Email Scandals, Job Searches, No Offers, Summer Associates

Foley & Lardner: Where the Wild Things Are

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Full disclosure: we do not know exactly what is going on over at Foley & Lardner. But we are hearing a lot of chatter.
By way of a quick summary: we posted information that Foley offered only 43% of their summers out the Chicago office. Then Foley issued a firm wide email saying that they offered 81% of their Chicago summers (we posted that too). Meanwhile, the firm has rebuffed multiple attempts to verify any of this information directly. For more details read here and here.
After we updated Foley’s hiring numbers and posted Foley’s CEO Ralf Boer’s statements, our tipsters wagged their fingers and said “oh no he didn’t.” This email is indicative of many comments we received:

Just FYI–Ralf Boer’s email is a load of crap.

Hmmm …
Many believe that Foley did in fact tell summers that they would not be receiving an offer, but then reversed course early this week, after our initial post on Foley’s no offers went up. The thought from these tipsters is that the public backlash was so bad that Foley had to rethink their hiring decisions. Initially we found it hard to believe that a firm would have the gall to no offer somebody, only to call them up weeks later with an offer. But the tips kept rolling in.
We are happy (rolling around like a pig in sweet, sweet slop, happy) to think that ATL had some small role to play in securing additional summer associate jobs in this economy. But there are two sides to every story. Some tipsters think that Foley’s delay in completing the offer process is par for the course:

I just want to say that I know first hand that .. many people had not yet heard either way about offers. That is for both 1Ls and 2Ls. … I think you should update your main posting for the sake of all the comments calling b.s. on Ralf Boer’s statement that they only just finished making all the decisions. … I know for a fact first-hand that several people had yet to hear as of yesterday and even today.
On an historical note, right about now is exactly how long it took Foley to get back to many folks last year.

So did Foley ding people and then change their mind, or did they just take a long time to finish their hiring process? More tipsters weigh in after the jump.


As usual, we reached out to Foley asking for clarification on this issue. We asked them if they wanted to explicitly deny the rumor that Foley changed summer associate offers in response to ATL’s story or other public pressure. Foley decided to remain silent on the matter.
Absent Foley making a statement, all we can go on is what people are saying. And people who claim to work at Foley in Chicago are saying:

All the rumors are true, they definitely flip-flopped.

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We received one tip in particular that had so many truthiness bells and whistles we can’t reprint it for fear of outing our source. Suffice it to say that the tipster claimed to have been no offered by Foley two weeks ago and then contacted again by the firm Monday night with an offer. As you may recall, Boer sent around his email claiming an 84% overall offer rate on Monday night.
And speaking of Boer’s email, here’s another interesting little tidbit for you conspiracy theorists out there. The copy of Boer’s email that we received was notably missing the “Do not forward this email outside of the firm” footer that is commonplace on almost every official law firm communication. A tipster also pointed out the missing footer and confirmed that every other email from Boer included the warning against forwarding the message outside of the firm.
Is Foley trying to spin us without actually talking to us? Or was it an honest mistake or omission? We’ll leave it to our readers to speculate since Foley has decided not to comment about this tip either.
Whatever is going on over there, this episode is frustrating for associates and summers alike. As one person put it:

Foley–a great place to tread water while you look for another job.

If you have any other Foley stories, please send them along.

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