You should first be aware that the individuals with whom you will interview are not selected at random. They are almost always members of the firm's Hiring (or Legal Personnel) Committee; sometimes a firm will not put you to a vote until you have been seen by all of the Committee's members. Most will be partners, although some associates will usually be thrown in for good measure. If you have expressed interest in a particular area of the firm's practice, you may also interview with one or two partners in that area who are not members of the Committee. Finally, you may spend some time talking to an important non-lawyer --the staff person who coordinates the firm's law school recruiting effort; usually she (for some reason it is almost always a female) or one of her assistants will walk you from one interview to the next and keep you on your schedule.
What are these "on site" lawyer-interviewers looking for? Let's start with the partners. While your credentials are still important at this stage, and you may be certain you will have to repeat much of the information you doled out at the on-campus interview, what is even more important is your perceived "fit" with the firm's style, culture and personnel.
As you walk through the hallowed hallways of Firm A or Corporation B, your interviewers will be looking around and asking themselves "does he go with the furniture?" Are they comfortable dealing with you? Do you carry yourself the same way others in the firm do (note that this is different from asking "do you carry yourself well generally")? Is your image a professional one? Do you appear to be diligent and hard-working? Do you appear to have good judgment? Are you "one of us"? Do you dress, walk, eat like we do? Will our clients like you?
Whether a person's cultural "fit" with an employer is a legitimate criterion for employment is a question much debated in legal circles these days, and is beyond the scope of this article. Yet as a general rule the farther along you go in interviewing with a particular legal employer, the less important your paper credentials become, and the more important these intangible questions of "fitting in" become. You must adjust your interviewing style accordingly; whatever you actually say during each "on site" interview, you must convince each interviewer that you were born to work for that firm. The fact that your Law Review case comment is going to be published may well be less important to the interviewer than the fact that you wear plaid sport jackets when the firm "look" is pin-striped suits.
Decisions, it is heard, are made more by consensus than by majority vote. In order to succeed in the "on-site" interview you have to impress favorably almost all of the people who interview you. The one you turn off may well be Chairperson of the Committee, unbeknownst to you.
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
