Description
What Law Firms Expect from Summer Associates
[00:00:00] The summer associates is asking me to complete tasks I have no experience with. This meant working with the partner who was giving me instructions, what to do the work I completed had mistakes in them, but these errors, not my fault because they were due to me, never have a word document for whoever is it true that partnership in reviewing the work that I produced as a summer associate.
Okay. So when you're a summer associate I think there's an article on Law Crossing called a guide to being a summer associate. It's a long article. That'd be great, but if you can, that would be helpful.
One of the things I would tell you in terms of being a summer associate is that I've had similar experiences when I was a summer associate. I would walk into someone's office and they would say something like it's corporate stuff, like review this prospectus and, tell me what some code is and I'd be like, what the hell is this guy talking about?
And I would sit there, afraid to ask questions. So my biggest piece of advice, if you're a summer associate and trying to figure this stuff out and not getting advice from partners is first of all, you're expected to push and figure out answers on your own to the extent you can.
There's one guy that worked for me a long time ago, [00:01:00] and it's probably 20 years ago when I was starting this company, Law Crossing. One of the assignments I gave him was come up with something called, "the top 100 reasons to use...". He came back and he said, I can only think of 10 and he'd written 10 down.
I'm like, this is crazy. Come up with, I need a hundred. And so he sat there all day going like this. And by the end of the day, he only had I don't know, 30 or 40 or something. And I went through this exercise with him for a week. And he actually at the time was applying to law schools and having me write recommendations and everything.
And I wrote him actually excellent recommendations. And he got into all the law schools. He wanted to. But he couldn't do this. He wasn't smart enough to really study because all you would need to do is say, okay, what are the benefits of using an online job board? What are the benefits of doing things this way versus that way?
And he couldn't do that. So because he couldn't do that, I knew, he didn't push hard enough and he wasn't aggressive enough and finding answers. I was like, how could someone like that possibly ever be an attorney for me, or, for someone, for anyone, because if they're not willing to look for answers, then then that's a problem.
So part of the [00:02:00] job of being a summer associate is it's almost like looking at really difficult math problems. For some reason when I was in college, I placed in the advanced calculus, which was ludicrous. Because the textbook was like this thick and the, for advanced calculus, as opposed to the textbook for, medium calculus and then regular calculus was like this thick.
And I think they just expected that it didn't have to go and do a lot of explanation 'cause the people that were doing this for somehow gifted or something, I don't know. But I would literally sit in the library or not the library, but in the basement of the dorms and these little study cubicles and sit there trying to understand some of these questions and problems for five or six hours at a time.
And then eventually my mind would have to wrap itself around it and I could, but wow. That's not normal. that was very difficult for me and 'cause I'm not gifted and by any stretch of imagination and math. Okay. So it's like that with a lot of the assignments you get. You need to sit down and you need to concentrate and put all of your effort [00:03:00] into doing whatever you can to understand these assignments.
The big, best way to shortcut it is to do research, about what the topic is. But the biggest way is ask senior associates. Senior associates or, or mid-level associates, or even junior associates, who've been through this before and they've done it before.
They're not gonna want many times to spend a lot of time explaining this stuff to you, but if you can track them down and make friends with them, then they will tell you how to do it. You have to remember that you shouldn't. And this is just very common for attorneys. They put themselves in the situation where they need to protect their ego, be in control. And you don't need a protect your ego. The solution to getting over this is to give up control and ask others and, say you don't understand now partners are going to get frustrated with you if they think that you're bothering them because their time is very valuable.
You don't want to. If it looks like you haven't thought about this in depth, or if your mind's not clear enough, then it could be a [00:04:00] bad idea asking them. Now, if it's a small firm and you have no choice and you need to, but before you do that, you need to go through and do everything you possibly can.
Like I'm telling you when I spent, five or six hours trying to understand a single frickin math problem you need to do the same thing with, these problems. The issues that you're coming up with in your search trying to do these assignments, because the biggest mistake you can make is to go into a partner and give them the wrong answer because you haven't done enough research and found obvious things.
The mistake is to come in and give this long answer that takes into account. It has 20 different ideas in it. And the information is not synthesized and to think through it and make sure you're coming up with the right thing, a good law school exam will basically give the answer very directly.
And it's the same thing here. You have to make sure you understand what's important versus important. That's kinda how I would do things. I also, just as a general rule, like everything you do needs to be very carefully approved in large law firms because you can see here that, this is lighting up with [00:05:00] different suggestions.
So you always want to use proofing programs and things because if you don't produce work, if you produce work that has a lot of typos and other errors in it, then the firm and the people in it will assume that your thought processes are also having hairs in them as well.
