Where do students look for articles these days?

[Diplock]

Assume for the sake of argument we're talking about an employer and/or an entire field that wouldn't usually recruit during OCIs or during OCI timelines. Where do students go looking for articling postings these days that aren't part of the formal recruit, in Ontario? I'm asking for a friend.

Edited October 3, 2021 by Diplock

[BlockedQuebecois]

Most students I know who found positions outside of the formal recruit but not through networking did so through their school's job board/CDO.

I believe it's fairly easy to get a listing posted on the job board—your friend would just email the CDOs at each law school and ask to have the posting added. It would take some upfront work to create the mailing list of the Ontario schools' CDOs, but once that list is made it would be easy enough to ask them to take down the listing once the spot is filled and post in the future if it's a yearly thing. 

I imagine it would have the added benefit of weeding out NCA candidates, if that's something your friend would otherwise do. 

[Thrive92]

I am not from Ontario, nor am I near that stage of seeking articling by any means, but I am planning on cold - calling (or emailing rather) just about every boutique (*insert which legal field your friend is interested in*) law firm near me with a plethora of details about myself and why I would be a great articling student in the law firm, adding some details of the specific law firm just so that they wouldn't dismiss my email as a generic one that I've sent to tens or hundreds of other law firms. This requires a bit of studying of the lawyer or the law firm, and so I would set it to about two cold - emails a day until I am hired.

I was told that in order to make this work, it is best to email a lawyer in the firm directly, and not the receptionist/other staff members. Keep in mind that this is probably the last - ditch scenario, where all of the networking done during law school is not helping you.

I also find myself checking into internet job sites, such as indeed.ca to see of any articling positions near me.

 

[cherrytree]

The Law Jobs Exchange Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/lawstudentjobs has job postings made directly by employers all the time (from all jurisdictions in Canada and ON makes up a big chunk). If your friend would prefer not to use their personal Facebook profile to make a post, I think they can PM one of the group admins to have the admin post the job on their behalf. The group has over 15,000 members and a large number among them are students and NCA candidates.

[artsydork]

I've seen people advertise through law twitter. Also on local county bar association sites.

[goosie]

The OBA has a job board here. It's not limited to student jobs but it's a good place to keep an eye out for articling job postings.

[Vizslaw]

+1 to the law school CDOs and the Facebook group. We've also posted articling positions to LinkedIn before. There are also listservs like the Criminal Lawyers Association listserv.

It's also a good idea to go meet with the CDO staff and tell them what you're interested in. They will keep you in mind when positions open up and send them to you directly, or try to connect you with alum in that practice area. Every time I send a posting to my old school, the staff there say, "oh person X is great and looking for a position at a firm like yours" so it helps to chat/network with them.

Good luck!

 

 

[PulpFiction]

Some friends have had luck with Indeed. A bunch of people I know have used the CLA job board. Another platform that's provided a handful of opportunities - one that I can verify actually materialized into a job offer - is Twitter, believe it or not. I'm sure the employer also advertised the position elsewhere, but I've seen several employers advertising positions on Twitter. I guess the benefit is having #lawtwitter circulate the posting and reach a targeted audience in a very short period of time. 

Edited October 3, 2021 by PulpFiction

[TheCryptozoologist]

I find alot of people who didn't get positions through structured recruits can end up in the most unusual places and alot of decisions about hiring is simply arbitrary. HR recruitment in big corporations often have data-driven hiring these days and look for metrics. Law still doesn't and in the absence of some kind of standardization or set of common metrics, people can find the most arbitrary reasons to hire.  I've heard directly from people who did hiring at government places and law firms about reasons they threw out or liked a particular candidate, and it seemed almost entirely arbitrary and based on whim. E.g. one MAG person tells me they threw out any cover letter with a typo and would also not be surprised that "personality" cough cough good looks and charm goes into some hiring like it always has with "intuition-based" hiring. 

Anyways there's obviously going to be a barrier if you are NCA from outside of North America and my sense is that job market segregation might only increase. What I'm seeing lately from networking, is that the sheer number of lawyers with primary undergrad degrees in law from foreign countries and who are recent immigrants is quite high in recent years since Vern Krishna permitted anyone who went to a school in a country with common law to write the NCAs. A few years ago NCA's were a third of new calls, but I would not be surprised if they are half of new lawyers. My perception is there are attempts to inroad and give positions for NCA people but there's still going to be a barrier and the barrier will be reinforced because the legal market is simply being flooded with non-Canadian trained lawyers and employers will look at reasons to filter out the candidate pool. This means higher quality NCA candidates will be filtered out. Not a big surprise, some law firms use to only hire people from their law schools only, and so this mentality in hiring is not really new. 

There's 1.7 licensed lawyers for each law job these days and the legal market is unusually saturated. In the US, there are fewer foreign lawyers but lower quality law schools creates a flood of lawyers so that T1 schools will reap all the benefits. The system is one de-facto segregated job markets in America and will not surprise me if the same happens here. In Canada, there's been historic control of the legal profession's labor supply but all of that's shifted in the last decade because Lawyers are designated as a legal profession in need by immigration authorities and the usual barriers has disappeared with NCAs/LLM mills. Since the view is to have immigrant lawyers address the access to justice issue simply by flooding the labor market, the result is chronic structural unemployment for a lot of people and in particular foreign lawyers. 

Edited October 5, 2021 by TheCryptozoologist

[CleanHands]

19 minutes ago, TheCryptozoologist said:

There's 1.7 licensed lawyers for each law job these days 

Where did you get this stat?

Also "law jobs" =/= legal work. There are geographical locations, practice areas and file types where community needs are severely underserved in Canada. Even as a 1L summer student once I started doing certain kinds of files those handing them out were begging me to take on more (and this was in a major metropolitan area even). If there were loads of starving lawyers out there, this wouldn't be the case.

The great thing about having a qualification like law offers is that you can create your own job if necessary (or desirable). And there are certainly gaps to be filled.

I've noticed a lot of people who bitch about the market being oversaturated then balk at the suggestion they move out of the GTA or broaden the type of work they take on a bit. This degree of choosing is not the behaviour of beggars.

Edited October 5, 2021 by CleanHands

[TheCryptozoologist]

23 minutes ago, CleanHands said:

Where did you get this stat?

Also "law jobs" =/= legal work. There are geographical locations, practice areas and file types where community needs are severely underserved in Canada. Even as a 1L summer student once I started doing certain kinds of files those handing them out were begging me to take on more (and this was in a major metropolitan area even). If there were loads of starving lawyers out there, this wouldn't be the case.

The great thing about having a qualification like law offers is that you can create your own job if necessary (or desirable). And there are certainly gaps to be filled.

I've noticed a lot of people who bitch about the market being oversaturated then balk at the suggestion they move out of the GTA or broaden the type of work they take on a bit. This degree of choosing is not the behaviour of beggars.

PrecedentJD talked about 1.6 lawyers for each new law job 4 years ago in this article.

https://precedentjd.com/news/are-there-too-many-lawyers/

Anyways I am not suggesting there is too many lawyers in unmet areas. There certainly is in some practice areas that's for sure where we can use lawyers, and there's also labor shortages because laterals to the US and so-on happening at the moment so that statistic might be different. What I am suggesting is that there is an emerging segregated job market happening if it doesn't already exist since probably most NCAs don't end up doing community lawyering and the supply of NCAs and internationally trained lawyers has spiked. Its already known that NCAs face difficulties, and law is a field kinda prone to qualifications discrimination. 

I don't generally see a problem when firms hire NCAs, obviously its their freedom to even if it potentially subtracts from the rest of us. What I am pointing out is that old ideas about controlling the supply of labor through restricting law graduates that made old lawyers fabulously wealthy are tossed out the window just as things like job automation and so-on are emerging. Now new law grads, millennials and young lawyers compete in a bigger pool for what's potentially going to be declining overall average salaries (would not be surprised the high-paying positions will also cut into wages after the ongoing labor crunch ends, partner to associate ratios were already declining for some time). 

Edited October 5, 2021 by TheCryptozoologist

[BlockedQuebecois]

46 minutes ago, CleanHands said:

I've noticed a lot of people who bitch about the market being oversaturated then balk at the suggestion they move out of the GTA or broaden the type of work they take on a bit. This degree of choosing is not the behaviour of beggars.

I think we should let crypto have this one. After all, he is saying we’re attractive and charming: 

Quote

"personality" cough cough good looks and charm goes into some hiring like it always has with "intuition-based" hiring.

 

Edited October 5, 2021 by BlockedQuebecois
Although I agree he’s largely wrong

[Darth Vader]

@TheCryptozoologist, you are an articling student and apparently know people in hiring positions telling you point blank why they are tossing out resumes, and that people are being hired on good looks and charm for substantive-based hiring processes like the MAG? Have you ever interviewed for a public sector position? 

PrecedentJD is a great source... Is the author of that article citing his sources or is he a lawyer? I just checked and it seems he is a journalist. Yes, let's take everything written in an online magazine at face value. 

Look, dude, the main problem with your posts is that it is difficult to separate the drivel/your opinions from actual discussions worth having. You're not even a lawyer yet and seem to think you know better than hiring employers and lawyers who've been doing this for many years. If Vern Krishna wants to let NCA candidates write the exam, by god, he is more accomplished than you or I to make that decision.

I'm a few years out of law school, and I do not know a single person that graduated from a Canadian law school struggling to make ends meet. Sure, people struggle with finding summer, articling, and new call positions, but Canadian law schools have an over 90% articling rate, and the Law Practice Program provides a fail-safe to assist candidates with getting called to the bar. You may have to hustle a bit to find a new call position, but it's not any more difficult than finding entry-level positions in other fields. In fact, because of all the barriers you have to go through to become a licensed lawyer, it is much easier than just graduating with any university degree and entering the job market. Finally, once you practice law for 2-3 years, it becomes remarkably easy to find a job in your field. There are also many law adjacent fields in law, teaching, labour relations, professional development, business/start-ups, etc. that I see lawyers going into. As a Canadian law school graduate, you should not be concerning yourself with what foreign trained lawyers are doing. The marketplace will decide that for itself. 

[TheCryptozoologist]

@Darth VaderYes I talk to them and attend career events for the last 3 years where they tell everyone some reasons why they throw out CVs. You learn alot from talking to people.

MAG actual interviews is a whole different story obviously and I am referencing just the screening process. Their process is always one that stumped me but the filtering I've heard it personally several times.

Anyways you don't need a law degree to understand things like labor supply, wages, filtering and hiring processes or the immensely flawed and biased world of human-driven decison making and hiring. Data-driven decisionmaking including in hiring had profound effects on corporate HR. I think it makes it worse because following the data leaves one open to blinds and creates unnecessarily restricted processes and weaker flexibility because of ambiguity aversion. Personality and intuition based hiring and the model of 'just talk to them' is a whole other ballpark with benefits and flaws and its also one that drives people to control perception and exploit our instinctive blinds.

EDIT: the following is a rant on human biases and flaws.

As much as we want to believe their is fairness and people are treated as individuals, some things affecting human bias don't go away. I remember watching a video of first year US calls giving interviews about their career a few years ago. Every female they had on was a goodlooking fresh JD who said alot of their time was spent on flights because partners e.g. rich old white men arranged for them to meet CEOs and other clients e.g. other rich old white men to secure representation on a legal issue. Not the case for men they talked to, who said they spent their time mostly on other stuff. And human history and anthropology is full of these things, old aristocrats and leaders sending their young adult daughters or female relatives to other powerful men to secure alliances and essentially using them as pawn to exploit another's weakness. Unfamiliar women are not seen as transactional the way a stranger male is to other powerful men. Think there's changes from this in recent years, but some patterns do not disappear overnight and dealing with it requires understanding just how flawed and instinct driven humans actually are. Our understanding of bias, cognitive framing and everything else from behavioral economics and cognitive psychology has already reshaped other industries and perhaps governments and there is room for it to improve the legal field.

Anyways this is just me ranting about the world on an overnight flight and very tired (travelling for an entirely different reason lmao). 

 

Edited October 5, 2021 by TheCryptozoologist

[BlockedQuebecois]

You know, if you keep posting the same bizarre nonsense you really ought to stop trying to say it's because you're "on an overnight flight and very tired" or "on meds after getting [your] wisdom tooth removed yesterday".

Just own your bizarre beliefs. Or stop posting them.

[Darth Vader]

@TheCryptozoologist, MAG and other public sector interviews don't have to be a mystery to you. Write a professional cover letter, show a demonstrated interest in the area/s of law practiced through your course selection, clinics, extracurriculars, etc., and have a list of references and writing sample ready if asked to submit. Interviews are typically substantive with some behavioral questions mixed in and you're typically trying to get in as much points as you can while the interviewers write down everything you say. 

Women face inequalities in the legal profession but it is not as bad you seem to think it is; more women than men attend law school in Canada; more women work in desirable legal jobs like in the public sector, government, specialized boutiques, etc.; more racialized women are being hired in Big law; more women are being promoted as Partners, Senior Counsel, and General Counsel; and more firms are offering alternatives for women wanting to continue to practice law while raising children (this area still needs a lot more work though). 

Are you going into labour and employment or professional development? Sounds like an area that you can contribute to if you have such strong opinions on how the hiring processes are done. 

[TheCryptozoologist]

@Darth Vader

Yes gender inequality exists and its big but my point was on the line of there is a different type of treatment even with parity. We've probably read about the female associate always asked to fill water or do whatever before a big meeting and these types of differential treatment exists and will continue to do so since gender relations and expectations do not disappear overnight.

Anyways back to my original point in that humans are inherently flawed decisionmakers and continue to be guided by personal, cultural and instinctive expectations without ever really reevaluating it. The same way finding a typo on the front page is a poor method of filtering candidates, or that selecting a law firm to represent you based on superficial perception, these things won't go away without recognizing it first.

There's a reason why extroverts like myself are good at fooling people into believing we are smarter than we appear, its ingrained habits of managing perception and playing off superficiality. Introverts are found to have a deeper understanding of social dynamics but it rarely shines while extroverts seize on the few things that dazzle people.

@BlockedQuebecois

People here get annoyed when I go left field with my examples. It takes a bit to connect how my examples line up and I have the habit of triggering everyone. 

Edited October 5, 2021 by TheCryptozoologist

[Apple]

When I was searching for 1L jobs I looked to the local law association websites, Indeed and my school's CDO resources. While I didn't do this for articles, because I didn't have to, I would have if I was looking for an articling job. 

[CleanHands]

15 minutes ago, TheCryptozoologist said:

 

There's a reason why extroverts like myself are good at fooling people into believing we are smarter than we appear

Lol sure bud

[Diplock]

25 minutes ago, CleanHands said:

Lol sure bud

In order to determine if he's fooling us into believing he's smarter than he appears, you have to start from an assumption of how dumb he actually is. Maybe you're just not starting low enough. He could be doing a great job fooling us.

[BlockedQuebecois]

34 minutes ago, CleanHands said:

Lol sure bud

Are you not dazzled?

[epeeist]

On 10/3/2021 at 10:26 AM, Diplock said:

Assume for the sake of argument we're talking about an employer and/or an entire field that wouldn't usually recruit during OCIs or during OCI timelines. Where do students go looking for articling postings these days that aren't part of the formal recruit, in Ontario? I'm asking for a friend.

I imagine they might start with a Google search and find that the LSO has an "articling registry" listing positions that those with articling positions available may post to... 😀

https://lso.ca/Becoming-Licensed/Lawyer-Licensing-Process/Articling-Candidates/Finding-a-Placement#articling-registry-6

On 10/3/2021 at 10:32 AM, BlockedQuebecois said:

Most students I know who found positions outside of the formal recruit but not through networking did so through their school's job board/CDO.

I believe it's fairly easy to get a listing posted on the job board—your friend would just email the CDOs at each law school and ask to have the posting added. It would take some upfront work to create the mailing list of the Ontario schools' CDOs, but once that list is made it would be easy enough to ask them to take down the listing once the spot is filled and post in the future if it's a yearly thing. 

I imagine it would have the added benefit of weeding out NCA candidates, if that's something your friend would otherwise do. 

[emphasis added]

I totally get (even if I don't fully agree) with the attitude many have towards Canadians going to a foreign law school. But, weeding out NCA candidates may have a disparate impact on immigrants to Canada (including people of colour, refugees, or just anyone who was born and grew up in another country and went to law school there normally) in the sense of their never being aware of jobs. I realize you didn't mean it this way, but if someone were seeing e.g. weeding out non-Canadian citizen immigrants in medicine, nursing, non-professional jobs generally, etc., by posting where only those who graduated in Canada could see job listings and nowhere else, that would be concerning. But that's full discussion on its own.

Also, if they do LLM at a Canadian law school, does that give them access to law school job listings, or because grad school separate from (still an undergrad degree even if called JD) law school, it doesn't?

[Thrive92]

7 hours ago, BlockedQuebecois said:

You know, if you keep posting the same bizarre nonsense you really ought to stop trying to say it's because you're "on an overnight flight and very tired" or "on meds after getting [your] wisdom tooth removed yesterday".

Just own your bizarre beliefs. Or stop posting them.

 

I cannot help but notice that this oddly pertains to my comment earlier about how I sometimes post on this forum while under the influence of the coffee jitter.

For the record, I own up to every post I have ever made on this forum. No excuses.

Edited October 5, 2021 by Thrive92

[Hegdis]

23 minutes ago, Thrive92 said:

I sometimes post on this forum while under the influence of the coffee jitter.

You might not realize how weird it is to claim coffee makes you post things, but it's weird. Pretty sure 95% of us consume coffee regularly and I have never, ever seen anyone blame coffee for a post or a perspective.

Honestly I have been trying to figure out if "coffee" is code for something else.

3 hours ago, TheCryptozoologist said:

 I have the habit of triggering everyone. 

Oh, dude. No. Don't frame people's responses to you as them being "triggered". It's gross.

[CleanHands]

I sometimes post under the influence of my own stupidity and poor impulse control.