It’s an oft-cited complaint at the Faculty of Law: jobs outside of Bay Street are ignored. Students say they’d like to work in the public interest, but they’re lost as to how to pursue this goal. Why is it so difficult to hear about jobs in smaller fields like criminal, family, and immigration law? The answer lies in a number of factors.
First and foremost, there are simply fewer jobs directly out of law school in these fields. “For better or worse, the vast majority of summer and articling jobs are at mid-sized and larger firms,” CDO director Emily Orchard explained. “The market is just so small. Often smaller firms don’t have the means to hire summer and articling students.”
In addition to there being fewer jobs, there is minimal LSUC regulation of the articling process, which makes it difficult for a) smaller employers to advertise their positions to students and b) for students to find out who is hiring summer and articling students.
Having a 2L summer law job is not actually a requirement to become a licensed lawyer (which panicked 2Ls don’t seem to know). As a result, firms are not required to inform LSUC if they are hiring 2L summer students. So if a small family law firm opts to hire its articling student by hiring a summer student, LSUC may never have been told about that articling position. How the firm advertises its summer student position is entirely at its discretion, so long as it does not do any recruitment prior to LSUC’s approved dates and times. While Bay Street firms post their job openings broadly and participate in the OCI process, a smaller firm hiring one 2L summer student may not have the time or resources to do such extensive advertising and will get no LSUC assistance in broadcasting its available positions.
Theoretically, it would be easy for LSUC to consolidate available articling positions by simply publishing the list of lawyers that apply to serve as an articling principal. However, the application to serve as an articling principal only has to be done once and takes only two weeks to process. Thus, a list of LSUC articling principals will likely not be reflective of the actual articling positions available for the upcoming year. Furthermore, a student can be hired as an articling student before her principal is even approved. As a result, LSUC would be notified that an articling position is available after it has already been filled.
Outside of an application to serve as an articling principal, the only other paperwork required for students to complete their articles is filed after articling begins, and thus would not assist LSUC in consolidating a list of available articling positions.
LSUC’s reason for not having a more regulated process is that there are “volatile factors” that can affect articling positions. An LSUC representative explained to Ultra Vires that a student could accept an articling position and then terminate it for a variety of reasons. Likewise, firms may hire a student and then terminate the position before it begins with no consequence.
One solution is to turn articling into a highly regulated process, like the famous CARMs regime for medical residencies. But to require such a procedure would likely squeeze out the smallest employers who cannot plan their budgets such that they know how many students they need by the time the regulated process begins.
LSUC could also take on a more active role in advertising articling positions to students. At the moment, LSUC’s job postings board is completely unregulated. Arguably, since LSUC knows which employers hired articling students in the prior year, it could follow up on these employers and post their projected hirings for the current year on its job board. This would allow students to see which firms have served as an articling principal in years prior and they could use these employers as a starting point when looking for jobs.
The CDO is seeking to bridge the gap in the advertising of articling positions through extensive networking. Emily explained that she often cold-calls employers that she knows personally, professionally, or through research to find positions for students. She recently did a “family law blitz” where she called 30-50 family law firms that have not hired students in the past, in the hopes that if they do hire students, they will consider U of T and will inform the CDO of their job openings.
The CDO also has a “Career Development Advisory Group,” which is working on a series of documents that highlight tougher-to-navigate practice areas. These guides explain lesser known areas of law, what students should do throughout each year of law school to make them attractive candidates for jobs in the field, and will have the contact information of relevant alumni and employers. The goal is to cover approximately 20 areas of law.
When asked about whether she thought students were successful in achieving their career goals, Emily noted that while there is less diversity of jobs at the summer and articling level, five years out of law school, U of T’s alumni are extremely dispersed in their practice areas. She also stated that the CDO will continue to work with alumni who are seeking to transition to a different field from what they did in their articling or in their first year as an associate. “Anything a student wants to do, to the extent I can support that, I will.” Emily said. “There’s no benefit to me where a student goes, so long as they are gainfully and happily employed.”
