Weil Gotshal Associate Shown the Door for Failure To Graduate From Law School

We’ve often explored the studio space in terms of what a “performance-based layoff” actually means. But today we can report about at least one person who would have been fired in this market or any other.

According to multiple sources, both inside and outside Weil Gotshal, the firm recently fired an associate for failure to graduate from law school.

How did this escape the notice of Weil personnel? How was he outed? What was he thinking?

Well, Weil did not respond to our requests for comment. But we imagine that it is not unusual for firms to hire a summer based on 1L grades, make them an offer when the summer is over, and then never really look at a transcript again.

What we do know is that the associate “attended” NYU Law School. Tipsters report that he then did some study abroad and thought his credits would transfer back over to NYU. They did not. He never made them up, hence, no diploma, no graduation.

But this story is a little beyond a technicality. More details after the jump.


Because Weil declined to comment, we have no idea if the firm would have given him the opportunity to go back and make up his credits. But we do know that Weil management was never really put in that position, since the offending associate allegedly lied to them and said he had in fact graduated.

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Having failed to actually graduate from an accredited law school, the associate (perhaps wisely) spared himself the pain of sitting through the bar exam. He simply didn’t take it.

But when the results came out in November, he told everybody he took it and passed. According to a tipster

He told all of us that he passed the bar, but that his name wasn’t on the bar list. He actually said it was because of “a typo.”

See, here’s the thing about lying: never try to combine two lies into one lie. You can say you graduated from NYU when you only attended NYU and get away with it, at least for a little while. But if you say you graduated from Columbia when you never even attended, you’ll get caught right away.

In this case, the ex-Weil associate should have said that he sat for the exam and then failed. That would have been so much easier to get away with than saying that he both sat for it and passed.

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Oh well, at least he’s learned an important lesson for next time.

In any event, the “typo” challenge seems to be what did him in. That got people checking around, and soon enough the whole house of cards toppled over.

But one question we are dying to know is how much work he actually did at Weil. I mean, Weil has been busy, and the firm has been putting extra bodies on some high-profile bankruptcy cases. Was this guy one of them?

Maybe this guy had no intention of being a lawyer, but decided to try to scam a couple of paychecks once the market went south. This is not a good time to be unemployed and trying to find your dream job anyway.

But perhaps I’ve buried the lead. It looks like there is an opening at Weil for a junior associate. Just make sure you can “document” your J.D.

If you’ve got more interesting details on this charade, send them in to tips.