post-employment grade drop....myth or reality???

[thesealocust]

To restate, in the simplest terms possible: Your grades count for your job. If you wouldn't go to a firm event with an big purple stain on your shirt, then you shouldn't get a gentleman's B in Corporations.

I laughed

I also laughed.

[Anonymous User]

ITT: the truth is somewhere in the middle. But lol @ law school classmates rep mattering w/r/t lateral firm options to any serious degree.

[Anonymous User]

ITT: the truth is somewhere in the middle. But lol @ law school classmates rep mattering w/r/t lateral firm options to any serious degree.

You're wrong. It does matter. Do you really think that if you're moving, as, say, a fifth year, and the group you're targeting to move into has someone from your law school class, the partner - who has worked with your classmate five years - isn't going to ask him for feedback before pulling the trigger on hiring you?

Everything matters. Biglaw is a small world. It's real easy as a law student to think of biglaw as this amorphous blob of tens of thousands of anonymous lawyers, but speaking as someone who is five years out, biglaw is a more intimate, gossipy space than you can possibly imagine. I would say that about half my deals have a WGL that includes a name I know socially from HS, college or LS, to say nothing of folks I know professionally from past deals, who are everywhere.

[ExBiglawAssociate]

Serious answer: latin honors/Coif matter a LOT more than grades, but even latin honors/Coif come second to your substantive experience and who you know. The idea that busy attorneys on hiring committees are combing through transcripts to look at individual grades is hilarious. Some may take a peak at your cumulative GPA, so you shouldn't let things get totally out of control. But as long as you don't have an eye-popping grade drop, it's *highly* unlikely that a drop in your overall GPA will affect your career in any way (in and of itself). The way it *may* affect you is in missing out on honors.

[Anonymous User]

Post subject: Re: Does Cum Laude Matter at All for Firm Lateral OpsPostPosted: Thu Nov 07, 2013 5:43 pm
Offline

Are the cum laude bros mentioned about the "chill, fratty bros who pwn the Brooklyn bar scene" from the other thread?

[Anonymous User]

Serious answer: latin honors/Coif matter a LOT more than grades, but even latin honors/Coif come second to your substantive experience and who you know. The idea that busy attorneys on hiring committees are combing through transcripts to look at individual grades is hilarious. Some may take a peak at your cumulative GPA, so you shouldn't let things get totally out of control. But as long as you don't have an eye-popping grade drop, it's *highly* unlikely that a drop in your overall GPA will affect your career in any way (in and of itself). The way it *may* affect you is in missing out on honors.

At my firm, no one could give a shit about coif/latin, its all about GPA.

[ExBiglawAssociate]

Serious answer: latin honors/Coif matter a LOT more than grades, but even latin honors/Coif come second to your substantive experience and who you know. The idea that busy attorneys on hiring committees are combing through transcripts to look at individual grades is hilarious. Some may take a peak at your cumulative GPA, so you shouldn't let things get totally out of control. But as long as you don't have an eye-popping grade drop, it's *highly* unlikely that a drop in your overall GPA will affect your career in any way (in and of itself). The way it *may* affect you is in missing out on honors.

At my firm, no one could give a shit about coif/latin, its all about GPA.

GPA means literally nothing. Are you talking about class standing, because that would make more sense? As long as you do good work, the firm just cares about how they can signal to their clients that they have smart lawyers. Honors are an easy way of doing that. And really, they don't care about honors nearly as much as the quality of your work and your personality.

Aren't there people with 3.8s at Northwestern who are in the bottom 20% or something?