Below are descriptions of the various types of job listings that are available from Law Firm Staff.

Accounting / Finance

With firm revenues peaking as high as $1 billion annually, it stands to reason that savvy financial management is critical. Firms deploy their assets in hedging transactions, foreign currency swaps, and numerous other complex market strategies on a daily basis. Law firm chief financial officers (CFOs) earn salaries in the high six figures, making them monetarily competitive with some of Wall Street's top investment bankers.

The successful CFO of a large law firm will have extensive experience overseeing international operations, financial consolidations, and identifying and mitigating foreign exchange risk, be intimately familiar with the process of acquisition, including valuation, due diligence, and integration. On a day-to-day basis, the CFO will plan, direct and control overall financial planning, accounting, forecasting, and cash management functions of the firm, handle the annual budgets and forecasting, evaluate the firm's practices and analyze cost, budgets, operating policies, trends and increased profit opportunities, and protect the firm's financial stability by ensuring that internal controls are adequate to safeguard assets and accounting systems are sufficient to generate accurate and timely financial reporting. With an eye to the firm's future, the CFO must possess strong skills in business planning, analyzing growth opportunities, and valuing potential acquisitions.

Since lawyers have worked long and hard on their own education, they prefer a CFO who has also obtained an advanced degree, such as an MBA, and being a CPA is extraordinarily helpful. If you are a sharp, educated financial professional who can manage the financial organization of multi-office, multi-national firms, and have the vision and the stamina to take our clients forward in their future growth, please contact us.

The controller assists the firm's CFO in day-to-day transactions involving firm payables, receivables, and general accounting: payroll, time and billing, financial reporting, cash management (such as AP/AR control, and maintaining relationships with the firm's banks), and be an integral advisor to the administrative management team, ensuring that decisions are made with full information and awareness of the bottom line. A top-notch law firm controller will be able to create financial management processes that work in a professional services environment, and display impeccable characteristics: a high-energy person with a strong executive presence, who can roll-up his/her sleeves and get the job done. As with any other position of strength within a law firm, the successful applicant will hold an MBA and/or a CPA degree, and have strong computer skills.

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Attorneys

As an incomparable source of revenue, attorneys are ultimately the driving force behind any successful law firm. As such, our clients rely on our ability to find for them those individuals who, with the right combination of legal experience, academic background, and intelligence, will excel in the firm's environment and make an immediate and significant contribution to the legal team.

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Human Resources

The best law firm HR managers are dynamic "people persons" who can multitask like no other, as the duties are many: managing the secretarial staff, handling non-legal staff recruiting, overseeing and conducting new employee orientations, handling employee relations issues, administering and communication of the benefit plans of the firm, managing the compensation system and coordinating the annual performance evaluation process, developing training initiatives for the staff, and overseeing maintenance of the firm's HR databases. This person will have responsibility for handling sensitive issues of employee relations within the firm, recruiting from outside, and supervising and training a staff to be able to respond to the needs of some of the most demanding employees there are. The HR manager should be as well-versed in Federal and local labor and employment law as the firm's Labor attorneys are, since decisions often need to be made quickly, without time to get an opinion from an attorney.

From the outset, it must be understood that a recruiting coordinator at a law firm spends a lot of time on the phone, and generally undertakes significant travel responsibilities. If you aren't prepared to spend 50% or more of your time talking to candidates and hiring partners, spend much of your summer organizing and attending summer associate events, be away much of the fall season on law-school recruiting junkets, and give up many nights and weekends in between for various seminars, cocktail parties, and other networking events, then this is not the ideal career for you. On the other hand, if all of that sounds like fun, and you possess strong communication skills, the ability to listen effectively, and relish the idea of convincing exceptional law students that your firm is the only logical choice for them, then you are on the right track and should contact us to discuss our client firms' needs.

Unlike recruiters at agencies and in-house recruiters in many other industries, the law firm recruiting coordinator needn't spend any time cold-calling candidates. The legal job market is such that prospective hires will generally be beating down the door with their resumes, and the recruiting coordinator must be able to efficiently discern those who have merit and pass only those resumes along to the Hiring Committee.

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Information Technology

While attorneys typically do not push the limits of their individual workstation capacity, no type of organization relies more on the persons responsible for keeping its computing technology in shape than law firms. With hundreds of attorneys producing dozens of documents each day, and an increasing reliance on email technology, there is never a dull moment in any firm for its information technology managers and their assistants. Unlike traditional career paths, a career in information technology management in a law firm offers better pay and a faster rise to the top of the IT ranks within a large organization.

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Legal Administrator

The chief administrative officer (CAO) of a law firm serves as the nucleus of the business activity of the firm. At the largest and most successful firms in the United States, the CAO is often more business savvy than any other person in the firm, even (sometimes especially) including the firm's partners. Attorneys in the most prestigious firms recognize this and reward highly qualified administrative officers accordingly. Whereas CAOs historically were recruited up from the ranks within a law firm, there is an increasing trend to bring in new talent from outside the firm in order to provide a "fresh perspective." This is the point at which we become involved, as many of these top firms call upon us to find that unique individual capable of functioning as the firm's "nerve center."

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Legal Secretaries

While any good legal secretary knows that it is they who truly make things happen in a firm, many attorneys do not understand how valuable a highly-skilled secretary can be for their practice. Every great legal secretary has a counterpart - a colleague who treats his or her position as though it were nothing more than a means of earning a salary. They answer the phone in a monotone, file papers haphazardly, and halfheartedly transcribe scribbles from the attorneys they are assigned to help. But the true stars? They go the extra distance. They know the clients by name, they ensure that they understand the documents involved in a transaction or a trial, they take their place as a full-fledged team member of any project to which they are assigned. Our job in recruiting and placing legal secretaries is to find those stars - legal secretaries who thrive on being an integral part of a winning legal team - and to place them with attorneys that can use (and appreciate) their help. Our clients tell us every day how happy they are that we made the effort to discover their particular skills and match those skills to the right opportunity.

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Librarian

Nearly every firm could use skilled library personnel, even those with smaller collections. Our clients constantly need librarians experienced with the numerous treatises, case reporters, and information binders that are the staples of legal research, as well as being extremely well versed in and comfortable with the paperless media that are swiftly replacing the more traditional information mining methods. Our clients are willing to pay top salaries to knowledgeable law librarians with information science backgrounds and generally afford them the opportunity to do much more than replace binder pages with update sheets and toss out old pocket parts. Law librarians in the 21st century need to be on top of the latest in legal computing technology. The need to migrate vast amounts of data in most large firms into a management system that permits its full exploitation has driven an increasing search for skilled library scientists. If you are the sort of person who relishes the challenge of administrating a dynamic information system and has interest in managing the design and build of efficient systems for the cataloging and retrieval of the vast array of integral firm information, we generally have opportunities for you.

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Litigation Support

Attention, Legal Assistants! Law Firms are looking for litigation support people and really good people in this area are very sought after. They can be in short supply at times. The subject is very interesting, and, while you need to have a certain technical "knack" for it, you won't know if you have that knack until you learn about the field. And, even if you are not involved in the technical aspects of discovery, you would still be wise to understand how the practice of law in changing, and to learn the rules.

Litigation support people get involved with electronic discovery. A background in e-discovery makes you very marketable to law firms and is a really good career move. It is also a very interesting field which is rapidly changing the way law is practiced and can hugely affect the outcome of a case. Many traditional law firm paralegals transition into this field with great success. Their technical skills are sought after, and they are well compensated for them.

People who are in litigation support, or practice support, generally understand data conversion. Again, they can have a paralegal background, a classic one. But, like paralegals, they work in the cases, not for the IT department. They also work with vendors when they need to send out data conversion work, and have a great say in which vendors are chosen. People who understand this area are vital to a firm, and large firms have built whole departments around litigation support. Litigation support people in law firms really like what they do they are truly vital to the firm.

How is electronic discovery defined? Electronic discovery (also called e-discovery or ediscovery) refers to any process in which electronic data is sought, located, secured, and searched with the intent of using it as evidence in a civil or criminal legal case. E-discovery can be carried out offline on a particular computer or it can be done in a network. Court-ordered or government-sanctioned hacking for the purpose of obtaining critical evidence is also a type of e-discovery.

Speed of document processing and review are areas where paralegals have noticed the most dramatic shift from paper discovery. You are really in a good position when you can provide guidance and advice to attorneys in the area of e-discovery. Many of the attorneys that you will work with are actually dealing with this for the first time.

Understanding and then "selling" the workflow benefits of electronic discovery is a process that often originated with the paralegal and flows to the attorneys and them to the firm's client. Because the millions of e mails generated by parties in lawsuits cannot be printed and read, we have electronic ways of sifting through documents. Of course, every legal team on a case wants to find that "smoking gun" in the reams of evidence that is required to be produced. This can win or lose a case, and you, as a team member, can be instrumental in the project of electronically culling through the documents- to find that smoking gun. Or, just as important, you can prevent privileged documents from inadvertently being sent out to the other side.

Many large firms offer training in this area, but paralegals would be wise to get educated on their own-maybe take classes at night where training is lacking.

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Marketing

Law Firms are businesses too, and they need to market their services. Small to large law firms are increasingly relying on marketing professionals to help them market their services. With the advent of web-based marketing programs, and other law firm initiatives, marketing jobs are becoming increasingly important to law firm success. While many in marketing jobs working inside law firms tend to come from the industry, do not be surprised to find many within law firms whose previous jobs were in a marketing capacity for a large corporation.

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Paralegals

Experienced paralegal assistance is critical to the success of any law firm. We are dedicated to assisting our clients in their efforts to find and evaluate those legal professionals who exemplify talent and dedication and will deftly handle matters that require a keen intelligence, yet need not be billed to the client at attorney rates. With the shifts in the economy and the resulting client dissatisfaction with paying high attorney billing rates, the use of paralegals in the law firm has been forecasted to increase significantly in this decade. While availability of schools for paralegals has grown to meet this expected need, it is high-quality experience in a demanding legal environment that makes a paralegal most marketable to the best firms.

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Receptionist

The receptionist is, quite literally, the front line of a firm's public relations campaign and has the ability to make or break the firm's image during that crucial initial telephone or walk-in contact. A top-flight law firm receptionist possesses the same skill set and performs largely the same duties as do receptionists in most other industries, and are similarly as difficult to find. A star receptionist must be able to do more than regurgitate a string of last names followed by the ubiquitous "Hold, please," or "I'll put you through," (or worse, simply transferring without acknowledgment!) followed by punching a button and turning back to a book/magazine/computer game. In order to present the firm in the best light requires the skill of a stage actor in enunciation and diction, the composure of a tightrope walker, and the patience of a saint! The firms with which we work are in constant need of these elusive star receptionists. If you are a "people person" with ambassador-like diplomacy who takes pride in making a good impression, we would be delighted to hear from you (but please - don't put us on hold!).

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Technical Specialist

Technical specialists assist patent attorneys in patent prosecution and litigation. Patent law is one of the fastest growing practice areas, and there is a strong demand for technical specialists with strong science or engineering backgrounds in many law firms.

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Other

Other jobs include openings for Receptionists and other important law firm personnel.

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