It's a few minutes before 3 a.m. when indie rock band The French Semester takes the stage at an underground Los Angeles club that can only be entered after reciting a password (psst ... it's "Yasmine Bleeth") to a less than friendly bouncer. The Baywatch star's name opens the way into a dimly lit space in a decaying building in downtown L.A.'s historic core. On a weeknight in mid-May, the club is packed with hipsters and scenesters who will be rolling into work the next day exhausted, or who don't have to worry about showing up at a job in the morning.

Brandon Dorsky, the band's fedora-clad manager, is squarely among the latter. Two months earlier, Dorsky was one of 55 attorneys let go from Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. He'd known that the firm was planning layoffs. A partner's telephone conversation about planned cuts -- while he rode on an Amtrak train in late February -- was overheard by a tipster to the legal blog Above the Law. Pillsbury was forced to essentially confirm the impending layoffs at hastily arranged meetings after the blog post. "It was a tense situation," Dorsky says of the late winter meetings. "People tried to get clarification as to what would be taken into consideration in layoff decisions."

When Dorsky, 26, first joined Pillsbury's Los Angeles office in October 2008 as an associate in the intellectual property practice group, job security was the furthest thing from his mind. Straight from law school at the University of Southern California, he found that his early days at the firm were filled with filing trademark applications, writing cease-and-desist letters, and negotiating resolutions to trademark infringement claims.

By the time he was laid off in March with three months' severance, Dorsky hadn't done work for a paying client in weeks. "I sent out multiple e-mails a week searching for [billable] work," he says. "I did a lot of work for prospective clients. I prepared presentations about what we could do for them, but none of it was billable."

The Cleveland native briefly considered returning to Ohio after he left Pillsbury. "I had a job offer on the table with a law firm in Cleveland," he says. But Dorsky had come out West to attend law school with the hope of breaking into the entertainment industry, and he was unwilling to retreat. "My whole reason for coming to Los Angeles was to get involved in talent representation, and I didn't want to give that up. That is my dream and what I want to do," Dorsky says. "I didn't come here to go to law school, get a law firm job, get laid off, and move back to the Midwest."

As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, he worked at the Blind Pig, a live music venue in Ann Arbor. It was at the club -- where his responsibilities included booking music acts and negotiating contract terms -- that he began to seriously consider a legal career. At USC, Dorsky put out a weekly newsletter about the city's live music scene. After his first year in law school he interned at International Creative Management Inc., the famed Hollywood talent agency. During this period, Dorsky also managed the Los Angeles-based band Blue Judy and coproduced the documentary movie "Last Cup -- Road to the World Series of Beer Pong." "I felt I was a different sort of law student because I didn't do [an academic] journal," Dorsky says. "I was working on my movie."

After leaving Pillsbury, Dorsky decided to build a practice geared to entertainment clients, while also managing musical acts. He e-mailed friends and business contacts looking for leads. Just three days after leaving the firm, he landed his first client, TRG Sports and Entertainment. A friend from the University of Michigan recommended him to the management company, which was looking for a lawyer to draft a recording contract. Tyler Glover, who heads TRG, says he has called on Dorsky for other matters, including a licensing agreement involving a professional boxer, because Dorsky was "very easy to work with. All I have to do is talk him through my situation, and he lets me know what we need."

All Dorsky needed was Glover's trust in handling that first matter. "That gave me confidence that I didn't need the machinery," says Dorsky. "I was enough of a hustler to get clients." Since then, Dorsky's legal clients have grown to include the Brooklyn-based band Volunteers, for which he has done trademark work, and the apparel company Grassroots California. Additionally, Dorsky manages groups such as The French Semester. "The long-term goal is to find a recording artist that has true upward potential," he says.

Now a typical workday begins at his Santa Monica apartment drafting contracts for legal clients and booking venues for his musical act clients, and ends by taking in a concert. "I'm out most nights," Dorsky says. "I see five concerts a week. I'm out there looking for new clients and looking for opportunities for existing clients."

And so on a May night, as Dorsky vibes to The French Semester's music, he doesn't really have to worry about work in the morning -- because it's 3 a.m., and he's already working.

Click here to access The American Lawyer's full Associates Survey 2009, including the national, city-by-city, and A to Z charts and all related feature stories