When I graduated from law school, I had no idea that I was about to embark upon a 2 year journey to land my first full-time permanent job. Certain economic factors did not help including the fact that the legal market that I graduated into was under distress and the Boston legal market specifically, where I wanted to work, was and remains relatively small compared to other markets. I grew up in the Northeast and I didn’t want to move away from the area. My own happiness was important to me as well. I had recently met someone who I would go on to marry and I wanted us both to be happy as well. I also knew that I did not want to work for a big law firm.  Working in-house would make happy. I also was not naive; I knew that landing such a role was going to be an exceptionally difficult goal to achieve for a young (and at the time, highly inexperienced) attorney.

For those two years that I spent working in a variety of temporary roles, I gained a wide array of experience while also bringing in some needed income. Although working on a full-time temporary basis was not what I had anticipated, I made the most of it by learning as much as I could about the area of law I was working in at the time which ranged from electronic discovery, regulatory compliance, and contract administration to name a few.

After those two years, my next move was joining a legal startup company whose mission was to develop a proprietary contract management/analysis system and to train young attorneys in how to review and analyze complex contracts and answer specific questions about particular clauses within them. The truly unique part of the company was that there was no centralized office. We all worked remotely from around the country and each region would come together to meet periodically. It was this experience that gave my first true and in-depth taste of contract law.

From there, I then moved on to work for Velcro Group Corporation, part of Velcro Industries, which is a global leading manufacturer and maker of Velcro-brand hook and loop products. I then moved on to work for Pearson Education in another in-house role as Manager, Contract Negotiations. I most recently served as sole in-house counsel for Salary.com, a leader in the compensation services space.