I got in as an alternate with a top GP firm and did not receive a cb. When I interviewed with them at oci, I got a cb and offer. Maybe there's no link? Or it might just be that the PLIP interviewer didn't pay any attention to an alternate at the end of a long day.
Hope that helps a little.

Sound like a good approach to me, especially when you know they do both.

Firms without the requirement of Patent Eligibility will more and more likely focus on Litigation instead of Pros.

research the firm's website, that should give you the information you need

Thanks for the info! I feel like screeners are hit or miss anyway. Fortunately doesn't look there will be a whole lot of overlap for me, so I will probably just bid on the few at both.

Another piece of advice from personal experience:

You should still apply directly to the firms that reject you at PLIP within a couple weeks of the program. It is important to remember that these firms need to select from hundreds, if not thousands, of resumes for what may be less than 50 interview slots. People will slip through the cracks, get overlooked, or get passed over simply because it isn't possible to interview anyone else. Although resume credentials are a good first indicator of employability, they are far from the end-all be-all. Firms may only come away from PLIP with a small handful of candidates worthy of a CB. If you didn't make the "first cut", you're not dead in the water.

I was not preselected or given an alternate slot for a V100 at PLIP. I applied independently via Email to the firm's recruiter and I got a very personal reply back, telling me: They were sorry they didn't get a chance to interview with me at PLIP, but they would be very interested in interviewing me. I set up a phone interview with them later that week.

wednesday morning bump

How much of a bump do you get for EE?
For those firms that require science + top 1/3, do you think you can snag an interview slot if you have EE (good grades) and law @ median?

There are quite a few firms/offices that only want EE, I am sure you have a great shot.

Slightly related, cheers for my school to not publish rank or GPA.

This might be a dumb question, but when looking for firms with an office in the area that I want, I can search by State, but then also there are "firmwide" ones-- do I then have to research the firms to determine where these firmwide locations are?

Do you just not put it on your resume and bring your transcript to the interview?

Yep. Here are two easy ways to to that.

1) Their website will have a list of their offices, and you can then go through that office to see who is in the IP group. Alternatively, look at the IP group on their practice group page - most firms will list attorneys alphabetically rather than by location, but the page will usually also state which office they work in.

2) Search the firm on NALP. This will give you office locations (though not always all of them, so be careful) and also tell you how many associates/partners do IP in that office (this is sometimes inaccurate due to discrepancies in how firms classify people).

Do make sure you look at the full list of firms, before you start filtering by location or other attributes.

Last year I was so focused on location that I nearly missed the "firmwide" stuff. I had immediately filtered the firms per my locations of interest, and the "firmwide" firms don't show up in those results. Nor do the firms that are split into practice groups, IIRC.

I realized my mistake literally hours before the close of bidding, and had to cancel and shuffle around a lot of bids to account for the "firmwide" firms. As it happens, my SA is at one those.

Yup, that's our career services policy to put "do not rank" on the resume. We also have lottery for OCI.

How much does connection to a market matter at PLIP? Especially at the resume review stage since we are only uploading resume.

The answer you are expecting is "depends on the market."

It probably matters less than at OCI because you have a particular niche (IP).

You might be able to parlay subject-matter interest into geographic interest. For example, you could say, "I'm interested in San Diego because of my background in Biotech" or "I'm interested in Seattle because of my background in Computer Science."

Obviously, some areas of the country do a little bit of everything, but you might as well try and make it work for you.

This is true. I landed an offer in Texas (from OCI though, not PLIP) despite never having set foot in the state before my callback for this exact reason.

I am wondering how hard is it to get a preselect without obvious ties. I can talk about legitimate or maybe reasonable reasons for wanting a market, but I wonder if it would hard to land a preselect.

I got preselects in DC with zero connections on my resume. It doesn't seem to matter that much. But I'd probably only aim at NYC, DC, and CA without ties for IP.

Re bidding: For people at Lottery schools at OCI, you will probably have no problem getting local boutique interviews at your schools OCI. But if you are trying to get GP firms, you have to compete with everyone else. So make sure you do the GP firms at Loyola.

Thanks everyone for the advice. You guys are very helpful.

Thanks everybody, this is great.

Is there any resource out there for quickly researching firms' reputations (both prestige and in-firm atmosphere). It seems to me that firms' websites are the WORST source of much of the information I'm looking for.

I think Vault, Chambers, and ATL's Career Center are about as close as it gets to what you're looking for, but all 3 are skewed heavily towards Vault and other non-boutique biglaw firms. You can try and ask around TLS, but I don't now how helpful it'll be unless you're asking about the firms that the above sources cover. xoxo used to be good for that kind of stuff like 5+ years ago, but sadly now it's nothing more than the most prestigious WGWAGvsNOWAG/onlinedating/Trayvon discussion board on the internet.

ETA: yeah, firm sites are absolutely useless for what you're looking for. They're more for logistics, i.e. what practice groups/how many and what kind of attorneys/how long and when is the summer program

I'll update if anyone reminds me of something I missed. I think all surveys/lists are the most current versions available. I know some of this is old and some isn't really what you're looking for, but regardless, HTH.

Also, you might want to consider asking for input over at intelproplaw forums or the GreedyIP and GreedyAssociates boards.

Patents:
Avery Index
DC's Top IP Lawyers 2011-12
IP Today's Top 2012 Patent Firms (previous years here)
The Patent Scorecard 2011
Law.com's 2012 Patent Litigation Survey (2011; 2010; 2009; 2008)
Managing Intellectual Property's Patent Survey 2012
Chambers Partners - Chambers Global > USA, Intellectual Property
Chambers Partners - Chambers USA > Intellectual Property (slightly different than the above)
Chambers Associate > Intellectual Property

Overall:
Vault Law 100 (for previous years, just edit the last characters of the url)
Law.com's The Associates Survey
ATL Career Center
Judged.com (nothing on most firms, but I occasionally find something helpful here)