Self-Started is a column that shows law students and young lawyers that entrepreneurial skills can help their legal careers and that there are ways to get involved in entrepreneurial ventures right now.  Through the insights I gather from interviews with women with legal backgrounds who started companies, non-profits, and educational programs, among others, I will provide tips and entrepreneurial skills that lawyers need.  We can all be creative self-starters, and this column will help inspire!

The most popular article on the New York Times website for the entirety of this past week has been a January 8 article entitled “Is Law School a Losing Game?”

The piece is negative from top to bottom and claims that law students are naïve, debt-ridden, and doomed to a life of unemployment mostly due to the outsourcing of legal services.  The piece goes on to characterize law schools as fraudulent money hungry institutions that mislead students into thinking there are job prospects post-graduation.

This bleak characterization of the young guns of the legal profession and the schools that cultivate them has prompted a huge response by many news outlets, most of which are equally fatalistic.

But everyone is failing to see the upside.  While today’s law students and lawyers certainly do need to be aware of changes that revolutionize what it takes for lawyers to succeed, there are hidden avenues for success.

The modern female lawyer, like all lawyers, needs to meet the new type of demand by the savvier client.  The media’s doomsday predictions are an easy way out for those who don’t understand the changes in what today’s clients demand from their attorneys.

One such demand is for more efficient, creative, and less costly legal work.  Lawyers can no longer get away with billing upwards of $500 an hour to merely fill in a template contract.  Clients are too savvy, and companies like Legal Zoom are taking care of these simple tasks for next to nothing-- relatively speaking. 

Noted author, speaker, and professor of information law, Richard Susskind wrote a book called The End of Lawyers?, which underscores how vital it is to be an entrepreneurial lawyer in order to survive.  In fact, his book, theories, and talk he led at my law school this past October are the inspiration for writing this column.

Mr. Susskind wrote his book in 2008 during our nation’s most severe financial crisis and drew attention to a different situation, one that lawyers face—way before the mass media got their claws on the issue in 2011.  And unlike the current articles that are dripping with negativity, he urges us to adapt to the new type of legal demand rather than accept a fate of unemployment.

The decrease in jobs is merely a symptom of a much greater irritant: change in the type of legal demand from that of people who accepted the old fashioned way of doing law.  And the media chooses to fester in the unemployment aspect that is partially due to lawyers failing to adapt and meet the new demand.

In order to adapt, Mr. Susskind calls on lawyers to ask themselves what elements of their current workload could be undertaken more quickly, more cheaply, more efficiently, or to a higher quality by using different and new streamlined methods of working.

Once firms do so, they will be more efficient, prosperous and able to offer more employment opportunities.  Lawyers need to better align their interests with those of our clients.  Litigators do stand to gain from litigating a case, but litigation might not always be the most beneficial option for the client.

First-movers in this environment, those that adapt most quickly and in ways that best serve their clients, stand to gain more than lawyers ever have.

Last semester during my second year of law school, I interned for Lis Wiehl, who is a Fox News on-air legal commentator who has a segment called “Is it Legal?” On the O’Reilly Factor.  I was recommended by my Law Review professor for the job because since I started law school, I had been packaging myself as not only a good student but also one who is dedicated to pursing a career in law and the media by working for professors in the field, writing and blogging about the field, and taking media internships.

I’m certainly no media mogul, but Ms. Wiehl is a media force to be reckoned with.  And when I recently asked her what types of entrepreneurial skills got her to where she is and what skills can most help female lawyers in today’s challenging environment, she, like Mr. Susskind, emphasized the importance of proactively meeting consumer demand. It’s about “keeping your eyes open to new opportunities and thinking ahead, ie ‘what can I do that people will need?’ Then focus on providing that.” Keeping attuned to consumer demand is vital for her whether she is advising parents on TV, debating controversial legal topics on Fox News or writing her New York Times bestselling legal fiction books. 

She is the archetypical self-starter who parlayed her prosecutorial success (she never lost a case) into an even more profitable media career.  

But even in less “glamorous” fields, there is room for entrepreneurial zeal.  Ms. Heather Cucolo is a female attorney who works in perhaps the most difficult legal roles: defending sex offenders in civil commitment hearings.  Her job is to convince a judge that the defendant is no longer a risk to society and should be released after the individual has served his sentence.  The people she defends are among the most loathed and feared of all the criminals.

Yet when I asked her how she confronts the challenges in her field, she credits both her leadership skills as well as her femininity, in perhaps an arena in which one would think being a female would pose even more difficulties.

Ms. Cucolo put it best when she said, “[F]emininity and soft-spoken sensitivity that I portray in the courtroom has more than once disarmed an expert witness or my adversary and allowed me to gracefully and demurely go in for the kill.” 

And while it is true that the two women I interviewed above first rose to success during different times than those we face today, they too needed to adapt to changing demand in extremely competitive fields.  Now more than ever, we need to be attuned with demand. 

The goal of this column will be to transform the abstract concept of being an entrepreneur in the legal field into things we can actually do to change how we practice the law and to find employment in this down market.

I will relay to you stories of my own trials and tribulations as they happen, as well as the insights of the women I interview, to uncover different ways to find jobs and succeed, and provide ways to connect with like-minded entrepreneurial lawyers.  I’m still a student and certainly don’t have it all figured out, but that’s the beauty of it.