Interviewing for Academic Positions

As a lawyer seeking to move from a big law firm to academia (especially if you are targeting a non-teaching job), one of your biggest challenges is to convince the interviewers that you are truly prepared to take a significant pay cut from your law firm salary.

If you are interviewing for a tenure track professorship, you will of course be asked many questions about the substantive legal area you want to teach. Be prepared to discuss any research you’ve done in your substantive area, any relevant speaking engagements, published work and/or notable amicus briefs, Supreme Court arguments as well as any other particularly important or high-profile matters you’ve handled. You’ll want to highlight matters that resulted in new law or a significant change in the law, involved large-scale public policy concerns or dealt with novel or cutting-edge legal issues. Most tenure track interview processes include teaching an actual class, so you will need to prepare a lecture to give to students.

In terms of what you should be asking, in general, your questions to interviewers should concern the organization of the department, interaction of that department with others at the school, typical career paths of people who have had the job that you want and the biggest surprises/benefits/challenges that your interviewer has encountered since entering the world of academia. It's helpful to consult the Academia page of this site.