The Informational Interview: Your Secret Weapon

Here is a thing nobody tells you plainly: a large share of legal jobs are filled before they are ever advertised. Someone thinks of a name, makes a call, and the position quietly disappears. If your entire search consists of refreshing job boards, you are only seeing the leftovers.

The informational interview is how you get into the room where those names come up. It is not a job interview. Nobody is deciding whether to hire you. You are asking a working lawyer to spend twenty or thirty minutes telling you how they actually spend their days. Done well, it teaches you more about a practice area than any firm website, and it puts a real face and a warm memory next to your name for the next time a spot opens.

I ran an articling program for years, and the students who found positions through the hidden market were almost never the ones with the best grades. They were the ones who had been quietly having these conversations for months.

What an informational interview actually is

Strip away the corporate phrasing and it is simple: you reach out to a lawyer, you ask to hear about their work, and you listen. That is the whole thing.

The magic is in what it is not. It is not a request for a job, which means the person on the other end feels no pressure to say no. Lawyers turn down "do you have any openings" reflexively, because the honest answer is usually "not right now." But "could I hear how you ended up in immigration law" is flattering and low-stakes. Most people genuinely enjoy talking about themselves and their path, especially to someone earlier in the journey.

You are playing a longer game than a single meeting. You are building a small network of people who know what you are looking for, have met you, and think well of you. When a colleague of theirs mentions they need an articling student, your name is available to be handed over.

Who to reach out to

Start closer than you think. The best first contacts are people with even a thread of connection to you, because a warm introduction gets answered far more often than a cold one.

• Alumni from your law school. Career offices keep alumni contact lists for exactly this reason. Shared roots are a real reason for someone to say yes.
• Lawyers you have already crossed paths with. A guest lecturer, a moot judge, someone you met at a clinic or a section event. You are not a stranger to them, even if you feel like one.
• Friends of friends. Ask the lawyers in your own circle, however junior, who they think you should talk to. A referred introduction skips the hardest part.
• People whose exact work interests you. If you read a firm's write-up of a case or a lawyer's article and it genuinely caught your attention, that is a legitimate, specific reason to reach out.

Aim wider than the big downtown firms everyone else is chasing. Sole practitioners, two-lawyer shops, in-house teams, municipalities, and legal clinics are often the friendliest to a coffee request and the most likely to hire off the beaten path. If you want a sense of who is actually staffing up, scan current articling and legal jobs and use the firm names as a starting list for who to learn about.

How to ask (the message that gets a yes)

The request is where most people either overthink it or overreach. Keep it short, specific, and easy to say yes to.

Name the connection, name why them specifically, and ask for a small, defined amount of time. Twenty minutes is a real number; "pick your brain" is not. And make the low-stakes nature explicit, because it removes the fear that you are about to ask for a job.

Every practising lawyer you admire was once the nervous student sending that first awkward email. Send it anyway. The worst outcome is silence, and silence costs you nothing.

A message that works reads something like this: you are a student at their alma mater, you noticed they practise in an area you are trying to understand, and you would be grateful for twenty minutes of their time to hear about their path. You are not looking for a job, just perspective. Offer to work entirely around their schedule, in person or by phone or video, whatever is easiest for them.

Keep it under a short paragraph. Do not attach your résumé; this is not an application, and a résumé makes it feel like one. If you do not hear back in a week or so, one gentle follow-up is fine. After that, let it go and move to the next name. Non-responses are almost always about a full inbox, not about you.

Running the meeting well

You asked for this time, so you drive it. Come with real questions and the person will leave thinking you are sharp and worth remembering.

Do your homework first. Read their firm bio, glance at anything they have written or any matter they are quoted on, and understand the basics of their practice area so you are not asking them to explain what you could have looked up. That preparation shows, and it is a form of respect.

Then ask questions only they can answer:

1. How did you actually get here? Paths in law are rarely linear, and the detours are where the useful lessons live.
2. What does a normal week look like? This cuts through the glossy version and tells you whether the day-to-day would suit you.
3. What surprised you about this area of practice? This gets you the honest, unofficial texture you cannot find on a website.
4. If you were in my position now, what would you do? People love being asked for advice, and the answers are often specific and generous.
5. Is there anyone else you think I should talk to? This is the single most valuable question, and I have saved it for a reason below.

Watch the clock. If you asked for twenty minutes, start wrapping up at eighteen. If they are enjoying the conversation, they will offer to keep going; that is their call to make, not yours to assume. Ending on time is a small professionalism signal that lawyers notice.

Do not pivot into asking for a job. It breaks the trust you just built and confirms every cynical suspicion about why students ask for coffee. If they raise the idea of openings themselves, wonderful, follow their lead. Otherwise, resist.

The follow-up, where most people fumble

The conversation is not the finish line. The follow-up is what turns a pleasant chat into a lasting connection, and it is where the majority of students simply vanish.

Within a day, send a short thank-you note. Reference something specific they said, not a generic line you could have sent to anyone. If they mentioned a book, an article, or a case, naming it proves you were listening and makes the note memorable. This one habit puts you ahead of most of your peers, who send nothing at all.

If they offered to introduce you to someone, make it effortless for them. Send a tidy few sentences about yourself they can forward without editing, and thank them again when the introduction lands. That is how one coffee becomes three.

Then stay lightly in touch. Not pestering, just present. When you accept an articling position, tell the people who helped you along the way; it closes the loop and it is the kind of grace that gets remembered. A message every few months when you have genuine news is plenty. The point is that when a position opens a year from now, you are not a forgotten name but a familiar one.

Why this is your secret weapon

Job boards show you the visible market. Informational interviews are how you reach the hidden one, the referrals and quiet openings that never get posted. If you want the fuller picture of how that hidden market works, our guide on how to land an articling position walks through it, and if the whole idea of reaching out makes you want to hide, networking for introverts is written for exactly that feeling.

The students who do this are not smoother or more connected than everyone else. They are just the ones who sent the email, showed up prepared, and followed up like a professional. That is a repeatable habit, not a personality trait, and it is entirely available to you.

Pick one name this week. Someone with even a thin connection to you, in an area you are curious about. Send the short, honest message. You are not asking for a job. You are starting a conversation, and conversations are where careers in law actually begin. For more on the search itself, the rest of our job search writing is a good place to keep going.