Keeping Your Day Job

When I found out last May I had passed the California bar exam, I entered a state of limbo while I waited for the State Bar to process my Rule X Moral Character examination (a requirement before you can practice law in this state). It was a series of small disasters...I applied later than I should have; my application was subsequently lost or mishandled; and finally I was informed I had missed an entry on the application listing my job title at a temp job I held ten years ago, causing the processing to freeze entirely while I filled in the job title ("Temporary Employee") and paid the $35 reprocessing fee.

Somewhere around the beginning of October, I got anxious to find out what was going on, so I called the San Francisco office of the Bar and was told that they can take up to 180 days to process the application. I finally got my determination letter on day 178. So, to any of you who will be sitting for the California Bar Exam, if you don't take anything else away from my column today, please learn from my bad example file your Rule X application on time.

While still in that limbo mode I had lots of time to plan how to eventually land a job. I had been working internally at work to catch on with one of our in-house law groups, but I knew I had to have a "Plan B." My first stop was the career center at JFKU, to do some research on the job marketplace. I was surprised to find the average starting salary for a first-year associate in my area would be a pretty drastic pay cut for me, and come with the added joy of much longer hours. Right about there "Plan B" started to lose some serious luster.

Normally I'm fine with starting at the bottom and working my way up. The problm now is that I'm the sole breadwinner at home since my wife left teaching to raise our children. I also don't have a huge cash reserve, so any hit to my salary - even a short term hit - is really going to hurt.

I tried to think outside the box a bit to come up with creative ways to make a new job work. If we sell our house and bank the gain, I could use the extra cash to supplement my income while my career gets started. The drawback there is that I would want to move closer to the big city - where the jobs are - to cut down my commute, and the social cost of uprooting my family from family, friends, school and church weigh heavily against.

Another idea that came to mind was starting a practice on the side to make a few bucks and get some experience at the same time. That's how I fell into the idea of estate planning, which seemed like something that can be done in the evenings. I've heard several arguments why part-time law practices can't work, but there are just as many success stories out there - I guess it depends a lot on the individual and the situation. I know that without this option I would have to do something drastic like sell my house and move just to enter the profession.

So far it has been working out well. I have a few clients already, and people seem to like having a lawyer who will meet with them in the evenings when they are available.

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I'm still working with the Elder Law Clinic through John F. Kennedy University. Learning a brand new area of law, and working with such devoted volunteers, has been a real eye-opener for me. We had our first "staff meeting" last weekend, and as a person trying to get a solo practice off the ground it's especially great to feel like part of a team for once.