Introduction
The Library has partnered with Career Services to help curate some of the best tools for you to use on your journey searching for leads on legal positions and preparing for interviews. The web offers a sea of information on legal career service searching and you could drown using search engines. That said, most law school offer a web based guide similar to this one. Many are extremely comprehensive. We encourage you to start here and expand if you feel guided. A simple search such as career services library guides yields many guides prepared by law librarians.
Like most types of research, you encounter a combination of premium and open web resources. The premium resources provided by the law school we will cover include Lexis, Westlaw and Bloomberg Law. We will cover some tools that cover areas of law. Covering every area is beyond the scope of any one guide. The Library and Career Services are always at your service to help scope out areas of law not covered by this guide.
For additional resources and professional guidance, we strongly urge you to visit the dedicated Career Services Site.
Law students send resumes far and wide with the hope of landing their dream placement. The Law Library can help you highlight the knowledge and skills that will help you stand out from the crowd.
The Library’s librarians are happy to meet with job seekers to help you research firms and other employers. We can help you identify cases that attorneys have argued to assemble talking points, find judges’ past decisions, and gather details such as the types of cases that law firms tend to handle most frequently. This can help you keep a steady rapport with your interviewers when they ask you what you’d like to know about the placement.
We can also help you identify ways to stay up to date on developments in your field. Reading through blogs and other legal news, as well as engaging with expert commentary, are ways you can highlight your mastery of and dedication to your particular field during interviews and networking events. We can help you set alerts on your favorite research databases so you can be sure that you’ll have the latest information when you need it.
In addition, we can introduce you to tools of the legal trade, including materials in the library collection that practitioners frequently consult. Online practice guides and document templates can help you impress interviewers, and then produce professional work efficiently. We have experience using specialized tools and research databases for particular practice areas, which can give you a leg up over competitors with more baseline research skills.
Furthermore, this guide assembles tools you can use to tailor your resumes and cover letters and to prepare for interviews. Books from the library’s collection provide focused advice on landing particular jobs and thriving in the legal profession. Legal news websites can help you stay current. We have focused advice on researching law firms, with websites and litigation analytics tools that provide data on employers.
The guide also has advice if you are seeking a clerkship. It lists texts and blogs that provide tips on standing out, as well as resources on finding job openings and reading up on judges’ work. Finally, within the Professional Development topic, we introduce networking opportunities, such as specialized legal associations as well as student organizations at ASU. The law librarians have firsthand experience navigating the legal employment landscape, and the skills and experience that can help you land your dream job. Meet with a Librarian to get an edge before you button up your best interview suit.
This guide is updated periodically. If you have suggestions, contact Jon Cavicchi and/or recommend resources to the Career Services Office.
