Biglaw, Law Schools

Law Firm Replaces On-Campus Interviews With Speed Dating

Getting your job should be more like dating.

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Smiling couple having tea outdoorsIt’s a long-standing joke that the brief, 15-20 minute on-campus interviews that law students stack back-to-back with with law firms throughout the day amount to an extended speed dating session. So it should come as no surprise that one law firm has taken the model to the next level and shifted its traditional on-campus interviewing more toward the speed dating model.

Vivia Chen, writing over at Law.com, has the scoop on a new practice from Herrick Feinstein:

Then, with drinks in hand, each student picked a bar table and chatted up a hiring committee member for five minutes. (Students were told to come prepared with an elevator pitch on why they should be hired.) After five minutes, a bell rang, and students went to a new table to meet another lawyer. Repeat.

Interviewing should be more like dating. When you think about it, they both lead to the same emotional roller coaster: the thrill of that initial nibble of interest; the wild, intoxicated honeymoon of the summer; the grim reality of your first year; the nerve-racking senior days as you wait out the partnership proposal because you’re not getting any younger; and then you’re either dumped in favor of the next younger class or you settle into a lifetime of boring missionary legal practice.

Some may see this as a little less staid than the traditional model, but frankly this is a far superior approach to the initial interview. Moving from hotel room to hotel room to have one brief chat with, usually, a single lawyer from a firm offers almost nothing of value to either side. The applicant gets only a slim peek at the firm’s culture before moving on to a rival and the firm has only one snippet of face-to-face time to form their opinion before moving on to the callback.

The student now talks to a number of lawyers from the firm and has the opportunity to form a broader understanding of firm culture, while the firm has multiple, iterated chats with a specific applicant and can draw on the insights of a number of lawyers in forming the best decision before extending a callback. In a way, the traditional model of flitting from one isolated interaction to another is actually more like speed dating than what Herrick’s doing. And, let’s be honest, most of those 20-minute interviews are just time-killing exercises after a student is already plucked off the sheet based on their 1L transcript making the traditional model more like an in-person Tinder session than a substantive blind date.

That said, there are some potential downsides here worth considering. As shallow as a 20-minute interview can be, at least it’s a 20-minute interview. There’s an opportunity for follow-up questions and a genuine interchange. My on-campus interview with Cleary quickly veered off the canned introduction and became a full-scale defense of my undergrad thesis. That’s when I fell in love with the idea of working at Cleary and, apparently, they decided they liked me too. That talk definitely couldn’t have developed in the Herrick model. Could my connection have really formed after 5 minutes? Hard to say.

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When stories add up about how introverts make as good, if not better, lawyers, Herrick has to worry that some of their best opportunities are slipping away because they just can’t shine in the tight, high energy format of speed dating. It’s going to be interesting to hear how Herrick feels about this process after next year’s summer program (and interesting to hear how applicants felt about going through it).

For now though, someone out there is taking a chance on a new approach and in this industry that sort of bold thinking is a rarity worth encouraging.

Just don’t give up an acceptance until at least the third callback.

Firm Takes Its Cue From Speed Dating [Law.com]
Law firm uses speed-dating approach to law student interviews [ABA Journal]
Most lawyers are introverted, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing [ABA Journal]

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Joe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

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