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Career Center: Tips for Summer Associates

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The Career Center is featuring a special series this summer for law students who want to excel as summer associates and ultimately secure permanent offers. Starting today and continuing throughout the summer, we will feature tips to help you manage your assignments, juggle conflicting demands, account for your time, handle feedback and criticism, and much more. These tips, focused on helping you navigate your law firm and summer associate internship, are provided by Frank Kimball, a principal of the Kimball Partner Group – a Lateral Link company, and an expert recruiter and former Biglaw hiring partner.

Today’s tips focus on how to maintain an attitude that will help you win over the partners at your firm and put you on the fast track to success. While not known for offering useful legal guidance, Elle Woods from Legally Blonde: The Musical offers great advice to summer associates: “Be positive.” You have already passed the first test, by initially securing the summer associate clerkship. Now you need to show off your dazzling personality — or at least demonstrate that you are at least tolerable during late-night doc review projects that await your future.

Keep the following tips in mind, whether you are working on a legal memo or hanging out at a partner’s summer house in the Hamptons….

1) Do good work — and lots of it. This advice is always important, but it is critical when the pressure to perform is on.

2) Be realistic. The table of life is not an all-you-can-eat-buffet. A law firm is neither a catering company nor a personal trainer. You cannot have it all – great income, unlimited opportunity to make partner, reasonable hours, wonderful culture, and a bike rack in the basement. The lawyer must make choices – the firm is not your parent or fiduciary.

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3) Go for a low profile. Do not assume that the green light is now on to make silly or extreme demands during the summer, whether or not they are economic. (You may find partners a bit more testy about economic issues.) The sensible summer associate will maintain a profile lower than a snake’s belly in a wagon rut (thanks, Jed) on these issues.

4) Lose the drama. There is no upside to being an opinion leader, agitator, or rumormonger. No, you won’t get fired, but you will be remembered and perceived in a way that is not favorable. It does not mean you cannot chat with your colleagues, but I wouldn’t recommend that you lead the charge on why your firm must compete with firms around town or volunteer to collect data on other firms.

Click here for the final six dos and don’ts for maintaining the right attitude this summer. For additional career insights, as well as profiles of individual law firms, check out the Career Center.

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