This is why immigrant lawyers should not start their careers as law clerks, legal assistants or paralegals when relocating to Canada.

I am originally from Brazil, where I was a lawyer for about seven years before moving permanently to Canada and restarting my career here. I decided to write this article because looking for an alternate position in a law firm was also how I started my career. I later found out it was not the best approach. I constantly get asked by immigrants for tips on how to find a job as a law clerk, legal assistant or paralegal to get their careers started. This is even generally, and without much thought and knowledge about the legal profession here, advised by immigration consultants as a path forward. Depending on your goal, that may be a shot in your own foot (is this even an expression in English? It sure is in Brazil :) )?

A career, the sacrifices we are willing to make, and the paths we want to follow are highly personal decisions, so I want to shine a light on what could possibly put you in a better position to compete for the best jobs in the market (salary-wise) if that is what you wish. Of course, I understand that salary is not the primary motivator for some people (I include myself here, to a certain extent). Still, if we can maximize the return of giving our time to an employer, I want you to have the information you need to at least have a chance at it. If, after reading, you decide you actually want to follow an alternate career, which is not just a stepping stone for you, that's also totally fine. There is no absolute right or wrong here. There is only what is suitable for you and your family.

Although I would not change a thing and am very happy with where this choice took me, I understand that I went through a lot more struggle than if I had simply done what local law students/lawyers do to find a job. In Canada, where you start your career matters - and begins in law school. I find that more than "prejudice" against internationally trained lawyers coming from the employers, the?lack of honest information?is what makes it harder for immigrants to get good jobs after relocating. We don't follow their traditional course of events in the recruitment process and lose golden opportunities with that.

If you have already made these choices and are confident with them, please do not change the course of action only because of what you read here unless it makes sense for your specific situation. Just a reminder: I started as a legal assistant, was later a contracts administrator, and successfully found a job as a lawyer after graduating.

It may seem intuitive for people from countries where the recruitment process for freshly graduated lawyers is not as structured and traditional as it is in Canada to think they would be putting themselves out there and showing value to the employer by starting their careers in clerical or administrative positions in a law firm. It is intuitive for them, and it was for me when I moved here that we could grow within the firm and continue our careers as lawyers there after graduating from law school. However, this is not true for every type of firm/workplace. There are other strategies you can use to truly put yourself in a better position to compete with local lawyers in the job market.?

Please note that this is crucial to those looking to get into most mid-sized, big firms or the government. Smaller firms and corporations (although first-year in-house positions are rare) may be more flexible with their recruitment. And the decision of where you want to work is very personal. I usually see students drawn to apply and desire to work in the most high-paying jobs, but I rarely see them thinking of whether they are a good fit. Most people try to fit in first, just thinking of salary and status, and after being there for some time, they realize they are unhappy with their choices. Do the most research you can before applying.

I was hoping you could bare with me while I explain why you may not want to restart through an alternate career in a law firm. Beforehand, you will need to understand how a local lawyer finds their first job. My experience has been solely with Ontario, so although it may translate to other provinces, please take it with a grain of salt and listen to other immigrants in the jurisdiction you are located in.

Unlike most jurisdictions in the world, Ontario's recruitment process starts for the students in the Juris Doctor in their second year. The LLM students would apply?as soon as they start school (or before, depending on when their first term begins). And that is because the Law Society of Ontario organizes the traditional recruitment process that most firms (and the government) participate in. This is where they hire their future first-year associates. I will explain how this works in more depth.

As a first step, the student will upload their application to a portal. It will contain, at minimum, a resume, a cover letter, and a school transcript to be considered for a summer internship position at a particular firm (or company/government). Some workplaces may require other documents. Most students genuinely competing for the best places will have good grades. So that is a minimum requirement - not necessarily something that will make you stand out to the future employer.?

You will want to adapt your application to show certain personality traits (such as your ability to be a leader, communication skills, ability to influence, and collaborative/team worker personality) and background, depending on where you want to practice. It is common here, for example, that an IP lawyer will have a previous experience in health jobs/academia. You should speak to lawyers in the area of practice you want to pursue about their background and adapt your resume to highlight those skills if you have them.??

To show the personality traits mentioned earlier, simply stating them as a "highlighted skill" won't cut. You must demonstrate through your life history that you have these skills. It could be through more traditional roles such as working as a volunteer in legal clinics during school years, writing for a journal in the area of practice you are keen to work on, being a part of student associations committees and so on. Alternatively, you can also be innovative, write and publish a novel, start and succeed at an online e-commerce store, start a podcast about a specific subject, etc. Although the possibilities are endless, to stand out, you must have a proven history of taking action and doing more than just good grades. Every single one of your competitors will also be good students. For immigrants who come in as mature students, I am sure you have a lot of previous experiences in your home countries to add to this list of possibilities.

As a side note, I have always worked in the private sector. Still, I know that if your goal is the government, there will also be some challenging exams as part of the recruitment process.?

After preparing your application, the second step will be the OCIs (On-Campus Interviews). The employer will come to each school and interview the candidates they selected by submitting applications on the portal.

The selected candidate will come in as a summer student to the workplace (law firm, government or company) where they accept an offer. The following year, they will return as articling students to that same firm. Students will work their summer jobs during school vacations and return to class to complete their studies for about a year. After graduating from school, almost a year later, they return to the firm to start the articling term.

For that reason, to maximize your chances, you will want to start looking for a summer internship and not directly look for an articling position. Otherwise, if you look for articling positions directly, you will look at what is left over from places that summer students could not fill out. Most articling positions, if not all, were already filled out the year before by the summer students. Only in rare circumstances, when the summer student decides not to proceed in the same firm, or the firm does not hire them back, which is very rare, will there be an opening to hire an articling student.?

I have been through this tough decision and know of many of you that would be in the same position - I could not leave my guaranteed job (in an alternate career, in my case) to summer for three months and then be unemployed until the following year, or until I am lucky to find another job before the articling term starts. This is a genuine financial and mental struggle for mature immigrants who are spending so much money on not only the education but also the immigration process, housing relocation costs, kids etc. However, this is your best-case scenario to the extent you can.

At the same time students are articling, they are also going through the bar exams. Once both are completed, they are hired back for the following year as associates in the same firm.

This is why applying for summer in the firm you want to practice is crucial. You will be hired back for articling and later as a lawyer in that same firm. It is infrequent to find a firm hiring for first-year positions because these are already filled out by the articling students from the previous year.

This was actually the main struggle I had when looking for a job after articling. I completed my articles in-house in the same company where I had an alternative career (I was a Contracts and Negotiations Specialist and the General Counsel was kind enough to supervise my articles so I wouldn't have to leave to summer and article elsewhere). However, I was under a temporary contract that finished almost simultaneously with my articles, and the company did not require another lawyer (aside from the GC).

I only came to find out law firms rarely hire first years when, after articling, I contacted recruiters to find my first job as a lawyer. Every single one responded by saying they do not work with first years. As I had about 2-3 years of experience with commercial law in Canada by working in legal departments in an alternative career and had several years of experience in my home country (Brazil), I leveraged that to look for positions where the required minimum experience was 2 to 5 years. However, not all firms will value our time as lawyers in other jurisdictions and will only start counting our call to the bar since we were called in Ontario.

I had about 18 interviews and did receive offers from different firms. Still, through the first 5 or 6 interviews, I had to learn what to highlight to even be considered. As you know, if we have previous experience, we have much knowledge that can be transferable. However, we also don't know some basic things a person will learn here in their first years of practice. It will happen to every single one of us that apply for a position that is not as junior as first-year, that we will be expected to know things that we don't because of this gap. And, of course, I am considering that you are coming from a jurisdiction and area of practice with different processes and procedures than what you would find in Ontario.

If you have a good employer, they will be aware of that and wait a few months for you to catch up while benefiting from your more advanced expertise in other aspects of the work. Still, not all of them will have the same vision. This can undoubtedly make adapting to the new job more stressful than if you started from a first-year position.?

As you can see, none of the traditional steps on finding your first job as a lawyer (for high-paying jobs) requires previous knowledge of how to draft a contract or a motion (unless you didn't go through the traditional recruitment process like me). As a summer, articling, and first-year, you will be trained for that. The employer expects this, and all your colleagues in the same position will learn at the same pace.

However, what is required by the mid-sized, big firms and government is that you follow the traditional process for recruitment. There is no escaping from that. Even if you hold an alternative career position in one of these firms, that is not how they would hire you as a lawyer later. You would still be required to go through the recruitment process with everyone else. Except that most of them would have built their background per the area of practice they would like to work on, and you were, during all this time, only getting more of the same - just "law knowledge".

There are sporadic cases where a law clerk gets hired to be an articling student in one of these workplaces. In most of these, they are not treated the same as those who came in through the recruitment process, and they will not be hired back as a first-year associate. So please be very careful with trying this approach. There are great workplaces and employers out there but be cautioned about this. Then you would have to fight the stigma when looking for a first-year position to explain why you were not hired back - the question will always be: "did this person not perform well?"

So what is the alternative? How can we put ourselves in a better position if we have to work while studying to get our licenses in Ontario? Although this does not guarantee to put you in a better place, as being a law clerk/legal assistant/paralegal is not the path local lawyers usually take and can be seen as not desirable by certain employers, you would preferably work in something that could provide some background to the area of practice you want to work on in the future.

If you want to be a personal injury lawyer or in insurance defence, you may want to work as a claims analyst; as an IP lawyer, you may want to have previous experience somewhere in the health industry; as a corporate lawyer, I have found my work as a contracts administrator (even though still in the legal field, just more specific) to have been very helpful in applications. Sometimes previous experience in sales/customer services can also be well seen.

So there are several alternative careers that are not the more intuitive and recommended by immigration consultants that will put you in a better position for your future job search than working in a law firm in a clerical or administrative position.?

Suppose you are still not clear about this, and you wish to work in mid-sized, big firms, or the government; what I usually recommend to my mentees is to schedule a coffee chat with summer and articling students of 5 different firms where they would like to work and ask them about their backgrounds.?

Coffee chats are common here, and people are helpful and willing to share their experiences with others. Ask them if any of their colleagues were hired by starting as law clerks in the same firm. You will almost unanimously hear that no one was hired that way. In the rare cases that they do, there is more to the story - a strong personal connection or a key prior advanced experience in that specific person's resume - that will put that person in a different light than most regular people, which may not be your case.

Now, in the event you do not wish to be a lawyer. In that case, if you are confident you like the everyday tasks of administrative and clerical work, these do not apply to you. Suppose you are comfortable with the type of work to be performed, the salaries, and the career progression of these professions. In that case, you should absolutely go for it!

I hope this very long explanation can help clarify things for other immigrants.?

I look forward to seeing more of my fellow immigrants in leading positions soon!