New program helps lawyers keep pace with industry changes

Westchester County Business Journal, Mar 12, 2007 by Occhipinti, Christina

The competitive nature of the legal field adds to the allure for aspiring attorneys. But the competition, combined with the constant changes in the, industry, could make it difficult for those who have taken time off from their legal careers to jump back into the mix.

Looking to ease the transition for people who want to re-enter the legal field - and for lawyers who have-never practiced and want to enter the field - Pace University School of Law and the Westchester Women's Bar Association (WWBA) have teamed up to create New Directions.

The program consists of one academic semester and one externship semester. The goal is to bring participants' legal skills up to current standards while also developing their resumes and refreshing their interviewing skills, said Mark Shulman, assistant dean for graduate programs and international affiliations for Pace University School of Law.

"The program is the brainchild of one of my colleagues, Amy Gewirtz, associate director of the career development office. She realized, 'Wow, there's a population of people that's not being served at all as people who were trained as lawyers ... and left practice, most of them to presumably raise families,' " Shulman said. "(These people) want to resume their professional career. Their substantive knowledge may be rusty or inappropriate to the kind of law they want to practice. Their research skills are out of date because Westlaw and Lexus are changing all the time. They just don't know how to get into the profession, so we, can help them with a lot of their career development skills."

New Directions differs from other refresher courses, he said, because the program looks to incorporate the skills unpracticing lawyers have learned during their time away from the field into new occupations.

"We try to figure out how to translate their experiences into a professional career. We realized we can't just take a course off the shelf and offer it to people," said Shulman. "We had to come up with something completely new, and I think with New Directions we have done that."

Shulman said Pace made a good choice in partnering with the WWBA last summer for New Directions because the program fell within the confines of their target demographic. "(The WWBA) has great outreach, this fits well within their mission and they're particularly helpful in sorting out what kind of program we need to get our participants into the career tracks they want."

New Directions will kick off at the end of May, said Deb Volberg Pagnotta, program director and a cochairwoman of the WWBA's Lawyering and Parenting Committee.

"We will have one week of boot camp from May 21 to May 25. Then starting ... the week of June 12, we will have two half-days a week on Tuesday and Thursday for 10 weeks," Pagnotta said. "It will go through the summer to midAugust, and starting after Labor Day ... the participants will spend a semester in externships."

The program, which is extensively interactive, will bring participants up to speed with changes in the industry, she said.

"In the week of boot camp, we will be providing a series of programs that are designed to help the participants get back into the work force. For example, with legal research skills, if you've been out of (the) legal arena for a few years, you find that everything is online now," Pagnotta said. "We're bringing (program participants) into the 21st century. We're teaching and revisiting skills such as resume building, networking, communication skills, and as we move through the summer we will weave those skills into the substantive areas."

In its first track, the program will focus on matrimonial law and the externships will relate to that area of law.

"It is an area that we felt would provide participants in our program with lots of different avenues in pursuing careers afterwards - whether it's in the public sector, the, private sector, litigation, proving social services of some form, etcetera," said Pagnotta. "We felt it would be very intriguing and attractive to our targeted audience, and it would provide a broad spectrum of opportunities. It's a deep vein to be tapped. For the next round, we will be looking at other substantive areas of law."

Upon the completion of their academic semester and externship, participants will be placed in jobs relating to the area of law they studied.

"We will be looking at law firms in Westchester and Now York City. Employers may also be government agencies," Pagnotta said. "We will be reaching out to the legal community, as well as reaching out to various employers so participants can have a menu of options. We want to work with (our participants) to enable them to move back into practice of law in an extremely confident and capable way." Tuition for New Directions is approximately $9,000, and admissions are completed on a rolling basis. For information, call Amy Gewirtz, associate director of Pace University's Center for Career Development and program coordinator for New Directions, at 422-4606.