What ATL Editors Wish They Knew As Summer Associates

When the ATL editors were young summer associates.

Ed. note: This is the second post in a series sponsored by Hotshot, a company bringing modern online learning to the legal industry.

As Chris Rock says: “Life is long, especially if you make the wrong decisions.” The crew here at Above the Law has done a lot of… living.

It’s been a long time since I was a summer associate. I look back on the way I was then: a young, stupid kid who committed to a terrible lifestyle. I want to talk to him. I want to try to talk some sense to him, tell him the way things are. But I can’t. That kid’s long gone, and this old man is all that’s left.

But if I could talk to the kid that I was as a summer associate… what would I say? Two things spring to mind:

  • Yes, You can get fatter.
  • No, you don’t work for clients, you work for partners.

I wasn’t fat in college, but I started to put on weight in law school. But as a summer associate, I couldn’t conceive of what a fully sedentary lifestyle would do to my svelte sexiness. I couldn’t do the math on what comfort eating and revenge lunching would do on the caloric-intake side of the ledger either. And I couldn’t imagine how little I would want to go to a gym in the middle of an 80-hour work week. Good Lord. Thank God I’m usually too drunk to stand in front of a mirror.

In any event, professionally speaking, as a summer I was super-excited to work on the big-name clients at the firm. NFL! Yahoo (don’t laugh, it was a thing). Turns out, I should have been more excited to work with specific people. I got lucky — the partner who had the clients I wanted to work with was also one of the best guys in the firm. If I had it to do over again, I just would have attached myself to his hip for everything. It’s the people that make the firm.

Enough about my issues. I asked my fellow editors for their thoughts. David Lat says:

It’s your career, and nobody will care about it as much as you. Don’t be passive. Take some initiative and, to the extent that you can, seek out the matters you want to work on and the people you want to work with. Firms try to accommodate summer associates in a way that might not happen once you’re there on a more long-term basis.

True that. One problem that new associates can have, especially at the top firms, is that they expect things to be laid out for them. Top-end higher education can be a little bit like getting on a train. You go to a great high school and, just naturally, you end up at a great college, and then a great law school, and eventually find yourself at a great firm. As long as you stay in your seat and don’t do anything crazy, the train is going to take you to where you want to go.

But once you get into your career, you are driving your own car. Destination unknown. You can follow the interstate, but eventually, you are just going to run into some water. You have to make your own decisions.

Of course, not everybody arrives at the summer experience from a comfy seat in business class. Staci has these words of warning:

If you’re working for free now, you’re probably going to be working for free after graduation.

Yeah… umm… damn. She’s not wrong though. If you find yourself with a “summer job” that doesn’t pay you anything, you’re making worse financial decisions than the 15-year-old who is mowing my lawn right now.

Joe Patrice has two pieces of advice:

  • Go to every expensive lunch… they’re the last ones you’re going to get.
  • Whatever you end up doing, some of your best business contacts are going to be in this class.

Jesus, could this man be any more white? Annoying, but again, not wrong. Most of the people in your summer class will not be at your firm in 10 years. You probably won’t be at your firm in 10 years. But these people you are meeting over the summer are going to be key cogs in your professional networks, for better or worse, for the rest of your working days. So yeah, go to that lunch, and play nice. You’ll want to have something you can reminisce about when you are connecting on Future LinkedIn.

Our newest editor, Kathryn Rubino, has the most salient piece of advice:

Sure you can get an offer after drunkenly knocking over a glass of red wine onto someone’s beautiful linen suit, but it isn’t advisable.

Wait, no, not that. This:

Just try corporate work.

It’s the summer. Just try it. Get out of your comfort zone just a little bit and take a shot. You can learn how to do it, and some of you are really going to like it.


 

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