Ed. note: This is the first post in a series sponsored by Hotshot, a company bringing modern online learning to the legal industry.
The summer is upon us. Law students are fanning out all over the land to get their first experience of the Biglaw lifestyle: 45-hour work weeks, memos to file, taking in the occasional baseball game. Enjoy it, kids. The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist.
Of course, the summer lunches do coldly furnish forth first-year associate dinners. The summer program might be an extended recruiting event, but they are also opportunities to figure out what you need to know in order to hit the ground running when you start practicing for real.
Above the Law sat down with Kerianne Crooker, a former associate at Weil and another Biglaw power firm, about what she learned over her summer associates experience, and what she wished she had learned.
ATL: What’s the one thing you learned in a summer program that really helped you once you started your career?
KC: I think above all else – that the people you work with make a difference. Learning who specializes in what, the impact of politics in your firm, and the significance of a good mentoring relationship, early on, was one of the most significant take-aways from my summer program.
This is a key point most prospective law students and many new lawyers don’t always understand. What you work on depends on who you work for, not what you “specialized” in during law school. Over the summer, you can figure out which partners handle which clients, and plan your kissing-up appropriately. It doesn’t matter how many IP courses you take, if the partner who handles the Google account hates your guts, you’re out.
That’s especially true of corporate practice. Law school doesn’t really prepare you for corporate work anyway, and every corporate partner knows that.
ATL: What’s the biggest difference between what you do as a corporate lawyer versus what you thought you’d be doing as a corporate lawyer in law school?
KC: To be frank, the lack of correlation between the substance I was taught in school and actual practice. I didn’t expect to be drafting Merger Agreements from scratch or even have any real impact on them right away but I guess looking back I had a bit of a naive view that I would use my substantive learning more directly and that it would prepare me for the tasks I was responsible for.
Given the lack of training at the school level, we asked Kerianne what firms could do:
ATL: What’s one thing you think firms can do to help train their own people that they’re not doing right now?
KC: Invest more. Whether that’s time or money to have someone else spend the time – invest. I have worked at three separate top-tier law firms and in my opinion the training I received at one stands out among the others for that reason. We all generally have other places we’d rather be – spend the time or money to set people up for success early on and let our associates motivations do what they will to take care of us weeding ourselves out as time goes on. The more individual associates can confidently run on their own, the faster you can see who can keep up.
Okay, so Kerianne favors training with a “This is Sparta” Darwinist flavor. Good to know.
But no matter what kind of training regime the firm sets up, associates are still going to need help along the way. And the summer can be invaluable for setting up the kind of peer networks that you’ll need when you start working full-time:
ATL: When you don’t know what to do at work, how do you find the help you need?
KC: Setting up the right network in a law firm is just as vital as it is in any other industry. During my summer I spent a significant amount of time networking with my classmates, the junior associates (who would then all serve as mentors during my junior years), junior partners and a handful of partners I felt professionally challenged by. As a lawyer, as much as you can use Google to perhaps scratch the surface, we all know the vital time save of knowing who to ask that will actually know and the softer space of it needing to be done a certain way for a particular client (or more likely partner). So if I didn’t know how to do something, or the particulars of how a certain client/partner wanted something done, I turned to my trusted “network” of colleagues to assist or point me in the right direction of someone who could. For what it’s worth, they were spread out among several different practice areas in each of the firms I worked, and also included associates at other firms from law school if I was aware they had certain experience I needed.
The firm wants to get to know you over the course of the summer. But you should be learning about the firm. The people you meet and the relationships you make will have more to do with your future success than anything that will happen when you get back to campus for your 3L year.
To learn more about Hotshot and register for our free Summer Pilot Program, visit www.hotshotlegal.com.