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Picking A Law Firm: Prestige Versus Practice Area

Which factor matters more? A future summer associate seeks your advice.

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Good luck to all of our readers who are now going through the on-campus interview process for 2015 summer associate positions. We’re sure that, armed with Anonymous Recruitment Director’s 8 tips for OCI, you are racking up offers left and right.

Once you have the offers, how do you decide between them? How do you weigh, for example, overall prestige versus strength in a specific practice area?

To this question we now turn….

Here’s the latest question from the ATL mailbag:

A friend who is at a T14 school has summer offers from (1) a top-ten Vault firm that isn’t especially strong in the specific practice area he’s interested in and (2) a lower-ranked firm that is a top-five firm in that practice area.

Which option should he take? Assume that the culture, pay, and location are non-issues.

We don’t have a lot of specifics here, unfortunately. I’d want to know such things as the strength of this person’s interest in the practice area and the prestige differential between the firms in question, for example. (We asked the correspondent for more details from the friend but didn’t hear back.)

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For purposes of answering this question, let’s make two assumptions:

1. The person’s interest in the specific practice area — let’s say real estate, or sports law — rests on a solid foundation. This isn’t just a whim, something the person is curious about, or something he’ll probably change his mind about in a few months. Rather, the applicant knows, to a fairly high degree of certainty, that this is the type of law he wants to practice. Perhaps he worked in the field before law school — for a real estate developer, for a sports agency — and wants to combine his existing industry knowledge and contacts with a legal education.

2. The firm that’s ranked lower in terms of overall prestige is still a solid firm — still in the Vault 100 and Am Law 100, still a firm that seems stable and successful, not the next Dewey & LeBoeuf.

Based on these two assumptions, I’d tell the reader to go with practice-area strength over general prestige. Turn down that V10 firm to do real estate at Fried Frank or Greenberg Traurig, or to do sports law at Proskauer or Covington.[1]

I am, of course, a huge prestige devotee, as reflected in my worship of SCOTUS clerks and super-elite law firms. But prestige must ultimately serve some purpose or goal, such as overall career satisfaction. If your overall career satisfaction turns on a particular practice area, then you should opt for the platform that will best enable you to practice in that area.

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Is it misguided for so many law students and young lawyers to focus on overall prestige? Not necessarily. If you don’t have a clear idea yet of what type of law you want to practice, then it’s smart to keep your options open, and prestigious posts are the best for doing that. Start your career as close to the top as possible, and as you figure out what you want to do, you can contemplate lateraling “down” the prestige totem pole. But if you already know what you want to do in the law, then why not just go do it?

Readers, what do you think? Express yourselves in the comments and vote in our reader poll.

[1] Okay, Covington might be a bad example; it’s no slouch in the prestige department, falling just shy of the V10. I’m mentioning it simply because it has a great sports-law practice.size>

If you know you want to practice a certain type of law, what matters more in choosing between law firms?

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Earlier: 8 Tips For On-Campus Interviewing

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