Why not go solo if you're out of a job?
One of uLaw’s most recent users had previously been laid off from a job he’d been working at off Bay Street for a couple of years.
After the layoff he spent three months desperately searching for work but nothing seemed to be getting off the ground. He told us that with each passing hour he spent on LinkedIn, desperation was crawling into his psyche about what his next steps would be if he could still not manage to land employment.
One of our compliance coders who works for uLaw suggested that instead of firing off emails to large, well-staffed firms every day, he needed to start up a business.
“I’m not entrepreneurial enough. I can’t take those risks in good conscience. I need something with predictability; a real job, and I need one soon otherwise I’m going to have to learn how to sell insurance or start doing home renos again for peanuts.”
While it’s true that not everyone is a natural-born entrepreneur, but the reality of the situation is that there are only so many large firms out there practicing the same types of law. In short, there are a lot of large fish swimming in an exceedingly small fishbowl, especially in the areas of law practised by firms on or near Bay St. Firms simply aren’t hiring at the same rate as the amount of graduates who are being pumped out every year by the law schools.
One of our team members suggested it was a bit silly for this talented lawyer to consider abandoning years of practice and study to go back to doing a job he did casually as a teenager.
The problem with constantly searching for work and not finding it is that gaps in your resume, even if it’s just a month, can sometimes be a red flag for employers. Especially the kind of employers who hire Human Resources departments which utilize algorithms to parse through hundreds of resumes emailed to them every hour of the day and night once a job ad is posted.
Our friend, who is now a proud sole practitioner and a client of uLaw, did conceed that he wasn’t getting any of the callbacks he was promised. Quick talking HR people can be nice and gentle when they’re laying you down.
Sometimes working for yourself looks better to the rest of the world than merely being jobless and desperate. And besides, these days it doesn’t exactly cost that much to start your own firm if you’re smart about how to slash office costs when starting up.
Trying to get work from prospective clients is almost the same kind of activity as job hunting, anyway. And it might be a hell of a lot more productive and lucrative in the end. Working for yourself is always an option, even if you’re not a born & bred hustler, it can work for you.
In a matter of a few months, our new client, who wishes to remain nameless because he still insists his end goal is to return to BigLaw on Bay Street one day, concedes that he’s at least making some money with clients he found through networking. While it’ll be a shame for our company to lose him as a client, we’re happy he’s landed on his feet in the interim.
Keeping time, marketing, branding, accounting, docketing, invoicing clients is a lot of work. But fortunately uLaw is available as a digital assistant, which can aid and facilitate legal administration procedures effectively while in compliance with regulations in jurisdictions across Canada.
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