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Why Summer Associate Jobs Don't Tell You Anything About A Firm

Think you’re going to have real interactions with partners? Ain’t no partner got time for that.

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Okay, okay:  My headline had a little clickbait built in.  (So what else is new here at Above the Law?)

Summer associate jobs do tell you a little bit, but not about the practice of law.  Why not?

Think about summer associates from the law firm partner’s perspective:

I’ve been working at this firm for 15 years.  I’ll continue to work at this firm until I retire.  I’ve got several big cases on my desk.  Those cases have been active for years, and they’ve got years to go before trial.

I just got a memo from our summer associate team.  They’re looking for projects to give to summer associates.

I really don’t want to do this.  If I give a project to a summer associate, then the work product is unlikely to be useful; the person doing the work is the least experienced person in the joint.

Actually, it’s even worse than that.  If I give a project to a permanent associate, then, when I receive back crappy work product, I can just revise the crappy work product into something serviceable and send it to the client.  I might send the final product back to the associate, telling the associate to compare the final product to the associate’s draft and think about the difference.  We call that “training” at this law firm.

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But a summer associate is different.  After I receive the crappy work product, I must revise it in a way that permits you to track the revisions.  Then, after making the revisions, I must think about what I did (that’s 15 minutes of wasted time), figure out how to convey those thoughts to a young lawyer without causing the young lawyer to break into tears (that’s another 15 minutes of wasted time), and then sit with the young lawyer providing constructive feedback (which is probably 45 minutes of wasted time).  That’s an hour and a quarter of unbilled time taken out of my life, when I could have been home with the kids.  I need this like a hole in the head.

But we do have to generate projects for summer associates, and I feel a  little bit of institutional loyalty, so I’ll contribute one project that can be done by a summer associate, just to pull my weight.

What does the memo from the summer associate team say?

“Summer associates are at this firm for only a few weeks.  It’s critical that no one lawyer occupy the time of a summer associate for most of a summer.  Summer associates should work with multiple firm lawyers, so that the summer associate’s work is evaluated by many people.  And we should give summer associates a sense of the working styles of many different people.  We therefore ask that any project assigned to summer associates be capable of being completed in two weeks or less.”

Two weeks or less?

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What are they thinking?

I’ve got the Blaine case that has been pending for three years and will continue to pend for three more.  What piece of that case can be completed, start to finish, in two weeks?

None.

I guess I’ll pull out a small piece of one legal question and ask the summer associate to look at that one disembodied legal issue for two weeks.  That’s nothing like the practice of law, but at least it meets the standard that the committee imposed on me.

I’m such a fool.  I swear I’ll never again work with a summer associate.  Let other partners waste their time with this.

What does the summer associate think?

“Let me pick a project from among those available.  Oh — here’s a research project from a partner who’s a pretty important guy at the firm.  I’ll choose this one, so I can help him out, and I’ll have a person with some clout evaluate my work.”

The summer associate then reads the disembodied legal question, talks to the partner about it for 10 minutes, and undertakes legal research and writing for two weeks.

The summer associate wonders why life at law firms is so dull:  “All the junior folks do is disembodied legal research.”

No.  But that’s all summer associates do, because those are the rules that the firm imposes (for a pretty good reason, actually).

It’s rare for the summer associate to learn about the entirety of a case, or the joy of practicing law, because that requires the partner to sit with the summer person for a reasonably extended time, explaining the nature of the client, the case, the development of the case, and what the future holds.

Ferociously busy partners ain’t gonna waste time doing that.

So being a summer associate tells you something, because you breathe law firm air and meet law firm inhabitants.

But being a summer associate doesn’t tell you very much about life as a lawyer, because there are too many constraints — formal and informal — guaranteeing that interactions with summer associates are artificial.

Mark Herrmann spent 17 years as a partner at a leading international law firm and is now deputy general counsel at a large international company. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Inside Straight: Advice About Lawyering, In-House And Out, That Only The Internet Could Provide (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at inhouse@abovethelaw.com.

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