This Firm Hired An Actor To Play The World's Worst Summer Associate

What better way to build summer camaraderie than hiring someone for the class to rally against?

In every summer associate class there’s the one annoying kid. Whether they’re annoying because they’re a know-it-all or a slacker, there’s someone who just rubs you the wrong way. If you can’t think of who the annoying kid in your class might be, well, then it’s you.

One firm had a really annoying kid in their summer class. But the firm was ready for it, because the firm hired an actor to be the annoying summer.

As the managing partner explains to his plant, “you should understand what the — kind of the goals for the week are, and then you should f**k with them.”

I love these guys….

Jay Edelson of Edelson LLC is prominently featured in the video below, explaining to actor Jesse Thurston how he wants the improvisationalist to really mess with the rest of the summer class. Reason #756 NOT to go to Edelson — You only play a lawyer on YouTube.

We should have expected this from a guy who does photo shoots from his office armed with a Nerf gun.

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Highlights include the character hiring an out-of-work lawyer to do his work for $20 an hour. That’s frighteningly believable. Indeed, it’s the up-and-coming business model of more than one Biglaw firm. He also brought a clingy girlfriend to the office to bug everyone. Amazing.

The real summer associates fell for the prank. As one of them told us, it was “kind of a weird experience, but ended up being pretty funny and fun for us.”

Apparently at one point in the exercise a fellow summer got suspicious and tried to verify the kid’s credentials. Thankfully for Edelson, this snoopy summer didn’t tip off ATL and ruin the joke. On the other hand, if you thought a fellow summer was lying, why wouldn’t you tip us off?

Jay Edelson and associate David Dale masterminded the prank and deserve kudos for thinking outside the box in coming up with summer icebreakers.

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Sadly, in this market we need to go to staged pranks to find funny summer associate stories this year.

UPDATE (9:00 p.m.): We replaced the original link to a Google Docs video, which stopped working at a certain point, with a functional link to Vimeo.

UPDATE (8/15/2013, 9:00 p.m.): Here’s some additional background from Matt Pacult of Creative Freedom Productions, which made the video:

We were the film crew that put together the video. A little more context: after a week of being incompetent, Scotty Larson (our mole) and the rest of the firm went out for drinks and food at a bar next door. A sorta “Welcome Summers” party… The room was surrounded by plasma screen TVs with the “Edelson, LLC” logo. As the head of the firm was giving a speech welcoming the summers individually, Scotty Larson jumped up and said, “You know what Jay, I think I can introduce myself a little bit better than you…I actually made a short video that can speak for me.”

The Edelson,LLC logo then melted off the screen (no one at the party had even suspected the TVs were displaying a DVD menu) and this movie began to play.

The first half of the video, everyone thought Scotty was scum. When we see Jay talk to Scotty, that would’ve been the first time the summers realized this was a prank.

We wanted to record stuff in the office, but apparently it’s illegal in Illinois to record people without them knowing about it.

So for those of you wondering why the video didn’t feature footage of “Scotty Larson” interacting with the summer associates, there’s your answer.

Scotty Larson Portrait [Vimeo]

Disclosure: Edelson is an ATL advertiser.