I would add that if any applicant expresses a strong interest in appellate litigation during an interview, unless your grades are just blowing me away, it's a huge ding. It would be like a woman showing up to a matchmaker and saying "what I'm really interested is going out with Bradley Cooper or George Clooney". You better be a fine woman, or the first thing we need to do is recalibrate your expectations.Anonymous User wrote:OP hereAnonymous User wrote:Strong +1 to this. I honestly, in a competitive market, would not hire either of these type of people for a capital markets, corporate, commercial lit, IP, etc. type of practice b/c it just does not show interest in relevant issues or add to the development of relevant skills, business acumen, jargon, etc. The counter is of course that you just did whatever you could get, but you don't want to say that in an interview because it speaks poorly of your ability to get a 1L job versus your peers. Many public interest and government jobs, the majority of 1L positions, evince a strong interest in business, finance, commercial transactions and litigations, etc. (e.g. judge's office, AG's, chamber of commerces, etc.) and would be much better options.Anonymous User wrote:In my experience, transgender will not be worse than any other political / public interest job. I.e., no one cares about your politics w/r/t interviews, at least at a big firm.
BUT all public interest / politics jobs are inferior to commercially-oriented jobs in terms of positioning yourself for interviews. Transgender Rights OR Ayn Rand Institute both scream someone whose heart isn't in commercial law, which is what we do at big firms.
Of course, nothing is worse than a resume gap, so if your options are political public interest job or barista, the answer is the political public interest job.
Yet, if you want to do appellate litigation, the above is probably less relevant. But good luck with that, as most litigators at big firms start off doing general commercial lit.
This seems to run counter to the general TLS "just do something legal they don't care what."
Though I'll have you know I'm now concerned about this.
If I had to pick a dream outcome, it would be appellate lit, but I'm aware that the possibility of that happening is slim-to-none. I figured working somewhere that does some amount of lit (on the atty side) would be good and if it was something I'm super interested in then even better.
I had a friend make that mistake several years ago, when we were on the other side, and despite having very good grades, top quarter from our T14, he got shut out. Eventually he went to a coach provided by a recruiter and they told him never to mention the word "appellate" again, and lo, he got a job right after his clerkship ended.
