First, what is business development? Ask any ten businesscritters and you’ll get ten different answers. Here’s my take: the person wearing the biz dev hat is concerned with making a business prosper.

This requires strategic analysis of a company and its competitors. Who are your competitors? What are they doing right, and what are they doing wrong? How can you learn from them and apply that knowledge to your company?

It also means you have to get into the weeds. Perhaps the CEO is saying one thing, the marketing folks are saying something else, and the people responsible for product development are charging off in their own direction. You get to be the unifier.

Usually business development handles partnerships with other companies. Hordes of biz dev people must be involved in arranging the music and movie distribution deals for iTunes. Partnerships frequently entail a lot of up-front homework, several “get to know you” discussions, and negotiations that can last for weeks or months. Initial drafting of terms are often handled by business development, and only passed off to the legal department (or hired counsel) for review.

If business development looks interesting, get thee to a company that has internships in their business development department. If they don’t have any internships, or if they don’t have a business development department (perhaps one of the VPs doubles as director of biz dev, or the head of sales also handles biz dev), create one. Find a company you really admire, tell them you want to help, and make something happen.

This may sound like a load of overly-optimistic nonsense, but I can tell you from personal experience that if you want to advance your career – any career – your relationships with people are more important than your skills, your degree, where you went to school, or anything else. If you can show off your talents, ask a lot of questions, and immerse yourself in your work, people will notice.

They’ll want you to work with them. Perhaps they won’t be able to hire you now, but they’ll refer you to their contacts. Your payoff might be immediate, and it might come in months or years, but there will be a payoff from putting yourself out there and having a good attitude.

If you think business development might be right for you, take all the business law classes you can find. Pay extra attention to contracts, and if you can, take a negotiation or leadership class. Create a version of your resume tailored for business development work, and start using Facebook and LinkedIn (if you’re not on LinkedIn, sign up now) to spread the word that you’re looking for a biz dev internship.

American law schools do not exist to prepare future diplomats, encourage entrepreneurial activity, create fine journalists, or churn out programmers. They are part of a guild structure. They prepare students to become members of a closed society of legal practitioners that mandates standards of professional ethics and behavior, and determines who can and cannot enter the profession.

In an ideal world, there would be a balance between the number of guild members needed and the supply of law school graduates. We’re not living in that ideal world. Not only are there more students and graduates than the guild needs, life inside the guild isn’t always as rewarding as it sounds on the outside.

If you’re concerned about the odds of getting hired into the guild, or if you’re wondering if that life isn’t for you, there are ways to turn law school into something else.

While your school is probably not set up to prepare you for anything but guild life, what you are learning in law school can help you get a job outside the guild. If you know in your heart that the law isn’t your thing, but you still want to obtain a J.D., now is the time to tailor your curriculum and your internship plan. Talk to the folks at the career center, but don’t expect them to drive your planning. You’ll have to create your own path for the remainder of law school.

Getting into law school is difficult, and making it through the law school curriculum requires hard work and perseverance. You know that because you’ve been there. But most folks who haven’t been to law school won’t care one bit. Why should they? What matters to them is the skills, experience, and personal traits you can bring to their organization.

That’s a good question. What can you bring to the table? Plenty. For starters, you can think critically. No other field of study prepares graduates to weigh evidence, consider all possibilities, come to a decision, and advocate for that decision – all in the context of the squishy, hard to define realities of human behavior, language, and moral and ethical dilemmas.

You can also dig deep. You know how to obtain, validate, analyze, and synthesize information. We live in the Information Age, but you’d be surprised at how few information workers possess even half of the skills you picked up in your legal writing and advocacy classes. Your ability to sift through information and write about it cogently is extremely valuable.

You can manage time and juggle tasks. You either figure out how to do that, or you burn out in your 2L year. Associations, journals, externships, fellowships, internships, and other extra-curricular work show that you have the juice to be the kind of motivated employee most managers would love to have.

It gets better. You’re making connections with professors, fellow students, and legal practitioners. If you have an idea of the direction you want to take, let them know about it. Facebook is great, but if you haven’t already, you need to get serious about LinkedIn, pronto. Your professional network is tremendously important, and law school is an excellent place to cultivate relationships. Be sure to pay it forward, too. Help your classmates and anyone else you meet in law school to make connections and advance their career goals. Give selflessly and you’ll receive far more.

If you’re in law school and considering opting out of the law guild, keep your chin up and start planning now.

So how can you prepare yourself now for this treacherous environment? I would be the last person to presume that I have all the answers, or even a reasonable percentage of them. But I think MLS might be a good place to start a discussion about how to navigate this tricky terrain. In particular I’m interested in exploring what kinds of jobs are a good fit for JD grads, and how to best go after them.

Does anyone else think it’s a good idea to open this up as a topic for further exploration?

While the median starting pay was $130,000 overall, it ranged from $70,000 in firms of 2 to 25 lawyers to $135,000 in firms of 501 to 1,000 lawyers, and $160,000 in firms of more than 1,000 lawyers, according to the survey.

Another interesting snippet from their evaluation of 2008 law grad employment figures:

Overall, about 75 percent obtained a job for which bar passage is required.

There are no guarantees, even if you’re an excellent law student.

The latter is the most interesting for me personally, as I decided about half way through law school that I didn’t want to practice law. Given that law firm hiring has dropped precipitously, many law students and recent grads are looking for options outside the law office. I’m curious how your school is handling this. Are administrators and employment counselors tackling this head on, or are you seeing a lot of vague hand-waving?