Summary: Harrison Barnes explains what can happen if attorneys ever find themselves without work and how to ensure that they never are without work.
In an enlightening article from Harrison Barnes titled, “Take this GIFT for Granted and Your Legal Career Will Be Dead”, we learn that attorneys need to have access to work that they are trained for in order to survive. Once an attorney runs out of work and becomes unemployed, finding new work becomes next to impossible.
Barnes explains the thought process that hiring managers go through when looking at a candidate that is unemployed. Ultimately, hiring mangers figure that any serious attorney would never leave a job without new work and would never be laid off if they are good at their job. They will assume an unemployed attorney was either fired or just not an attorney that clients or colleagues want to work with.
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Barnes continues to explain why attorneys find themselves without work. He pinpoints four main points that they struggle with: their identity, attitudes about work, waiting for things to happen instead of doing something about it, and not knowing what to do to ensure they always have access to work. The steps an attorney needs to take to ensure they always have access to work is to identify the problems preventing them from getting access to work, maintain a good attitude about work, get out to find work even if that means moving, and network like crazy to generate business or at least have a backup job waiting.
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In the end, Barnes advises all attorneys that want to keep working to never let their access to work dry up. Running out of work can and will ruin your life as you know it unless you follow his simple steps. Read the full article here: “Take this GIFT for Granted and Your Legal Career Will Be Dead”.
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