Law Schools

Everything You Need To Know About Fall Recruiting Season (Part II: The Initial Interview)

This will probably be the only time in your life where you have scores of employers lining up to give you a job.

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So you have done your employer research, gotten your interview schedule,[1] and now it is time for you to run the OCI gauntlet.  But whether you came straight through from undergrad or have a decade’s worth of work experience under your belt, OCI can be daunting prospect for a significant number of law students.  For those fortunate students, the daunting nature stems from having to cram dozens of interviews into the span of a week.  But even if you only have one interview, the nature of an OCI interview can be unlike that you will find in any other profession.  While a degree of trepidation is understandable, and indeed, probably justified, recognize that OCI is both conquerable and the gateway to a legal career that could last you for half a century.

Perhaps the most important ingredient to a successful OCI is to understand what you are walking into when it comes to an initial interview.  Unlike most corporate environments, your OCI interviews are not going to be conducted by Carol in Human Resources, or some other midlevel executive whom you would only know in the future as a box on the organizational chart.

Instead, interviewers at OCI are attorneys with that employer.  Be they partners several decades into their practice or junior associates who might have just graduated from your law school, these are people who are first and foremost looking for colleagues.  This means that they not only want someone who can excel as an attorney, but someone who these attorneys will want to work with side by side with for the foreseeable future.  Even if you are at the absolute top of your class, nothing will sink your employment candidacy quicker than turning off the interviewers.

The next thing to recognize is that these OCI interviews are extremely short, typically only 20 minutes — in fact, do not be surprised if you hear a knock at the door after precisely 20 minutes; that is just your classmate who is next on the schedule and eager for their opportunity to impress.  As I often tell students at Vanderbilt, that 20 minutes goes by quicker than you could possibly imagine, so this is not the opportunity to launch into soliloquies or meandering stories that have no real impact on your employment candidacy.  Barring being posed with a Phillip Barbay-esque 27-part question, the answers you give during initial interviews should be no longer than 30-45 seconds.

While it might sound a bit odd, practice your answers until you have them condensed into 30-second sound bites which you can eloquently recite the moment your interviewer finishes the question.

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That being said, the best initial interviews are often the ones that talk least about the law.  You have to remember that while you might have a long day or even week of interviews, so do the attorneys who are conducting the interviews — not to mention they are trying to calculate how they are going to make up for the lost day billing.  And while they might be interested in your thoughts on Property if you happen to be interviewing first thing in the morning, by the end of the day, the last thing they want to hear is yet another student explaining how they were able to conquer the Rule Against Perpetuities.  Find something else to talk about.  Before you walk into any OCI interview, not only should you have researched the employer, but also, ideally, the interviewer(s).  Perhaps you both went to the same undergrad and can talk about shared experiences or the interviewer went to a school with a prominent athletics program.  Providing these attorneys with a 20-minute respite from talking the law might, in and of itself, be enough to land you a call back.

However, there are two caveats to the above paragraph.  First, if your school has even a partial lottery system in place for OCI, be wary of interviews that do not even remotely touch on your potential as an attorney.  When I was going through the OCI (or EIW, as it were) process more than a decade ago, I had one interview with an Am Law 10 firm in which the first minute was reviewing my transcript and the following 19 minutes were discussing the weather in New York City.  Not surprisingly, that interview was soon followed up with a succinct rejection letter in the mail.  Second, when discussing non-legal matters, make sure you know your audience.  While you and I might be able to have a wonderful 20-minute conversation about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Abolishing ICE, that does not mean the same is true for the attorney sitting across the table from you.

Also, remember that you are always being evaluated, and not just when you are in the interview room.  Many firms will set up reception tables at OCI full of swag and staffed by recruiters and attorneys.  While this might seem like a harmless opportunity to grab a free pen, the key article there is “a.”  Someone who takes a dozen pens, or a plate full of doughnuts, is going to draw attention to themselves, and not in a good way.  This does not mean that you should avoid the reception tables, nor that you have to avoid taking anything from them.  Indeed, the swag is meant to be taken and the tables are staffed with people who can answer most anything you can come up with about the firm.  Just remember that acts outside of the interview room count just as much as those inside.

Regardless of how many interviews you have, but especially for those of you who will be going through a seemingly never-ending cycle of hand shakes and questions, it can be hard to keep track of your thoughts about each firm and interviewer.  This is especially true if you are trying to piece them together at the end of the day or even the week.  A high school friend of mine who was a year ahead of me in law school gave me a piece of advice that I still give to students today.  Even in this digital age, every attorney that you meet at OCI will give you a business card.  Right after your interview is complete, take a moment to jot down some notes about that interview on the back of their business card.  Your perception of the interviewers and the firm will still be fresh in your mind and you then will have a record which you can refer to later on when it comes time to determine which callbacks you want to take.

Yes, the initial interview phase of OCI can be a lot, especially if you have dozens of interviews in a short period of time. But remember that at the end of the day, this is a good thing. As my father explained to me more than a decade ago, this will probably be the only time in your life where you have scores of employers lining up to give you a job.  The subsequent years have showed me that like much of his advice, he was right.

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Next week, callbacks.

[1] Because the OCI bidding process can vary widely from law school to law school, there is no possibility of a universal bidding discussion in this space.  However, the single piece of advice I can give which I think applies to most students, and also sounds terribly obvious, is to bid on the employers with whom you most want to work.  Trying to game the bidding system in an effort to maximize your opportunities can end up harming your candidacy more than helping it.

Nicholas Alexiou is the Director of LL.M. and Alumni Advising as well as the Associate Director of Career Services at Vanderbilt University Law School. He will, hopefully, respond to your emails at abovethelawcso@gmail.com.

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