Description
Keep Your Feet On The Ground And Do What Your Expected To Do
[00:00:00] I'm a rising 3L. I've had a very bad experience at my biglaw summer associate position in a major market. I've been disappointed with my firm's supervision and work assignments.
Okay.
There are probably some things I can do as the program wraps up to improve my odds of getting an offer, but I'm feeling very burnt by this firm and wouldn't take an offer even if I received it. I have two federal clerkships lined up after graduating and will graduate with some honors from a school that tends to place very well everywhere. So, I feel my job prospects are pretty good. Is there any reason why I should gun really hard to get an offer?
Yes. That's great. You have these clerkships. You can basically say that. They weren't making offers for people two years in the future, and most firms won't, by the way. They may tell you that when it comes time to get an offer, they're not interested in making offers to people that aren't going to be working for the next two years. I can't know what's going on, what things are going to be like in two years. I think your job prospects are very good afterwards.
Talking about the supervision, mentorship and work assignments, you need to get over all this because you're working for someone and they're paying $20,000 a month, or whatever they are paying these days, you're probably working at a big [00:01:00] firm. That's been around and will be around for another hundred years and this stuff's not going to change.
And, it's not going to be much different anywhere. So, you need to figure out how to like it. And, because you go to a good law school and you've got these clerkships, you've done well. You shouldn't have the sense of entitlement. If you have that, you're going to get blown out of the water.
Now, you'll probably get that corrected in your clerkships, but you need to be careful. You deserve to feel proud of yourself and to work at a firm where you're getting the right things. But again, you're working in an environment where you're expected to work and try to get mentors, and you're expected to work on getting hard to get an assignment.
So, you have to be out there. One of the things that big law teaches is that, you have places you have to go and chase work and you have to do what you can to get those assignments. And, you have to try to work to get the best mentors and stuff.
You have to actually try to impress them and do what you can. You need to change a little bit about how you're thinking out. My thought is that you're in a good law school. You're doing well. And you want to feel valued and important and stuff, but, it's like going into the Olympics. You can't expect really good [00:02:00] treatment just cause you're in the Olympics. You have to you have to step up, now that you're in a more competitive field. You have to work harder to get mentors and work harder to get good assignments and all that stuff. And that's just how it works.
I made a similar mistake the first half of my first summer. I would work on getting an offer. If you don't get an offer then you're going to be asked that, probably. And, if you say you did it and people are going to think there's something wrong. Some firms have sour grapes about that. But, for the most part, I don't think it's gonna matter. Two years or three years from now is a long time. You'll be a different person after two clerkships.
And you may even, I dunno if you're doing an appellate clerkship as well, but, if you made one, you're an appellate clerkship after that.
