Which Southern markets are the least insular? Forum

[Anonymous User]

This is purely anecdotal, so take it for what it's worth. But I lived in a large southern city for about five years before applying to law school. I owned (and still own) a home in this city, and my significant other has a long-term job there. I went to HYS (grades around median) and mass mailed every NALP firm in the region and a number of non-NALP firms. This resulted in two screeners and zero callbacks. And I got grilled about my ties in both screeners.

I'm kind of surprised you had that experience. I know someone from CCN who got 1L a job in a very insular southern market with no ties other than a significant other with ties to the region. But maybe cites differ in what count as ties.

I can only speculate, but I think my experience was a combination of things: 1) There isn't a huge legal market in my home city, so the local firms can easily fill up their 2L classes with top 5% people from the local T1 plus a few T14 graduates with super-strong ties. Given that these firms didn't do OCI at my school, I'm guessing they didn't see much point in taking the time to interview an extra person. 2) The firms I interviewed with didn't pay market, and in one case paid substantially less than market. I guess they had a hard time believing that I would give up the NYC money and prestige to work at their lower-rate firm. 3) One firm in particular had tons of alumni from a local TTT but basically no out-of-state schools. I left with the impression that they took pride in the fact that they were a "Southern" firm rather than a firm of carpetbaggers with fancy Ivy League degrees. 4) I have kind of a non-traditional resume, so all firms (not just these Southern firms) may have seen me as a flight risk because I was sufficiently committed to law. I had significantly worse luck at OCI than my grades/school would have predicted. 5) I hesitate to even say it, because I like to believe it doesn't matter in 2014. But the firms I looked at carefully all seemed to be extremely white. I like to believe that in this day and age firms would just hire the best candidate (or even actively try to promote diversity), but it was pretty obvious from my resume that I'm not white. Whether that made any difference, I have no idea, and i certainly hope it didn't. But I have heard some horror stories from other non-white applicants even during interviews at Vault firms in Atlanta. (Nothing truly egregious, but stuff like telling jokes about Asians when an Asian candidate was interviewing.) If that sort of thing can happen in Atlanta, it may have been a factor at smaller firms in smaller cities.