Why It's Okay For You And Your Fiance Work Together In A Firm
[00:00:00] Can my fiance work at the same firm as me? I'm a 3L who just accepted an offer at a V100 firm in a very small market. The office has fewer than 50 attorneys.
My offer is for the litigation team, which only has about 15 people. They hire about 1 entry-level litigation associate a year.
My fiance is a year behind me in law school. So she's in 2L trying to get a job in the same city as me, which is again, a very small market. She also wants a biglaw litigation spot, which leaves very few options.
My firm offered a 2L SA position. They don't know that we're engaged. Can she accept the offer? Do we have to tell the firm, when and how should we have that conversation?
I would let her get an offer. Oh, did she get her? Oh, she has a 2L job. I wouldn't let anybody know about that during the summer.
If it was me, you certainly can. And that's interesting to you guys will be working fairly close together. It sounds like that actually won't cause you're taking the bar over the summer. I wouldn't make a big deal out of it. I understand the challenge there because you guys are both 2Ls and you're both trying to work in a smaller city where there's not a lot of litigation opening and such a weird coincidence, but I wouldn't make them aware [00:01:00] of that at the moment.
One thing I will say is that law firms that do make law firms, uncomfortable. And the reason is that you're getting trained like you will do things wrong and she will do things with you. So the law firms, one of you may want to quit or the other. If one of you goes bad in their eyes, then both of you will go back.
So that, that makes them nervous. And so that's something that I just would be careful about at this point. I'm not saying if it comes up, you certainly should bring it up to them. But for her sake, I don't know that you want to bring it up and you may decide to go somewhere else later. But yeah, that's a big problem when two people are working together, especially if your relationship goes bad, then the firm can have problems. If one of you has problems with the firm, then there can be problems. It could be an issue putting you both on the same case with one partner. There are just all sorts of reasons and the firm would not like that.
Some firms do have anti-nepotism policies. I don't know if that applies with fiances and so forth. And I've been in lots of firms where partners and so forth are married to each other. Associates are [00:02:00] married. So I don't see that being a problem, but I would be very careful about that at this point if it was me just because it could jeopardize your career and opportunity to get a job there.
