They’re older, wiser and can use a photocopier without needing instruction. They have organisational skills, workplace stamina and more life experience than the average grad straight out of uni. But is the potential of mature-age law students being unduly overlooked in the graduate recruitment process? Stephanie Quine investigates.

Many mature-age law graduates carry a decade or more of experience in a different career, as well as the experiences they have built up simply in living life through marriage, mortgages, kids and travel.

Roslyn Greenhill is one such graduate. A single mother with three children under 20, she also achieved a GPA of 6.75 in her second year of the Juris Doctor (JD) program at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ).

Twenty years ago, Greenhill graduated with a bachelor of arts with majors in economics and industrial relations and has since worked as a business manager for several Queensland primary schools and currently works as the office manager and secretary of a small biotechnology company.

She’s now concerned that that experience may be working against her.

“I’ve taken dates off my resume for previous employment past six years ago, I’ve tried tweaking all sorts of things, I’ve done some networking and I don’t even get a look in,” says Greenhill, 43.

After applying for 10 clerkship and traineeship positions at QLD mid-tier firms this year, Greenhill says she heard nothing back, even after she requested feedback.

“I have so many transferrable skills and if I considered myself over-qualified I certainly wouldn’t be applying for [clerkship roles] … I’m itching for legal experience,” she says.

Greenhill’s fears were echoed by almost 15 older students who contacted Lawyers Weekly following a graduate recruitment article published in edition 581.

We weren’t born yesterday

A 47-year-old Sydney-based lawyer, George*, says he was told by one HR recruiter that he was too old to even consider for a clerkship position.

 “I have dealt repeatedly with HR people, all of whom have been unable to see past the cookie-cutter 22-year-old with a string of distinctions behind them,” says George, who graduated in 2010 after a career in government and says he’s only been able to secure part-time work in small firms.

Securing a clerkship, which often feeds into a graduate role, is a daunting task for most Australian law students. Their total numbers outweigh the number of legal jobs and traineeships on offer and an uncertain economic climate, dictating conservative hiring strategies, is not working in their favour.

According to the 2012 Hudson Salary Guide, released last week, legal recruiters are exercising more caution than usual when recruiting talent at all levels, in order to represent the best value to the firm’s bottom line.

But Maryjane Crabtree, an executive partner at Allens who was formerly involved with the firm’s recruitment, is adamant her firm does not discern on age.

“I’d never assume a younger lawyer would be able to work harder or longer hours than someone who was a bit older; that wouldn’t seem relevant to me,” she told Lawyers Weekly.

Allens have a panel of partners and senior associates who conduct interviews; however, initial online applications for clerkship roles are selected by the firm’s HR department.

“I think the problem is the middlemen in the HR roles. They are concerned with preserving their client base and it’s the initial applications that they see, where people like me don’t get past,” says George.

Greenhill has spoken to a number of recruiters at careers fairs who assure her applications are assessed on merit, but after she came up against a HR who was “almost the same age as my daughter” she felt disheartened.

“Maybe they look at my resume and think ‘well, this woman’s old enough to be my mother’,” says Greenhill.

Doing the numbers

Tiffany Rogers is the national graduate resourcing consultant at Allens and says the “age bias question” is something she gets asked about repeatedly on campus by mature-age students.

“There certainly is a perception that large law firms aren’t going to be interested … my message to them is always the same, if you are able to show the qualities we look for from our graduates we will not discern on age,” Rogers told Lawyers Weekly.

She says that, while her team doesn’t have a specific culling process, it does look first at grades, then university, to categorise applicants.

“Once we’ve got a shortlist of candidates we do a diversity analysis taking into account university, age, ethnicity and so on, and again, it comes back to the number of applications we receive; [we] tend not to receive [as many] mature-age applications, and we‘re still getting the majority of our applicants from certain universities, so naturally we’re have more graduates from those unis and less mature-age grads,” says Rogers.

School’s out

Rogers says Allens takes into account the perceived prestige of a university “to an extent” but that the firm prides itself on taking grads from a varied background.

“In my previous legal HR role [with a mid-tier firm] I found it to be a lot more narrow in what we looked for. I was actually quite surprised at Allens approach to universities, [it’s] very far-reaching,” she says.

This is another factor weighing on the minds of mature-age students. Josie Palmer, a 40-year-old former international flight attendant, is in her first year of undergraduate law at USQ. She said she chose USQ, a new law school in Springfield that recently had its first round of graduates, because of its reputation for helping students who don’t fit the traditional high-school leaver profile.

“I subscribe to QLD University of Technology (QUT) and a lot of the other unis and they’ve got firm links in place with established law firms. University of QLD (UQ) had a meet and greet with partners and a postgraduate information evening recently whereas [USQ] doesn’t have those established relationships,” says Palmer, who admits law is competitive and she is worried she may be overlooked due to her university and her age.

Crabtree says that if there was an outstanding, balanced candidate with lots to offer it would not matter if Allens had even heard from the university before or not.

“That factor on it’s own wouldn’t have any impact,” says Crabtree, adding that Allens has taken an interest in JD gradates since the first JD intake at Melbourne University more than 10 years ago that “back in those days” consisted mainly of people who had previously had long careers elsewhere.

Anne Reeves, the HR general manager at Maurice Blackburn (MB), told Lawyers Weekly a similar story. She says MB recently took on “three or four” trainees with a JD and two of those were mature age.

“We get a number of people who were very successful in their professional life outside law and we’re very interested in seeing them because they replicate the community we work in,” she says.

Tools of the trade

Avril Ford commented on Lawyers Weekly’s  LinkedIn discussion forum that a number of her mature-age friends had taken up clerkships but that “the real barrier is our inability to stop paying the mortgage and take the time off to do the clerkships in the first place”.

Greenhill says that she would not apply if she wasn’t prepared to devote herself to training. Similarly, George says he is prepared to accept the initially “quite low pay” for a junior solicitor role.

“Mature-age law grads understand exactly what they’re going into, more so than the young’uns, because most have done it before. They [also] care more about being there, and they want it more because they’ve had to work harder to get to it, and are therefore more likely to stay in firms,” he says.

Despite the challenges mature-age students face, the sacrifices they make and the life skills they carry, there is a point to be made about the nature of their previous professional experience.

Reeves believes mature-age graduates can have trouble adjusting from being “at the top of the tree” to coming in as a more junior person.

“They’re not junior as in they don’t know how to conduct themselves, they’re junior technically. People we’ve taken on board want to come and they’re happy to start again,” says Reeves.

Forty-year-old Taylor* is about to start again. A mature-age law student success story, he recently secured a clerkship and graduate role in the construction and mining practice of a global firm in Perth.

“There is this underlying current, and [unspoken] vibe going around campus where the lecturers are very much like ‘oh don’t even bother applying to large firms if you’re mature age because they just won’t be interested’, so I set out to prove them wrong,” he says.

Taylor admits he “got lucky” after applying to 11 of the larger firms in Perth and gaining two interviews, but it was his 23 years’ experience in the navy that helped him stand out.

“I started studying law because the kind of work I was doing as I was getting more senior in the navy had a lot of contracts stuff,” says Taylor, who spent two years in Pearl Harbour working in US navy headquarters and six months working on construction contracts in the Middle East. 

He says he knows at least two other mature-age graduates with former military careers who have been successful in gaining junior legal positions.

“My marks aren’t outstanding, high credit average, but I guess it was my experiences that stood out [and] the old teamwork; knowing when to lead and when not to lead,” says Taylor, adding that he doens’t look 40, keeps fit and has a “younger outlook on things”.

“I think that was a factor too; I fitted in a bit better. From the outset I said I was here to learn ... I melded into the team really well. Firms don’t want to treat you like a run-of-the-mill law grad and the only way they won’t treat you like that is if you’ve got some kind of [relevant] background in the first place.”

Taylor began his clerkship alongside a partner who he says “was probably younger than me” but who had had a former career as an engineer.

“We got along really well and the partner who hired me said the firm had nothing against older people, it’s just that their experiences in the past have had nothing to do with law. He said they tend to be really interested in someone who’s got that relevant background,” says Taylor.

Taylor, like many others Lawyers Weekly spoke with, admits this is a “tricky” topic to get to the bottom of.

The fact remains, however, that there are limited support groups running for mature-age law students in Australia. While a number of well-established ‘young lawyers’ associations exist, perhaps it is time they were re-named ‘new lawyers’ associations.

*Names have been changed