Getting Into a Good Law Firm

Any clown can get a job as a lawyer. The goal is to get a good job. It's a complicated process, and it starts early. A summer job provides two things: (1) the name of a real, live law firm on your resume and (2) with any luck at all, an offer of permanent employment from that firm, to commence after taking the bar exam. Even if you didn't take that offer, having it would reduce your anxieties and increase your options.
 

A. Interviewing


The games begin in August and September. The first year of law school is over, and so is the crazy pressure. You know you can make it now. Armed with that confidence, you begin the second year knowing that you must get the job first and worry about the schoolwork later. The law school's "job fair" will attract hundreds of law firms, and you'll respond by donning your suit and peddling the flesh daily.

Law professors hate that. They complain about how "intrusive" the interviewing process is, with its absenteeism and distractions. And, officially, the ABA backs them up. Strictly speaking, students who do not attend classes on a "regular and punctual" basis are in violation of ABA rules, and theoretically cannot receive credit toward graduation.

But that's all ignored. You go for broke, because after a certain time, the opportunities fade away. The best law firms like to fill next summer's openings by mid-autumn.

Most interviews consist of a pretty tedious exchange of pleasantries, followed by an even more banal review of what you had done with your life, what you thought of law school, what your plans were, etc. Then it is your turn, and you got to ask the same old questions, one interview after another, about the firm's policy on something or other, the numbers of attorneys working in each of the firm's divisions, and the most interesting projects now underway in the firm.

In many cases, you could find this information just by looking at a handy book full of data that the law school distributed to each student. You can't ask interviewers for charity. It offends their sense of duty to their firm, and anyway they probably don't believe in it.

The follow-up interviews at the firms are sometimes even stranger. Some follow-up visits have you going out to lunch with the whole gang and having a great time, while in other lunches you need to sit across the table from some stuffed shirt who was practicing to be God. Some firms put you in a pressure situation in which three partners would be grilling you at once, whereas other firms would let you cool your heels in the lobby for half an hour at a time while they forgot you were there.

Except for the poverty-law soft-hearts, my classmates all seemed to want to go to the big, famous firms. Their logic was clear. Most people do not stay at their first law jobs for their entire careers. By starting at the best-known firms, they would have an excellent credential with which they could land top-flight positions in their next jobs.

B. The Summer Experience

Each big law firm works hard to persuade summer associates that life at the firm is quite pleasant. They take them out to four-star restaurants, to the ballet and the theater, and to Mets and Yankees games. Some even go so far as to rent motel rooms off in the countryside somewhere and take everyone away for a weekend, as in, "Oh, Yum, I get to spend a whole weekend of my summer vacation with these people from the office."

A summer clerk would do well to ask himself why that senior partner... says hello to him but not to the full-time associates. Does the partner remember the associates ' names ? ... [AJs a summer clerk you will rarely if ever be told of your shortcomings. Unless you screw up something serious - such as misspelling a partner's name in a memorandum -you will be told only that you did a fine job, made a lot of friends, and everyone is eager to have you back.

The law firms want to persuade young new attorneys to join the firm, and they succeed. After law students complete their summer clerkships, they typically affirm, overwhelmingly, that "The work that I received was interesting and challenging'' and that "The work assignments I undertook and the results of my work product were adequately discussed with me."

C. Clinching It

Many at the law firms seem to be restrained, but almost all seem genuinely decent. By contrast, we see that many of the law students back at law school doubt that they would even be able to stand working with the attorneys they had met at their summer jobs.

So once the annual autumn interviewing rites begin once again, you really don't see the point of trying to find another law job to replace the one you had already been offered. Rather, what you need to decide is whether you want to practice law at all.

If your classmates had raised that question, you would have implied that they were ready to scrap their careers. But with your half-completed MBA, you may have the option of skipping the bar exam and spending the next summer, instead, in an MBA-style internship in the business world. We may suppose the outcome is never really in doubt. MBA employers wouldn't be interviewing the graduating class for another six months or more, and anyway, the economy is in a recession.

Losing the bird in the hand seems foolish. Besides, by now you may have acquired some expensive tastes and may have learned to look down your nose at the less academically challenging, lower-paying (in most cases, anyway) jobs that your MBA friends may be taking.

In the end, you cave in rather quietly. You call up the law firm and tell one of the attorneys on the hiring committee that you were going to take their offer. "Oh, great!" he says. "We were really high on you." You hesitate when he says that, because the notion of these guys getting high on anything was pretty hard to take.