Valerie A. Fontaine earned her JD from UC Hastings College of Law and her BA, Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude, from UCLA. She was on the Editorial Board of COMM/ENT, a Journal of Communications and Entertainment Law. Valerie practiced law with a prominent Los Angeles law firm and entered the legal search profession in 1981. Valerie is Secretary to the Board of Directors of the National Association of Legal Search Consultants (NALSC) and Chairs its Newsletter Committee.
The conversation around diversity and inclusion in the legal profession changed over the past several decades. When the principals of SeltzerFontaineLLC entered the legal search profession in the early 1980s, diversity was a topic we brought up to the hiring authorities at major law firms and corporate legal departments rather than the other way around.…
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If your law firm is eligible but lacks certification as a woman-, minority-, veteran-, or other diversity-owned or small business, you may be missing out on valuable business opportunities. Most governmental entities now mandate that their vendors and their vendors’ suppliers are not only diverse, but also are certified as such. Hence, many private businesses…
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Objective statements are a waste of time and valuable resume space. Don’t squander those precious resources with meaningless words. You have just a few seconds of a hiring authority’s scanning time to entice them to read further before they set your resume aside. Prospective employers want to know immediately whether you’ve got what it takes…
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Dishonesty of any kind is a non-starter in a job search. Recently, I was speaking with legal industry consultants and employers about what red flags they see during the lateral hiring process, and how they weigh various risk factors in their decisions. There was an interesting discussion around various warning signs candidates exhibit during the…
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