It's fairly common for lawyers to switch into finance and investment banking specifically. There are several paths from law to investment banking.
You can get a banking job immediately after finishing law school; you can work as a law firm Associate for several years and then transition over; and you can go to business school after practicing for several years and interview for banking jobs as you complete your MBA.
It sounds appealing to go immediately from law school into investment banking. However, it is difficult to pull off and most banks do not recruit someone immediately out of law school. They would have difficulty placing the candidate and deciding whether to make him an Analyst or Associate.
This method becomes easier if you had finance experience prior to law school, in which case you just need to tell a good story about why you went to law school.
If you haven't had this experience, it's better to work for a few years at a law firm and transition over.
Going to business school after law school is only recommended if you've practiced in a completely unrelated legal field like Intellectual Property or Environmental Law.
How To Work In Law And Then Switch To Banking
You need to Corporate Law. Don't even think about Intellectual Property, Litigation, or anything else. Do Corporate Law.
Recruiting is ultimately a numbers game, and you increase your odds greatly if you have Corporate, Securities, or M&A legal experience.
Once you have a few years experience working on transactions, you can consider switching into finance.
Contact all your friends in the industry and ask for referrals to recruiters; contact former clients and ask about setting up informational meetings or discussing opportunities at their firms.
Target industries and clients you have experience with. If you worked with a lot of technology companies, go for technology investment banking firms; if you did Mergers And Acquisitions, go for the M&A departments at banks.
Also, try for boutiques and middle-market firms rather than bulge brackets unless you work at one of the top few law firms - it will be much easier to get into smaller places.
How To Sell Your Story In Interviews
With a Corporate Law background, there are 2 main points you'll need to prove: 1) that you have quantitative and finance skills and 2) that you really want to make a big career change even if you're on Partner track at your law firm.
You really need to focus on financial skills in your interview preparations. Know the 3 financial statements cold. Be able to explain models and valuation methods because they will ask you tons of questions here, especially if you were an English or History major and have no finance experience.
This is one of the few cases where getting a CFA might actually help you get into investment banking - it would give you the finance knowledge and show your interest in the field.
Making the case for a career change can actually be easier. You want to emphasize you were always interested in corporate finance and dealmaking, and went into Corporate Law for those reasons. However, you got frustrated with your inability to BE the dealmaker and how you had to just sit on the sidelines, and so now you want to switch into banking and be a player.
I've been discreet testing with this method with a lot of triumph and I figured it's time I let you know this secret.
We all know that to get to the popular #1 spot in Google you need backlinks (sites linking to you) - and lots of them. So sure you can perform a Squidoo lens and throw up a hub on hubpages or write an article on EzineArticles but without backlinks you will pretty much never be able to maintain the #1 spot. So let me tell you how to change that:
1. You perform your Squidoo lens/hubpage/ezinearticles/website or whatever you feel most adequate with.
2. just pull out and write an article (anything linked to the topic) with a link back to your Squidoo lens or Hub or whatever with the keyword as the anchor text.
3. You then tell how to make multiple unique articles out of it by providing alternatives for each sentence. This is very important because if you submit the SAME article to 400 directories, Google will only count the links coming from like 2-3 of them. The rest will be banned as "duplicate content" and you won't get any link juice from them. By making them "unique" you will get almost all of the 400 websites linking to you, giving your website a high position in Google.
So for example if your article contains the sentence: You need to check it out. You will supply this into :
?You need to check it out-This is totally worth checking out-Check this out if you haven't yet?
will then randomly pick one of the three sentence for each article. The more terms you have, the more unique your article will be and the less likely it will be marked as non-unique content by Google. This step will probably take around 20-35 minutes but believe me its worth it. After changing it will be able to spin it into 999 different variations of the article.
3. You then tell to submit a UNIQUE article to 400+ article directories. Google will not be able to tell that its duplicate content because will make it unique. This means that Google will think you got 400 links because you wrote 400 articles (well, almost).
4. Few weeks later, you'll have 400+ backlinks to your Squidoo/Hubpages or whatever from the article directories and people who pick up your articles and you will almost be guaranteed the number 1 spot (obviously depending on the number of competition of the keyword) for a long time.
Now the service which spins the articles is free but which submits them automatically to article directories costs $17 per month. If you are serious about internet marketing though, that $17 per month is NOTHING. Think about it, you can get an unlimited number of top rankings in Google for less than $20 per month. You should be able to make the money back in no time.
PS: Remember to tell JetSubmitter to submit like 20 articles a day so everything looks natural to Google and you don't have 400 links to your website in a couple of days. Getting too many links too fast looks fishy to Google.
Both Ian Spellfield & Lguerra are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Ian Spellfield has sinced written about articles on various topics from Pets, Social Issues and Culture and Society. Ian Spellfield, a former investment banker, advises students and young professionals on and how to earn high .. Ian Spellfield's top article generates over 12100 views. to your Favourites.
Lguerra has sinced written about articles on various topics from Site Promotion, Careers and Job Hunting. Lazaro Guerra . Lguerra's top article generates over 1000 views. to your Favourites.