Summer Associates

The World Hates Lawyers: Mainstream Media Manages to Criticize Biglaw Summers AND Public Sector Lawyers in the Same Breath

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Earlier this week, Conor Friedersdorf, writing for The Atlantic, poured a big bottle of haterade all over the legal profession. More specifically, he criticized the way “Ivy League” lawyers are recruited, and the “palpable sense of entitlement” they exhibit even when they don’t take Biglaw bucks and instead work for the government. Here’s the set up:

The details of how elite law and business consulting firms recruit astonish me every time I hear them. Even getting an interview often requires attending an Ivy League professional school or a very few top tier equivalents. Folks who succeed in that round are invited to spend a summer working at the firm, the most sane aspect of the process.

But subsequently, they participate in sell events where they’re plied with food and alcohol in the most lavish settings imaginable: five star resort hotels, fine cigar bars, the priciest restaurants.

And here’s the money shot, one that is careening around the legal blogosphere like Billy Joel trying to get back from the Hamptons before the hurricane hits:

Though it isn’t defensible, it is unsurprising that a lot of people who eschew offers to work at these firms, favoring public sector work instead, imagine that they are making an enormous personal sacrifice by taking government work. The palpable sense of entitlement some of these public sector folks exude is owed partly to how few of “our best and brightest” do eschew the big firm route (due partly to increasing debt levels among today’s graduates, no doubt).

Really? You want to do this now? You want to talk smack about the people on the bottom rung of this totem pole, while willfully ignoring the clients, partners, law schools, and state governments that generate huge sums of wealth off the backs of the palpably entitled?

Fine. Let me take off my glasses, and we’ll step outside…

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Career Center: A Useful Resource for On-Campus Interviewing

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With OCI in full swing, you should check out the firms below to see if it is one of the firms you have a callback interview with. Wondering how summer associates rated their summer experience at the firms you may be interviewing with? Check out the Career Center for valuable insight on summer programs, as well as firm-specific information that will be helpful in your interviews.

  • Out of the office by 6:00 p.m. and no weekend work faced the summer associates at this firm. When they weren’t working on “realistic work assignments,” summer associates attended several social events including a retreat at the Four Seasons Hotel in Atlanta.
  • Vegans and sedentary individuals may not fit in with the summer associates at this firm. While summer associates commend the firm for being “open and honest,” a number of 2009 summer associates were asked to accept firm-sponsored fellowships and defer their start dates until January 2012.
  • Summer associates at this firm receive continuous feedback on work assignments and attend writing seminars, mock trials, and corporate transaction workshops. In addition to not getting work stuffed down their throats, summer associates brag that they attended far more events than their peers at other firms.
  • This firm reduced the length of its summer program and cancelled summer programs in a couple of its offices in 2010 and 2011. Summer associates fortunate enough to get a summer gig here usually worked on 11 to 15 assignments and are encouraged to work in different practice groups.
  • The good ol’ days are still alive and well at this firm, where summer associates get to live it up on yacht cruises and get prime seats to baseball games, symphony concerts, and musicals. The tradeoff for all the social events is the occasional “long night in the office,” but summer associates typically leave the office between 5:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m.

For information on summer programs and associate life at all the top firms, visit the Career Center.

Career Center: The 2010 Summer Associate Survey Results

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We’ve completely updated the Summer Associate Program sections in each of the Firm Snapshots with the 2010 summer associate survey results and the latest news.  With on-campus interviewing already underway at most schools, law students won’t want to miss getting the inside scoop on the highlights – and lowlights – of each firm’s summer program.

So head on over to the Career Center to see how the firm you summered at, or want to interview with, stacks up. Highlights include:

  • Summer associates at this litigation powerhouse brag that their “workload is super light,” completing one to five assignments over the course of the 12-week summer program, and typically spending about five hours a day on billable work.  Just don’t expect to be making the lunch rounds at the city’s trendiest restaurants.  Summers eat in at the firm’s dining room, which serves free but “excellent” lunch daily.
  • It certainly pays to have high-profile clients at this firm, which treats its summer associates to unique social events like the Tony Awards and the NBA Draft.
  • The line between summer and full-time associates is blurred at this firm, with summers “put[ting] in well over 80 hours” during some weeks to complete 15 or more assignments during the eight-week summer program.  Despite their high work demands, these summer associates still find the time to be do-gooders by volunteering to cook at the Ronald McDonald House for kids and their families.
  • The good old days never left this firm.  Summer associates typically bill about four hours a day on assignments, leave at 5:30 p.m., play softball at Fenway Park, and still get 100% offers. But you might want to think about taking an extended post-bar trip, since you might not start work on time as a first-year associate.
  • No complaints at this firm, which gives summer associates “exactly the work that they want” and still provides a “very generous” $65 lunch budget in New York.  Be sure to brush up on your foreign language skills; one-third of the summer class gets to spend up to three weeks working in one of the firm’s overseas offices

For information on the summer programs at all the top firms visit the Career Center.

Firms Now Looking for Unpaid Summer Associates

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It sounds like something firms would try to keep on the down low, through anonymous postings on Craigslist. But in the new economy, it’s apparently no big deal for law firms to ask career services offices to send over students who are so desperate they’re willing to work for free. The ABA Journal reports:

Law schools in Florida have gotten a flood of requests from small and midsize law firms seeking summer associates willing to work for free — but career officials are not pleased…

Robert Levine, assistant dean for career development at Nova Southeastern University’s Shepard Broad Law Center, tells the Daily Business Review that the U.S. Department of Labor encourages unpaid internships to be coordinated through the school’s clinical program.

“It’s a big problem because the students want the experience and the firms need the help,” Levine told the publication. “All of the law schools throughout the state are dealing with this issue.”

Please tell me this is some kind of weird Florida problem, and this kind of behavior will be limited to the Sunshine State…

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Dear Law Firms: Canceling Summer Programs After People Bid on Those Programs Is Bad Form

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Late last night, we received a tip that has become all too common in the dog days of August. This tipster sent us this letter from the career services office at Georgetown Law:

Haynes and Boone, LLP has just informed us that they will no longer have a summer program in their Washington, DC and Austin, TX offices. Please contact me if you are interested in switching your interview to either the Dallas, TX, Houston, TX, or New York, NY offices or if you would like us to cancel your interview.

These late-breaking summer program cancellations, partial cancellations, or substantive summer-program changes really need to stop…

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Let’s Do This: Deferred (Then Rescinded) Would-Be Associate Sues Firm

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This was bound to happen at some point. There have been countless associates who were promised jobs at law firms. They stopped looking for other jobs in reliance on that job offer. Then during the recession they were deferred, or their offers were rescinded. They are the leading citizens of the Lost Generation.

Do they have any legal claims against their would-be employers?

Almost certainly not, but it looks like somebody is ready to try to find out. The ABA Journal reports:

A would-be associate has sued San Francisco law firm Howard, Rice, Nemerovski, Canady, Falk & Rabkin for deferring and then rescinding her job offer.

A clean test case on the issue of offer rescission? Not quite. As with most things, there’s a racial angle…

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Career Center: Learning How to Meditate — and to Write a Supreme Court Brief Like a MoFo

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With the summer coming to an end, we are almost done updating the summer associate profiles for all the firms listed in the Career Center. Along with Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman and WilmerHale, Morrison & Foerster was another one of the firms that encouraged their 2010 summer associates to share their experience with us.

Summer associates at MoFo definitely noticed the amount of transparency at the firm and appreciated how the firm “openly communicate[s] with summers regarding expectations.” If you end up summering at MoFo, don’t be surprised if you get to discuss regulatory matters with clients or draft portions of a brief about to be submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court. While every assignment may not involve earth-shattering issues, summer associates are given the opportunity to participate on various pro bono matters throughout the summer.

When MoFo summer associates aren’t busy selecting assignments in different practice areas or attending training sessions, they get to experience “just the right amount of social events to provide a contrast to the work.” In 2010, summer associates would end the workday sailing the Chesapeake Bay, mediating with a Zen Monk, or touring the Museum of Modern Art. In addition to real work experience and quality social events, MoFo had a not-too-shabby offer rate of almost 100% for the 2009 summer class.

Get more details about the summer associate experience at MoFo and other firms by going to the Career Center. Keep an eye out for future posts as we will be publishing the rest of the summer associate survey results in the next week or so.

A Collection of Funny Summer Associate Stories from a Bygone Age

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Some people were disappointed in the summer associate tales this year. We had only one really salacious story this summer. (If there were others we missed, email us.) Thank you, Oenophile Olympian, for your addition to the summer associate rules of etiquette.

Our schadenfreude-loving readers were terribly disappointed by the scarcity of scandal. Shame on you, sober and sedate 2010 summer associates! Though it’s worked out well for you all, it forced long-time lawyers to go digging in their memory banks for more exciting material.

We have five stories that came to us via comments and e-mail from the good old days when summer associates were young and restless, instead of focused and desperate…

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The Real World: Corporate Law Edition

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I have been writing for Above the Law since March of 2008. This Monday, though, will be my last day as a daily contributor. I am heading over to Forbes to write about privacy, law, social media, and technology (aka The Not-So Private Parts). For those who will miss my daily presence on ATL, please feel free to check me out there, or to friend me on Facebook, or to follow me on Twitter. I’ll also be writing a weekly column for Above the Law.

Lat, Elie, and I are going to be getting drinks after work at The Ninth Ward to help numb the separation pain. Please feel free to join us if you’re in New York. Though only if you’re not a weirdo. (You know who you are; but to clarify, weirdos are not those who would show up, but are among those who voted this up.) We’ll be there from six to eight p.m.

As many of you know, unlike my co-editors, I’m not a lawyer. I’m just a little journalist. I appreciate that, despite this moral and educational failing on my part, all of you lawyers and law students have put up with my writing about your profession. Professors Lat and Mystal have offered excellent legal lessons, as have the real law professors I have had the pleasure of interviewing. Plus, I date spend an inordinate amount of time hanging out with lawyers outside of work, and so have a solid appreciation for the terror of living under the reign of the billable hour.

I also did some hourly billing myself way back when; my first job out of college in 2003 was as a paralegal in the D.C. office of Covington & Burling, an experience that convinced me not to apply to law school (despite having rocked the LSAT). During my first summer in D.C., I lived in a five-bedroom apartment in Van Ness with four summer associates — from Harvard, Columbia, Yale, and Georgetown. We were five corporate law strangers picked to live in a house (vacated by the Georgetown law student’s roommates for the summer). That was where I picked up some useful stereotypes about students from these elite law schools. I came away from the summer with a strong dislike for HLS kids…

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Career Center: WilmerHale’s Summer Associates, For the Win

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In anticipation of the release of the summer associate survey results, last week we highlighted the firm with the highest response rate among summer associates, Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman.  Today we want to congratulate and feature WilmerHale, for having the highest overall number of respondents to the summer associate survey. In a time when firms have scaled back their summer programs to the point that you might blink and miss them, WilmerHale’s 56 summer associate responses are particularly impressive.

So what exactly did so many summer associates have to say about WilmerHale’s summer program?  For one, the best part of the summer program was the attorneys.  Summer associates unanimously praised the “supportive, friendly culture” and the “bright” yet “down-to-earth” people.  WilmerHale also treated summer associates to a lot of good, old-fashioned fun, such as feasting on crab after a sailing trip on the Chesapeake Bay, whitewater rafting and camping, ziplining on Catalina Island, and spending a firm-sanctioned “skip day” at the beach.

But it wasn’t just fun and games all summer long. Summer associates at WilmerHale proved to be more than just overpaid, wannabe lawyers, by completing an average of 10 “substantive” and “important” assignments over the course of the summer.  Spoken like a true Biglaw associate, one WilmerHale survey respondent noted that “it can be tricky to balance events, assignments, and life outside the firm.

To find out more about the associate experience at WilmerHale or other firms, head on over to the Career Center. And be sure to look out for summer associate survey results in the next few weeks.

The 100% Summer Associate Offer Rates Keep Rolling In

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This was a year of small summer classes. Fewer summer associates mean a greater likelihood that all will get offers… unless a law student does something egregious. (Good news for rising 2Ls: There are signs that next year’s classes will be larger.)

Latham & Watkins and Gibson Dunn had the biggest summer associate classes this year, with 110 law students each. We’re told that Latham gave offers to all of its summer associates. What about Gibson? Will it match Latham one for one? One commenter claims that 24 in the firm’s NYC office have already gotten offers. What about the rest?

We have heard 100% news from a few other brand-name firms. Some came with champagne, others with firm-wide emails…

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Summer Associate Etiquette 101: Share Your Bottle of Wine

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There was not much in the way of summer associate scandal this year. There were fewer summer associates at law firms, and they were on their best behavior — resulting in 100% offer rates at many firms. This meant, though, that the stream of summer associate stories was disappointingly dry. (Of course, if you have a story to share — now that summer programs are over, it’s safe to spill the beans — please email us.)

Alas, it was not a dry summer for one law student at Milbank Tweed. This particular summer associate, from a school near the top of the US News rankings, has won an Olympic medal. Apparently, she’s also a champion drinker.

This rising 2L fell under the spell of Mad Men and embraced the three-martini lunch. Her drink of choice, though, was wine — by the bottle…

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