Valerie A. Fontaine earned her JD from UC Law San Francisco (formerly UC Hastings) 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 past Secretary to the Board of Directors of the National Association of Legal Search Consultants (NALSC) and former Chair of its Newsletter Committee. She currently serves as a consultant to NALSC headquarters.
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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Prospective employers can blow the interview process just as easily as job seekers can. Many of the potential pitfalls are similar to those experienced by candidates and some are unique to the employer’s side of the equation. The jobseeker complaints listed below unfortunately are all too common. Muddled objective A major jobseeker pet peeve is…
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