Strategies for Success in Law Firm Interviews

Question: "How do you decide which students to interview for jobs?"

Answer: "If the grades meet the cutoff, it's almost automatic for an interview."


-Hiring partner, medium-sized Southwest law firm

"We give the law school a set of criteria based on the law schools' grading system."

-Hiring partner, medium-sized Northeast law firm

"We use a minimum GPA and class rank."

-Hiring partner, large national law firm

ARE YOU GOING to law school to get a job practicing law? Almost 70 percent of all law school graduates are. If you
are one of the 70 percent, chances are you'll get your first job right out of law school. Fifty-six percent of 1995 law grads and slightly fewer women grads started practicing in private practice (as opposed to being directly in business, government, or the like). A big avenue for getting that important first job is the on- campus law firm interview at the beginning of your second year. Almost all law schools have on-campus interviews by prospective employers. I asked a lot of employers how they decide which students to see, if the law schools allow them to choose whom to see. The first answer in all cases was grades.

How the System Works

The law school placement offices are supposed to help the students get jobs when they get out of school, and, to a lesser extent, during the summers or even during the school year. Recruiting can take many different forms, but the placement offices are usually the administrators of all the different aspects of job placement. The University of Houston (Femscore 153, fourth out of seven in Status Group #4) has an exemplary placement office, so I asked its placement director, Deborah Hirsch, to describe its program.

The placement office at Houston regards its job as to "teach students job search skills and to partner with them as they look for jobs." Beginning with the first-year initiative, the placement office breaks its first-year students into small groups to introduce them to the placement services, go over resume preparation, and have second-year students talk about their summer experience. First years have excursions to the legal community, networking breakfasts with the law school alumni, a partnering program to match students with alumni for introducing them to the lawyering process, brown bag lunches on "a day in the life" of different lawyers, and personal appointments with the placement directors to review their goals.

In addition to the standard on campus recruiting, which I will describe in a moment, Houston participates in a number of consortium efforts with other law schools, for example, the Texas Off- Campus Recruitment Program, in which nine law schools and the Texas Young Lawyers' Association hold interviews with legal employers at hotels or schools in Dallas and Houston. Since the Off-Campus Recruitment Program occurs in the spring, it captures firms that usually don't participate in the standard interview program, smaller firms from the larger areas, firms from smaller towns, places with sporadic hiring needs or without the resources to go around to schools recruiting, government agencies. Houston organizes on-site interviews with firms in five Texas cities that have small clerkship programs or lack resources to travel, the students go for twenty- to thirty-minute interviews in the employers' conference room. Finally, Houston, which has a special Intellectual Property Program, prepares a resume book for employers that specialize in that subject.

Learn the 10 Factors That Matter to Big Firms More Than Where You Went to Law School

Since Houston is "a very active legal marketplace," Hirsch says, "some students do get paying law-related jobs in their first summers." The office runs a job listing service, where the office posts job opportunities electronically and in writing, usually as lawyers from the community contact them for law students during the year and for summer research and writing. I begin with this description of a broad and diverse recruiting program because most American lawyers aren't employed at the one-hundred-plus member law firms. When picking your school, ask about the placement office. Ask the students you meet in particular and the ones who didn't make it into the top 10 percent especially. An active placement office can increase your chances of getting a good job by a lot.

The Ten Thousand-Pound Gorillas

There are scores of firms of over one hundred lawyers in America today. These large institutions are not the stable, socially rigid partnerships of the period before the explosion in the size and importance of the legal profession. Getting a job at a big law firm is no longer a guarantee of life tenure. Many firms hire a lot more associates than they intend to-or financially can-promote to partnership. Their clients merge, or are merged, mutate, metamorphize, or otherwise move around. Many firms decay, disintegrate, divide, or otherwise disappear.

Large firms, however, are stable enough so that in most years they can anticipate with some certainty in the fall what their hiring needs will be the following spring. Usually, before the hiring season begins, the big firms appoint a hiring committee, chaired by a hiring partner, which determines approximately what the firm's needs for associates the following summer will be. Typically, the hiring committee also decides which of the previous summer's associates should be extended offers to return as full-time employees after graduation at the end of their third year in law school. The hiring committee, or some such body, also determines which law schools the firm will recruit from and how many lawyers they will send to interview students. Typically, the firms send someone from the hiring committee, a younger associate with whom they feel the students can relate, or an alum of the school. The firms are most interested in interviewing students at the beginning of the second year in law school for employment the summer between the second and third years. Some interviewing of third-year students for permanent employment also takes place at the fall season. In the case of the big firms, most firms hire as full-time starting associates people they liked in the summer program between the second and third years of law school.

At the same time the firms are gearing up, so are the placement offices. They arrange to schedule the firms into interview rooms at the law school for however long the firms wish to come and they make the interview list available to the students to choose whom the students wish to see. Then the placement offices either send the students' resumes to the firms for the firms to decide whom they want to interview or they run a lottery at the school to determine whom the students will get to see or some combination of both sorting techniques. Columbia and NYU start early by participating in a big hiring fair in a public space in New York in August, before school starts.

Once the hiring season begins everywhere else, second-year students interested in firm jobs begin rounds of twenty- to thirty- minute interviews at their schools followed by "callbacks" from the firms interested in them after the interviews. Most firms that bother calling someone back will bring her to wherever the firm is located for a day of interviews with more of the lawyers and some serious wining and dining. From the interview and callback process, the firms will decide whom to hire for the second summer and also which graduating students to add as full-time associates, if they haven't filled their full-time needs from the previous summer's class.

American Lawyer magazine did a survey of the Am Law 100-the one hundred highest-grossing law firms in America-to see where their starting associate classes of 1996 and 1997 came from. Eighty-nine firms responded. Then the magazine corrected for the size of the classes in each school and ranked the schools according to what percentage of their graduates found work at one of the Am Law 100 high-rolling firms. The list contained few surprises. Yale, Harvard, and Stanford, U.S. News's top three, did not place in the American Lawyer top three, I suspect because they are schools that also feed clerkships and academic jobs, whereas the top three, Chicago, NYU, and Columbia, are traditionally more corporate feeder schools.

Some interesting information did emerge, however. First, no school placed more than 55 percent of its graduates in the top one hundred firms. In light of the emphasis the firms put on grades, the value of making it to or near the top half of the first-year class is clear, even in the top-placing schools. Once you get to the fifth-ranked school and below, the percentage placed in Am Law 100 firms goes below 50 percent, raising the value of making it into the top half even higher. Put another way, if women under- perform their numbers in making top half of the first year class as the little public data we have suggest, there is a real job cost.

Second, the list of top-performing schools includes the schools where women succeed, as well as those where they fail. Thus, the number-one-ranking law school for getting its students hot firm jobs, the University of Chicago, placed 54 percent of its 1996 and 1997 students, while NYU came in number two for placement, at 52 percent. What's the difference for women? At Chicago, women made law review in only 69 percent of their presence in the classes of '96 and '97, while NYU women outperformed themselves at 122 percent of their presence in the class. Since most law schools (including NYU and Chicago) refused to answer my survey requests, I don't know how the top half breaks down along the same lines as law review, but chances are the outcomes will be similar. Using law review as a rough stand-in for grades, women stand a much greater chance of being in the target group of the fancy-firm employers at NYU than at Chicago.

In addition to choosing a law school where women succeed as opposed to one where women don't succeed, if the prospects are otherwise similar, there are other things you need to know to succeed at the interviewing process. Accordingly, I interviewed the hiring partners and some administrators at several different firms. They spoke frankly with me, and I promised them their privacy I'll call them Midwest National, Midwest Regional, Southwest Medium, and Northeast Medium. But rest assured that they are real firms, and that none of them is peculiar in any important way.
 

1. Midwest National. Midwest National is a several-hundred- lawyer firm, with offices in all major American legal centers as well as in Europe. Midwest National interviews at more than thirty schools firmwide, but not all schools for all offices. The firm interviews at what it calls "national" schools for all its offices, but at "regional" schools for its regional offices only. So, in 1997, the firm interviewed at Harvard,Yale, NYU, Columbia, the University of Chicago, Georgetown, Michigan, Berkeley, Northwestern, Penn, Stanford, UCLA, USC, Virginia, and Wisconsin for all offices. Their interview list also includes Cardozo, Fordham, and Brooklyn in New York, and places like DePaul and Chicago-Kent in Chicago and University of Missouri in the Kansas City region, but the latter group probably was expected to provide lawyers only for the particular local offices.
2. Midwest Regional. Midwest Regional is a several-hundred- lawyer firm with most of its lawyers in two neighboring midwest- ern states, but with small offices in several other American cities and abroad. Midwest Regional does not distinguish between whom it gets for which office, but it interviews at only a handful of national schools-Harvard, Michigan, the University of Virginia, Duke,Texas, and Georgetown, and intensively at the top and secondary schools around the cities in the mid-South, South, and Midwest, where it has its local offices, for a total of twenty-five schools at present. Midwest Regional does a lot of interviewing at the midwestern universities of Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Minnesota, and the like, and at southern law schools like Emory, the University of North Carolina, Tulane, and South Texas.
3. Northeast Medium. Northeast Medium is a several-hundred- lawyer firm with offices in a big northeastern city and D.C. Northeast Medium interviews at seventeen different schools. Being smaller than Midwest National and Midwest Regional, Northeast Medium concentrates on national schools like Harvard, Yale, Chicago, and Georgetown, adding schools where they hope to attract people with a genuine interest in living in the Northeast. Northeast Medium voiced a concern that probably a lot of law firms share. They didn't want to send their recruiters to places from which people were unlikely to come. Thus, they do not go to Stanford, even though Stanford is one of the two or three most prestigious law schools in the country. Recruiting, after all, is time-consuming and expensive. Why should they send a partner whose time is worth $500 an hour all the way to Palo Alto, California, if most Stanford grads don't want to be more than five hundred yards from the surf?
    
4. Southwest Medium. Southwest Medium is a hundred-lawyer firm with offices in its state's two main cities. Southwest Medium has only two offices, so, like Northeast Medium, all its recruiting is for all its offices. Like all the rest, Southwest Medium starts at Harvard; its national schools include Virginia, Duke, Northwestern, and Chicago. Southwest's selection of the other national law schools reflects its southwestern orientation: Texas, UCLA, and USC. Like all the rest, Southwest adds a number of regional schools in its geographical or cultural area-Arizona State, the University of Arizona, Iowa, and Brigham Young-as well as a couple of Washington area schools: Howard and George Washington.

These lists actually reveal more about the firms than they realize. Midwest National is a big city firm, with its headquarters in one of America's largest and most sophisticated cities. Its choices beyond the obvious Harvard or Yale are law schools that are mostly in big cities-New York, Los Angeles, Chicago. Midwest Regional is a medium heartland city firm. Its choices beyond the obvious are concentrated in Midwest or mid-South cities often of a medium size-New Orleans, Atlanta, Minneapolis. Northeast Medium is a very elite firm. Its choices beyond the obvious are concentrated in East Coast cities of a national intellectual elite population. Southwest Medium is a frontier town firm. Its choices beyond the obvious are concentrated in frontier cities- Chicago, Salt Lake City, Phoenix,Tucson, Los Angeles.

Why does this information matter to you? If you don't get into Harvard, where you choose to go to law school will affect the choices you have when it comes, to getting a job. Your chances of getting a job with a firm that has identified your school to recruit from are greater than they would be if you had to apply to the firm on your own. So give it some heavy thought. Do you like to shovel snow? Minneapolis firms recruit more at the University of Minnesota than at Texas. Do you hate to shovel snow? Texas firms recruit more at Texas schools than in Minneapolis.

Let's be strategic. Say, your LSAT score isn't high enough to get you into a law school in Status Group #1 or #2. Or say you only get into a school in the high-status group where women don't succeed very well, like Michigan or George Washington. If you want to work in California, you can go to University of California at Davis, where women succeed very well. Firms from California that will interview at Davis won't even go to Michigan or George Washington. Or if you want to work in Arizona, you can go to ASU. Southwest Medium interviews at ASU every year. And it's not going to places like Georgetown or Stanford, which are actually harder to get into. If you want to work in a New York firm and you can't get into NYU, where women succeed, you might be better off at Rutgers Newark, where women succeed, or Cardozo, where they do pretty well, than at higher-ranked Notre Dame or Texas, where New York employers just don't bother to recruit.

The First Year Is An Important Moment to Examine Your Life

One drawback of the big-fish-in-a-small-pond approach is that you'd better be sure you'll be a big fish. All four firms indicated that they insist on prescreening the resumes of the students who want to meet them to screen out students whose first-year grades are below a certain level when they interview at the lower-status regional schools. Thus, Northeast Medium looks for "strong undergraduate and graduate records," for example, "honors for undergraduates and top 10 percent to top 50 percent" in law school depending on the law school. The scrutiny goes down "the more rigorous the process of getting into law school . . . the resumes at Yale all look somewhat alike, for example." (This is not a criticism!)
Although Southwest started the interview with me by contending that her firm only interviews the "top five to ten percent" of the first-year class, going "down" to "fifteen to twenty percent at Harvard or Yale," upon close examination she admitted that they see everyone from Harvard and Yale. "If they're from Harvard and Yale, we just see them. There's no such thing as the bottom." This conforms to what other firms report as the practice at the most elite schools-they won't allow the firms to prescreen the resumes of their students. The most common practice is for the elite schools to run a lottery if more students sign up for a particular firm than the firm has time for. Midwest National and Midwest Regional also screen the resumes for top students at all but the most elite schools.

The screening is often done by an administrator, who isn't even a lawyer, much less a partner in the firm. At Northeast Medium, the administrator will go to a partner if there's a question, but the firm doesn't want to spend any more resources on hiring than it must. What this means is that screening is a pretty mechanical sorting for grades. When screening, Midwest National looks for "GPAs or class rank." When grades meet the cutoff, an interview is "almost automatic" at Southwest Medium. If you haven't gotten the message, here it is: If you want to work in a big corporate firm, don't engage in civil disobedience in your first year of law school. As the hiring partner at Northeast Medium put it, "Think of it like the bar exam. You know this is an important year." Buy the commercial outlines, brief the cases in your casebooks, study alone or in a group, practice on the old exams.

Despite the firm's tough talk, there is always wiggle room at the edges. If grades are near the cutoff at Southwest Medium, they will look at other factors, like well-roundedness that bodes well for business development or expertise in substantive areas of interest to the firm, like intellectual property or health care. Indeed, Southwest Medium even admittedly looks for evidence of management skills or community development work that involves business contacts. Business contacts are more and more a criterion. Southwest Medium aspires to hire lawyers who can "mind and bind clients."

Northeast looks for credible connections with its headquarters city. Since, like most big firms, they hire permanent employees mostly from the second-year class, they don't want to waste a slot on someone who's just having a "flyer." Sometimes Northeast will take outstanding undergraduate grades into account; an accounting or an MBA degree or someone who wants to do corporate work is a plus, and a challenging job between college and law school is also a plus.
All the firms treated law review as we have done-as a symbol. Midwest National was frank. If you got on by grades, it's a big plus. If you wrote on, you go in the pile behind the people who graded on. It's still a plus, however, because it shows the person has high energy and is a "go-getter."

Looks and Charm

Remember-at many places, you never get to strut your looks and charm in interviews unless your first-year grades are pretty good. When you get into the actual interview process, however, the dynamic changes. Now you have to be sociable. The interviewer from Midwest National had a good tip. Make your resume "short," so the interviewer can work from it, and "put a couple of things in it that are conversation starters, an interesting or unusual hobby, for example, or an interesting job after college or the subject of your senior thesis."

The interviewer from Northeast Medium described the interview best: "I administer an 'in front of the client test.' Can I see this person advising a client and instilling confidence in a client?" When pressed for more specificity, he said something quite easy for you to do. "Don't look at my shoes, rather than my eyes. And don't say 'Like,' 'Ya know,' and 'Sorta.' ''When being interviewed by this gentleman, expect some "structured silence" and expect him to pick something from your resume to discuss. Be prepared to make it interesting.

The longtime hiring chair at Midwest National asserts that you could not meaningfully discern someone's intellect in twenty minutes. She looks for four things: "Who is the person? How comfortable? How articulate? How motivated?" The Southwest interviewer asks whether the person is "comfortable talking substance, comfortable in conversation, and grabs my confidence level with solid knowledge, intellect, and demeanor." These sound hard, and they're a lot more obscure than not looking at your feet! Midwest National strongly suggests taking advantage of the mock interviews the schools' placement offices often run.

Female Problems

Perhaps the most interesting thing to know about the interviewing process is that when asked to describe their needs in greater Depth, the firms all describe a person with a lot more of the stereotypical "female" traits than most law schools seem to reward. Southwest Medium actually has the traits reduced to a list: "quality, people skills, team spirit, pro bono public service, education and training, practice development, and 1,800 billable hours a year." "We've had experiences with very bright people," Southwest went on. "We really want a harmonious work force. We don't want morale-busting divisiveness. We want people to fit in the team and fit in with the program." Midwest National explained its reputation as a good place for women by a poignant analogy. "A lot of people started this firm who couldn't get jobs at other law firms regardless of their skills, so there is traditionally less resistance to diversity." Midwest Regional actually specified a "well-rounded person."

All four firms purported to have close to fifty-fifty gender breakdowns in their entering classes. This is probably an overstatement, because the law schools are rarely more than 44 percent female, and a smaller percentage of the already smaller number of women go to work in firms at all. Northeast Medium refused to acknowledge any difference in qualifications, prospects, or hiring. When pressed on the subject of work and family, the hiring partner said he'd take a flier on someone who only wanted to work nine to five if "the academics and intellect" were okay, but that he doubted the person would succeed in limiting their hours that way. The interviewer at Midwest National, a female, said she had a preference for people with oddball hobbies and brightly colored clothing, but that she doubted that was the best strategy. "Go with the lowest common denominator," she advised; be conservative until you get the lay of the land. An overwhelming interest in doing good doesn't do you any good at Southwest Medium. "We represent a lot of companies with environmental problems," the interviewer told me. "I ask people with a lot of public interest stuff on their resume if they'll be comfortable doing our work for our clients. This isn't the ACLU."

A highly placed female interviewer whom I won't identify had a tip you need to know. "Men," she told me, "tend to be a little more sure of themselves, a little cockier, that they're interviewing us as much as we're interviewing them. Women are more into pleasing the interviewer." When asked how she reacted to this difference, she said, "Occasionally, a man is too cocky or too arrogant, and I worry about the clients. My male colleagues," she confessed, "see it as self-confidence and commanding. In order to make partner these days, you must have the self-assurance that you're going to be able to stand up to a judge on [clients'] behalf no matter what. Timid women will not survive and make partnership."

The Guerrilla Girls

Remember the woman from UCLA who hung around the interview rooms snaffling off the interviewers from any firms she didn't get to see? All the hiring partners loved that story. Midwest National shared with me that an enterprising student at the University of Minnesota showed up to drive their interviewer to the airport after his day there, got a job, and was a great success. Several firms said that people called them the summer between their first and second years in law school and said they were from law schools far away and had occasion to be in the firm's city and asked to send a resume in advance of an early interview while they were in town. Northeast Medium was delighted to hear from the Stanford first-year student between his first and second years. They took his resume and interviewed him before he went back to California.

A little-noticed tactic is to make friends in your first year or at the very beginning of your second year with the second-year students who are going to firms where you think you would like to work. Then when they come back from their summer jobs, if they've succeeded, they are little ambassadors for the firm, scouting the newly advanced second-year class for prospects for the firm. If they have a friend to recommend to the firm, chances are the firm will at least do them the courtesy of meeting you. Once your foot is in the door, who knows? Maybe your macho self-confidence, relational teamwork skills, interesting hobbies, and technical engineering skills will boost you right over the line.

See the following articles for more information:
 

• 21 Major Interview Mistakes to Avoid at All Costs
• The Best Way to Prepare for a Job Search and Interviews
• How to Talk About Other Interviews in Your Interviews
• How to Answer the Tell Me About Yourself Interview Question
• How to Answer the Do You Have Any Questions for Me Interview Question