profession work best when an atmosphere of mutual respect amongst lawyers prevails. That collegiality is one of the profession’s greatest strengths. I’m not a lawyer, but my time at the Society has given me a huge respect and admiration for our members. I’m constantly impressed by the way they operate in often highly stressful roles.

Collegiality is a higher bar than civility, which is a pretty low hurdle. Civility merely demands that we recognise the right of others to hold and act on positions that differ from our own and that may be adverse to our interests.

One of the things my team at the Society does is give careers advice. This can be in the form of a chat over the phone, an in-person meeting or by email. This can be at any stage, from the school pupil considering law, through to people struggling to get a traineeship, or the middle-aged person beleaguered in their job and dreaming of a court room.

Receiving advice you don’t want to hear

Careers advice can be tough. Good careers advice can’t all be sugar-coating or tweaking typos on a CV. Sometimes it involves frank discussions and saying things – in a nice way – that can be hard to hear.

We know that any market-based approach to graduate recruitment means that some people will take longer to be successful in gaining work. We know that some people will never make it. There’s no way to dress this up as anything other than hard.

We do advise people from day one of the LLB that some people don’t make it. Sometimes that will be down to the competitive market, sometimes it will be down to sheer bad luck and sometimes (if we are honest), it will be down to the individual.

Between us, the team that takes these calls has decades of experience in dealing with people in a difficult place in their professional careers. We understand that those who have graduated from the Diploma and who are looking for a traineeship are particularly vulnerable. They deserve and receive our support. We are always looking for ways to better support them and would be really keen to hear suggestions on how we can improve.

Some examples where a bit of civility would have gone a long way

Given that idea of professional civility as a key trait of lawyers, a number of examples in the run up to the Christmas period have jarred.

The first came after we offered guidance to a job-seeking graduate with a disability. We have for many years provided introductory letters for people looking for traineeships who require reasonable adjustments. These are not references, but rather something for the employer to note: ‘the candidate needs x reasonable adjustments and you should make them’. The graduate in question clearly told a friend about the letter we wrote for them, which is fine. However, very shortly afterwards we received a phone call from the friend demanding ‘where is my letter to employers?’. This individual didn’t have a disability and we explained that this was why we wouldn’t provide them with a letter, something they weren’t impressed with. While there was clearly a misunderstanding about the reason for us writing an introductory letter,  the tone of the conversation suggested that their way of dealing with others may have been one of the reasons they were struggling to secure a job.

The second was from someone who wanted our advice on their CV. Someone in my team spent time looking at a CV, made numerous suggestions and edits, and then pulled together an email that made suggestions about their job search. The CV was sent back and, when clearing out emails a few weeks later, she noticed that they had not received a thank you. This, I’m afraid to say, is common practice. This isn’t a big deal for us. We don’t expect thanks. We understand we are offering a service for new lawyers and we are delighted they make use of it. What I might suggest, though, is that in a small profession that sort of minor incivility will be remembered. I can well imagine people remembering uncourteous applicants if they apply to an organisation for a second time.

The third was someone seeking a traineeship who was rude to our receptionists when they came in to speak to us in person. This was reminiscent of the waiter rule: someone who is nice to you but not their waiter is not a nice person. If you take nothing else away from this blog, take this: Be rude to the receptionist and whoever you were in to see will know about it.

These occurrences are becoming all too common

I thought these might be isolated incidents until I was training a handful of solicitors on equality and diversity and two of them raised – unprompted - the way some junior lawyers spoke to support staff. It seems to me that those tales are becoming a little more common.

Professional life is tough and can bring the worst out in us. We all sometimes speak to people in ways which upon reflection we know weren’t right. We may justify it to ourselves as ‘’it needed to be said’’. It almost always didn’t need to be.

So one of my New Year’s resolutions is to be the change I want to see in the world – aim for collegiality! I hope you join me. 

After all, that great American attorney Clarence Darrow once wrote

‘The best that we can do is to be kindly and helpful to our friends and fellow passengers who are clinging to the same speck of dirt while we are drifting side by side to our common doom’.  

And on that cheerful note: Happy New Year.