Quick facts: Michigan Law Office of Career Planning
- Office: Office of Career Planning (OCP), University of Michigan Law School
- Location: 1100 South Hall, 701 S. State Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-3091
- Phone: 734.764.0546
- Email: lawcareers@umich.edu
- Who can book: current Michigan Law students and alumni
- How to book: call the office or email it to set up a meeting
Full details are in the contact section below.
12 min read
What Is the Michigan Law Office of Career Planning?
The Michigan Law Office of Career Planning is the University of Michigan Law School's career office, usually called OCP inside the building. It helps law students, and later alumni, work out what kind of legal work they want and then go get it. That covers résumés and cover letters, interviews, recruiting season, clerkship applications, and the long middle stretch where you are deciding between two or three very different futures.
The school describes the office as centralized. One office handles every path a Michigan Law graduate is likely to take, and the school sorts those paths into four: academia, judicial clerkships, private practice, and public service. Plenty of law schools split this up, with a public interest office down one hallway and a firm recruiting office down another. Michigan keeps both under one roof and calls the approach integrated advising.
Most first-year students do not know yet whether they want a big firm, a clerkship, a prosecutor's office, or a nonprofit. When one office covers every path, the first counselor you meet can talk about all of them, so you never have to pick a lane just to get a meeting. A student who starts out set on a firm and drifts toward public defense does not have to switch offices or start over with a stranger.
Career Design System
Which career would actually suit you?
Find out what work suits you and what drains you, so you can stop guessing.
See what fits you →Who the office is for and what makes it different from a general career center
A general university career center serves undergraduates from every major. It is broad by design. The office of career planning at Michigan Law is narrower and deeper, and the biggest difference is who sits across the desk. The counselors are lawyers who have done the work, so they can tell you how a firm decides who gets an offer, what a clerkship year teaches you, or how a government job differs from a firm job once the novelty wears off.
The office does not stop at graduation either. Michigan tells alumni to call and schedule a meeting when they are weighing a new employer, a new job market, or a new kind of career, and it counts an alumni network of 23,000+ people around the world. A lawyer five years out of school is still a client.
Placement numbers: Michigan's career pages describe the advising but do not post where graduates land. For those, ask the office directly, or read the employment summary that every law school approved by the American Bar Association publishes each year. Either source beats any figure a third-party site guesses at, including this one.
Who staffs the office
Michigan's own page says the office has 10 attorney-counselors with 75+ years of practice experience between them. Their backgrounds span the paths students ask about. Ramji Kaul, now assistant dean for career planning, spent more than 10 years in private practice at Dentons in Chicago. Emily Bretz, who runs the public interest programs, worked for more than five years in the Civil Division of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York. Others advise on judicial clerkships. Names, titles and direct lines are in Michigan Law's staff directory.
Looking for a job at the University of Michigan itself, not career advice? Openings are posted on the University of Michigan jobs site.
How the Office of Career Planning Works With Students One-on-One
Every law school career page promises one-on-one advising. Michigan's is one of the few that puts numbers on it. Last year its counselors held 5,000+ individual appointments and logged 2.5K+ hours of one-on-one advising, and students can meet as often as they like. There is no cap.
Put those two numbers side by side and you learn something useful. About 2,500 hours spread over about 5,000 appointments works out to roughly half an hour per meeting. Both figures are floors, so treat that as a rough average, but it fits what most students describe. Half an hour is plenty of time to fix a cover letter and very little time to figure out what you want from a career.
That is the catch with unlimited meetings. You can have as many as you like, but each one is short. The students who get the most out of the office show up with a question small enough to answer before the half hour runs out.
A year of meetings with Michigan Law's counselors
From what the school publishes, the meetings over a year tend to cover three kinds of work:
- Direction. Talking through which of the four paths fits you, which employers within a path to aim at, and whether a clerkship belongs in the plan.
- Materials. Résumé review, cover letters, and writing samples, tuned for each kind of employer.
- Interviews and self-advocacy. Getting ready for screening and callback interviews, and practicing how to describe yourself and your interests in plain terms. Michigan names self-advocacy as a skill it teaches on purpose.
The counselors' backgrounds count most in the first kind. Anyone can review a résumé. Someone who spent years at a firm or in a government office can tell you what the first two years of a job feel like from the inside, which is the part no employer brochure covers.
A common rhythm looks like this. A first-year student meets in the fall to learn how summer jobs work, again in winter before applications go out, and again in spring before the recruiting season for the second summer. Each meeting has one job. Students who use the office this way tend to arrive at recruiting season with a short target list instead of a long, anxious one.
Career Planning Services at the Michigan Law Office
At Michigan Law, career counseling centres on the one-on-one meeting, but law school career offices run a wider menu around it. Michigan lists its own pieces across several pages, and other schools, such as Marquette, publish fuller lists. Put together, the standard menu looks like this. Treat it as a map of what to ask about, and confirm with OCP which pieces run this year and when.
| Service | What happens | When it helps most |
|---|---|---|
| One-on-one advising | A private meeting with an attorney-counselor about direction, materials, or a specific offer | All three years, and after graduation |
| Résumé and cover letter review | A counselor marks up your documents for a specific kind of employer | Before every application wave |
| Mock interviews | A counselor plays the interviewer, then tells you what landed and what did not | Before recruiting season and before callbacks |
| On-campus interviewing | Employers interview many students in a short window, mostly for second-summer jobs | At most schools, the end of first year into the start of second |
| Workshops and panels | Group sessions on a skill or a practice area, often with practicing lawyers | First year, while you are still exploring |
| Job postings and guides | A board of openings plus written guides to each path | Any time, between meetings |
| Employer and alumni outreach | The office builds ties with employers and graduates who hire or advise students | When you want an introduction, not a cold email |
Workshops, mock interviews, and on-campus recruiting support
Of that menu, three pieces reward planning ahead.
Workshops are cheapest in your first year, when you still have time to sit in on a panel about a practice area you had never heard of. A panel on bankruptcy or tax law can change a plan in an hour. By second year most students have stopped going, which is exactly when a panel on clerkships or in-house work would help them most.
Mock interviews are the most underused service at most schools. Students feel ready because they have rehearsed answers in their heads. Saying them out loud to a lawyer who has hired people is different, and the feedback is specific: you rushed the answer about why this city, you never said what the job should teach you.
On-campus recruiting moves fast. Michigan's own page warns that recruiting comes up quickly, and at most schools the bulk of firm interviews for the second summer happen in a compressed window. The time to decide which firms or offices to target is before recruiting opens, because once it does there is almost no room left to think. The counselors can help with that choice, but only if you bring it to them early.
How to Contact the Office of Career Planning at Michigan Law
The contact details for the Michigan Law Office of Career Planning are spread across several school pages. Here they are in one place, as the school lists them. Rooms and numbers change, so check the office's official page before you show up.
Michigan Law Office of Career Planning Phone Number, Email, and Address
- Office
- Office of Career Planning (OCP), University of Michigan Law School
- Address
- 1100 South Hall, 701 S. State Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-3091
- Phone
- 734.764.0546
- lawcareers@umich.edu
- Who can book
- Current Michigan Law students and alumni
Source: Michigan Law's Office of Career Planning page, checked October 2026.
To book a meeting, call the office or email it. Students and alumni use the same number. Admitted students who have not enrolled yet should start with JD admissions, which lists its own number, 734.764.0537, and can point you to career questions from there.
What to prepare before your first appointment
A first meeting goes better when you bring more than a résumé. Here is what to have ready:
- A current résumé, even a rough one. The counselor can fix the format in minutes.
- Two or three paths you are curious about, ranked. Ranking forces a choice, and the choice gives the counselor something to push on.
- What you have already ruled out, and why. This saves ten minutes of the counselor pitching options you hate.
- Your limits: where you can live, how much debt you carry, family, timing.
- One question you want answered before you leave.
A ranked list of two or three paths turns a thirty-minute meeting from a tour into a plan. If you cannot rank them yet, say so. That is a fine first question too, and the last section of this guide covers how to get there.
What Law Students Outside Michigan's Office of Career Planning Can Do
Most law students will never book a meeting with the Michigan Law Office of Career Planning. Some are in part-time or evening programs while holding a full-time job. Some are at schools where two counselors serve a whole class. Some finished law school years ago and want something different from the job they have. Every law school office of career planning offers some version of the same help, but the time each student gets varies a lot from school to school.
Most of Michigan's model can be copied. It rests on three things: one place that covers every path, counselors who have practiced law, and as many meetings as you want. You can rebuild the first two on your own. The third is the hard part.
Building the same clarity without a dedicated law school career office
- Look at every path, not just the loudest one. Write down the four Michigan uses, then add the ones schools mention less: in-house roles, compliance, policy work, legal operations. Pay varies widely across them. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median lawyer wage at $159,670 in May 2025, with jobs projected to grow 5 percent from 2025 to 2035, but that one median hides a big spread between paths.
- Borrow the practitioners. Michigan's counselors are former lawyers. You can get the same view by talking to lawyers two to ten years into each path you are weighing. Ask them what surprised them in year two, and what kind of person leaves.
- Use the office you do have. A small office still knows local employers and alumni. Your undergraduate career center, the state bar, and your school's library guides fill other gaps. UCLA Law's career planning guide shows the kind of resource list many law libraries keep.
- Write it down. Notes from each conversation, in one place, with what you learned and what changed. A simple career planning worksheet does the job.
If you are already practicing and thinking about leaving the law, our guide to career changes for lawyers covers that move in depth. If you would rather hire outside help, this rundown of career counseling services compares the options and their costs.
A part-time student's version: one conversation a month with a lawyer in a path you are curious about, one page of notes after each, and one meeting with your school's office each semester to test what you learned. That is a year of Michigan-style advising squeezed into a few hours a month.
The part you cannot borrow from Michigan is the unlimited time, so whatever you do before each conversation has to carry more of the load. Every hour of advice you get should start from what you already know about yourself, not from scratch.
How a Career Test Fits Before You Even Walk Into the Office of Career Planning
Every office described above starts from the same question: what do you want? Most law students answer with what they think they should want. The firm with the best name. The clerkship everyone applies for. Then they spend their meetings polishing applications for a job they never picked on purpose.
A career test cannot tell you which firm to apply to. What it can do is narrow the question before you spend counselor time on it. Grades show what you can do. They do not show which job you would still want in year ten. A student can be excellent at legal research and still find that months of solo research leave them flat, while a few weeks in a clinic full of clients leaves them wanting more.
Why narrowing your direction before the appointment makes the advising more useful
Counselor time is the scarce part, whether your counselor works at the Michigan Law Office of Career Planning or in a two-person office somewhere else. Compare two openings to a first meeting. One student says, "I don't know yet." Another says, "I do my best work with lots of people contact and quick calls, and I fade when I'm alone with documents for weeks." The second student gives the counselor something to work with. A former litigator can map that onto trial work versus deal work, a prosecutor's office versus an appellate shop, and the meeting becomes strategy instead of a search.
Walking in with a direction lets the counselor spend the half hour on how to get there instead of on where to go. It is also the one step you can take on your own time, before any meeting.
Taking the Pigment career test before a meeting does that narrowing. All 120 of its questions are forced-choice, with no middle option to hide in, much like a real week that will not give you both a quiet afternoon of drafting and a day of calls. It weighs the work you could stand for a decade alongside the work you happen to be good at. You leave with a written description of how you work and a short list of directions worth testing with a counselor or a lawyer you trust. Its typical user is a mid-career professional, so it suits a practicing lawyer weighing a change as much as a 1L.
It is for your own planning, and no hiring process will ever ask you for it. The test has not yet been through a published study of its own. And if you already know you want a clerkship and can say why, skip it and book the meeting.
If you want to weigh a test against a coach before you decide, see how a coach compares with an assessment and what each does well.
Frequently Asked Questions
How Will Michigan Law Support My Career?
Through the Office of Career Planning: unlimited one-on-one meetings with attorney-counselors who practiced law, help with résumés and interviews, recruiting support, and an alumni network of 23,000+. The support continues after you graduate.
Can Michigan Law alumni still use the Office of Career Planning?
Yes. Michigan invites alumni to call and book a meeting when they are thinking about a new employer, a new city, or a new kind of career.
How often can I meet with a counselor at Michigan Law?
As often as you like. The school sets no limit. Meetings run about half an hour on average, so come with one clear question each time.
Where can I find Michigan Law's employment outcomes?
Ask the Office of Career Planning, or read the yearly employment summary that every law school approved by the American Bar Association publishes. Both are better than any outside estimate.
What if my law school's career office is small?
You can rebuild most of Michigan's model yourself: look at every path, talk to lawyers who work in each one, and arrive at every meeting with a ranked shortlist so the time you do get goes further.
