Practice areas/career paths most similar to law school and/or intellectually stimulating? Forum

[Sackboy]

OP here. I appreciate all of the advice and feedback.

Assuming for the moment that I am especially interested in appellate legislation and to a lesser extent in fields like antitrust/tax, how (broadly speaking) should I approach researching or the OCI process? Do BL firms even have appellate groups? Should I try to target firms in a particular market/region? If it matters, I would be willing to live almost everywhere (completely serious).

While I know I could probably just wait, I generally push things like job searches to the side when things pick up during the school year, so I want to get some start now.

Biglaw firms absolutely have appellate groups. Kirkland, Mayer Brown, Gibson, Sidley, Jones Day, etc. all have appellate groups that frequently appear in front of SCOTUS. Chambers should have a relatively accurate ranking of all the big players under something like "appellate litigation" or "appellate law" or something similar.

Unless you've got some prestigious clerkships lined up, I wouldn't communicate that you're looking to do appellate litigation, because it's niche, hard to get into, and might just come off like you're inflexible or overeager. I'd just find the firms with good appellate lit practices, pick them for OCI (probably their DC offices, but double check just to make sure), and then say you want to do litigation. Once you're there for the summer, you can make it clear to the right individuals (i.e. recruiting + partners in the group) that you have fancy clerkships lined up and would be interested in assignments from the group.

[Anonymous User]

I know juniors at PW DC who have significantly less of a pedigree than you who are doing appellate work. They're in love with the office and Kannon, who apparently goes to bat for them as much as possible. If you think he's not gonna be a DC Cir. judge soon, probably a great target for you. (They also have a well-regarded antitrust practice, I think, though friends there tell me it's really run out of NYC and I have no color on whether that's true or not.)

[Anonymous User]

I know juniors at PW DC who have significantly less of a pedigree than you who are doing appellate work. They're in love with the office and Kannon, who apparently goes to bat for them as much as possible. If you think he's not gonna be a DC Cir. judge soon, probably a great target for you. (They also have a well-regarded antitrust practice, I think, though friends there tell me it's really run out of NYC and I have no color on whether that's true or not.)

I just checked because this sounded off. The pedigrees of PW’s four appellate associates are insane. One SCOTUS clerk, and the other three have appellate court clerk shops. Honors from HLS, UChicago, and UVA and the valedictorian from Vanderbilt.

Are you saying that other associates get to do some appellate work? If that’s the case, that’s true at many firms. I’ve done some (very minimal) appellate work, and I don’t even have a clerkship. Edit: I’ve only done appellate work when our one(?) appellate associate was slammed with some amicus brief and they needed bodies.

But if OP is a general commercial litigator that has some appellate here and there, I’m not sure that OP would feel fulfilled.