The Girl's Guide to Law School
Get In, Get Through, Stay You
Are you interviewing for summer associate jobs? If so, I strongly suggest you watch this Bloomberg Law video series. (And I’m not just saying that because I’m in it. Trust me, I’m the low man on the totem pole here — the rest of the guests are seriously impressive BigLaw hiring partners and such.)
All total, they run about half an hour, but I pretty much guarantee you’ll learn something useful!
August is here, which can only mean one thing — the annual craziness of on-campus interviewing is about to begin!
For the uninitiated, OCI is how most law firm summer associate positions are handed out. Students interview en masse before classes start, often in a hotel or set of on-campus conference rooms. In one day, you might do 10 or more screening interviews, with an eye towards getting to the all-important callback stage (which requires another day of interviews, on site in the office you’re interested in).
Every school is different, of course, but — in my experience — OCI was alternately boring, stressful, frantic, and exhausting. Not to say there weren’t some good parts, but the whole experience can be a bit overwhelming!
Therefore, I offer you seven tips for maintaining your sanity during the OCI craziness:
I know a lot of you are worried about finding that first job out of law school. (And with good reason.) That’s why I’m thrilled to have Shauna C. Bryce here.
Shauna’s a Harvard Law grad who paid her dues in BigLaw before leaving to start her own career consulting business for lawyers, Bryce Legal. She’s written a great book: How to Get a Legal Job: A Guide for New Attorneys and Law School Students and runs a useful website on the same topic.
Her advice is consistently useful and interesting, so let’s get started!
You’re in for a treat! My fantastic friend Rebecca Netter, who left Biglaw to become a legal recruiter, has agreed to answer some questions about getting a legal job, from the perspective of someone who spends all day figuring out if someone is a viable candidate for legal jobs.
In other words, she knows what she’s talking about.
What, you might reasonably ask, qualifies me to talk about law firm summer associate programs? Glad you asked. Basically, I made a hobby out of being a summer associate. I managed to summer at three different firms, in three cities and two countries, over three summers, for a combined total of something absurd like 30 weeks. Hey, it’s not a bad gig! Most of the time.
First things first: what is OCI, anyway?
The name varies, but most law schools have some variant of on campus interviewing, or OCI. Basically, a bunch of law firms send representatives to a single location (either on campus or in a nearby hotel) and these people conduct short interviews with law students. Afterwards, certain chosen students are granted “callback interviews” – more extensive interviews that happen on-site at the law firm’s office. If all goes well, the callback interview results in a job offer to join the firm’s summer associate program the following summer.
One slightly odd aspect of OCI is that it generally happens before 2L classes start, so you’ll be interviewing for a job that starts after your second year of law school, before that year has even started. Kind of weird, right? And potentially problematic if the economy shifts markedly during your second year, and the firm you thought you’d be summering with decides to cancel or downsize their program, leaving you in the lurch. But let’s not dwell on that now!
Congratulations, you’ve got an on campus interview! Let’s get you prepared.
Luckily, most summer associate interview questions are softballs, as long as you’re sufficiently prepared. The interviews are short, and the interviewer is tasked primarily with figuring out whether you’re sincerely interested in the firm, and whether you’d be a good fit. Consequently, he’s probably asking everyone the same basic questions, and any detours will arise from interesting elements of your résumé, so you have some control over what will be discussed.
Here’s what you’re likely to be asked in an on campus interview:
When you sit down across from a law firm interviewer, she immediately starts trying to answer two questions:
If you don’t get a “yes” for both of those questions, you’re unlikely to get the job.
Let’s differentiate between a first interview and a callback interview. If you’re at the initial interview stage, your perceived intelligence does matter. However, the screening mechanism here is your grades, not how smart you appear to be in an interview. Once you’ve reached the callback stage, you’ve already passed the “smart” test – otherwise you wouldn’t have gotten a callback. Now your task isn’t to appear smart, it’s to appear personable.
Basically, law firms are looking for someone they’d like to date, but can still take home to Mother. As an interviewee, you want to present yourself as solid and hard-working, easy to get along with, calm under pressure, and slightly, but not overly, interesting.
How do you do this?
