From Wikipedia:

He served as a clerk at the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit for Judge Jerry Edwin Smith and then engaged in private practice[12] as an attorney with the law firms Gibson Dunn & Crutcher and Cooper & Kirk,[13] where he concentrated in labor, employment, and constitutional law, in cases at all levels of state and federal courts.[3] [citation needed]

After leaving active duty, Cotton joined McKinsey & Company, a management consulting firm. He subsequently returned to Dardanelle, where he works on his family's cattle farm.[7]

His first job out of law school is the kind of prestigious posting that top young lawyers out of Harvard aspire to: a clerkship at a Federal Appeals Court. The Fifth Circuit is based in New Orleans, but Smith's duty station is Houston. I can't tell how long he clerked, but as I understand it, that is usually a one-year assignment, leaving 18 months for him to practice in two different firms "in cases at all levels of state and federal courts." Citation needed, indeed! New associates usually are involved in cases to the extent of endless hours sorting through mass quantities of documents, proofreading filings, and looking up citations. Gibson Dunn & Crutcher is a big international firm; the kind of BigLaw place that pays $160,000/year to Ivy League graduates with good judicial clerkships under their belts. The new associates are expected to bust their butts for 5-6 years before the firm decides if they get the Big Prize, a partnership, or they leave and are replaced by a new associate. The firm does a wide variety of work, but apparently does a lot of litigation. I don't know what city he was working in then, but I presume Washington, DC, since his next job was with a DC firm. For unknown reasons, he apparently left GD & C to go to Cooper & Kirk , a small, prestigious DC firm that specializes in litigation. Maybe someone at Cooper & Kirk was impressed by his work at GD & C, and offered him a bunch of money to move. Or maybe he just wasn't happy at GD & C. Or maybe he actually sucked at law but the Old Boy network got him a second shot. He did pass the bar along the way. He is not currently a member of the DC bar, but does have an Arkansas law license, currently inactive.In any case, his second law firm job didn't last long, since he joined the Army in January 2005 and went to Officer Candidate School to become a second lieutenant. As I understand it, if he was an attorney in good standing, he would have been eligible to be directly commissioned as a captain to be a JAG attorney, but instead, he went into the infantry as the most junior of officers. Maybe he was feeling especially patriotic and wanted to fight. Maybe he hated law that much & wanted to forget it. Maybe he actually did just suck at law, & was told to find another line of work. Maybe he was actually trying to burnish his credentials for electoral politics. No one's saying.He seems to have done well in the military. Passed Airborne & Ranger schools, which isn't easy. A tour of duty as a platoon leader in the 101st Airborne for which he was decorated. Then, after returning from Iraq, he was assigned as a platoon leader to the Old Guard at Arlington. These are the ceremonial troops who conduct military funerals, guard the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and do other ceremonial activities around DC. Another fairly prestigious posting; you need to be the right height & look good to get the job, as well as having favorable ratings. At some point, possibly after returning from Iraq, he was promoted to 1st Lieutenant. After another two years in the DC area, he volunteered to deploy and was promoted to captain. After another apparently satisfactory tour in Afghanistan, for which he was awarded a Bronze Star, he mustered out of the Army after four years of service.Also from Wikipedia Since he ran for Congress three years after leaving the Army, he wasn't at McKinsey & Co very long. That isn't a law job, so he apparently either didn't want to go back to the world of litigation, or he knew he wasn't cut out for it. McKinsey & Co is an enormous international management consulting firm similar to Mitt Romney's old firm Bain & Company. I can't tell where he worked for them. Cotton isn't an MBA, & had fairly limited prior experience in business management. Maybe this was related to his law experience, or maybe someone at McKinsey likes conservative Ivy Leaguers with military experience. At any rate, he left that job after an unclear amount of time to return to the family ranch. Did he suck at that job, too, or did he go home to re-establish residency in Arkansas so he could run for office?Aside from the Army, the other job Cotton is clearly good at is being elected to office in Arkansas. In his first try at electoral office, he won an open seat in Congress on the merits of his conservatism and his military service. Then, after only two years in Congress, he beat Mark Pryor soundly and became a Senator. We've already seen how good he is at that job (/snark) but in the next few years we'll see if he's aiming for higher office.