Real talk.

What is the best piece of advice to get an academic TT job teaching only "doctrinal" classes?

Practice corporate or tax law and write well and often about it.

Connections, grades, clerkships, networks, graduating school are all irrelevant if you can do that.

Of course, if you want to teach con law or fed courts, I agree networks and baubles matter a great deal.

But, honestly, you don't want to teach or write about those subjects. Your conlaw professor may have seemed glamorous, but implied conditions is where the magic happens.

I disagree strongly with @WilliamBaude's advice, though I know it came from an honest and well-meaning place. And I think he's largely right if your goal is to get a job teaching public law at a very highly ranked law school. But that's not most jobs or most people.

I've sat on or chaired six committees (4 at Temple, 2 at Penn) and been evaluated (and found wanting!) by others others. I just don't recognize the world that he describes as accurately capturing what is valued in entry level hiring for most jobs on the market.

[Outside of con law], practice experience matters, as does lively writing and law review placement. But a structural tilt is whether you are going to write about and teach corps, tax, secured, unincorporated, contracts. It's a generation-long sellers market.

Now, does that mean jobs are likely if you follow this advice?

Of course not.

It's a totally irrational process full of a million biases, some explicit (such as ideology) and others less so. Multiple deserving candidates don't get jobs for every one who does.

I do think that talking to your professors for advice is a good idea, because they might help you come up with ideas to write about. (As Will suggests.)

But if I were a 1L, I wouldn't transfer to Harvard on the theory that it might help me land a teaching job in 2025.

Take corporate law and tax and bankruptcy. They are really interesting subjects.

Practice in the field.

See if you like writing about the ideas but don't love being rich.

I do think that if you want to teach and write in con law and fed courts, @OrinKerr's interview with Akhil Amar lays the situation out well. https://reason.com/2020/05/19/the-legal-academy-episode-1-akhil-amar/