Columbia EIP 2015 Forum

[Anonymous User]

Any 3ls out there notice that Paul Weiss disappeared from the 3l bid list? Or am I losing it?

[Anonymous User]

From the weekly EIP email yesterday:

Employer Update: Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP (New York, NY - Corporate Group) interview schedule has been converted to a resume collection and the schedule is no longer available for bidding. The resume collections will be available on Symplicity under "Job Postings" starting July 13.

[Anonymous User]

Good to know I'm not crazy, just inattentive to emails.

[Anonymous User]

Are firm cultures an important factor of consideration (actually different from firm to firm)?

[smaug]

Are firm cultures an important factor of consideration (actually different from firm to firm)?

I think so, but you might not know who you click with until you interview with a few places. I was surprised by the firms I liked compared to my expectations. I wouldn't let the word on campus or TLS sway you too far about culture, but I think quality of life rumors are something to be tuned in to.

[Anonymous User]

For people who want Lit:

I'm trying to understand where you are coming from. Most people I know/am friends with couldn't stand writing their 1st semester memo or 2nd semester brief (I couldn't either). Did you guys HP LPW? Write-on to LR? Am I crazy for wanting to do lit if I didn't do any of the above? Corp/transactional somehow sounds worse, but if V20 lit is basically 2500 hrs/year of LPW, should someone like me either learn to love non-lit legal work or think of doing something else entirely?

Maybe this should go in a more general TLS forum, but any insight from my fellow CLS peeps would be awesome. Thanks!

[Anonymous User]

I'm trying to understand where you are coming from. Most people I know/am friends with couldn't stand writing their 1st semester memo or 2nd semester brief (I couldn't either). Did you guys HP LPW? Write-on to LR? Am I crazy for wanting to do lit if I didn't do any of the above? Corp/transactional somehow sounds worse, but if V20 lit is basically 2500 hrs/year of LPW, should someone like me either learn to love non-lit legal work or think of doing something else entirely?

I'm a 4L and I haven't seen the inside of a firm other than as a summer associate. So take all this with a large grain of salt.

That said, lit is a lot of research and writing. A big chunk of what you'll be doing as a junior associate is writing memos or emails; as you move up, you get into drafting complaints, motions, or (sections of) briefs. There's a lot of obsessing over minutiae and going back and forth with drafts. So, yeah, if you don't like to write, lit could be a tough slog. (And the work you do as a junior that isn't writing—like supervising doc review—is generally thought of as much worse than the writing).

On the other hand, I don't know if LPW is the best proxy for whether you like legal writing. The quality of instruction varies so much and the whole exercise is so contrived. I didn't really love LPW, but I think that had more to do with my instructor than with legal writing generally. (By contrast, I generally enjoyed writing my Note—which I know isn't super helpful since you haven't started that process now). I don't know how much writing you did either in college or a pre-law job, but that might be just as good of a guide if you had much experience there.

(Also, I don't know as much about this element of lit, but white collar/internal investigations seems to involve a less writing or at least a different sort of writing. As someone who does like writing, white collar sounds pretty painful to me—I get the sense that it involves a lot of (low level) witness interviews and assembly of binders of notes from those interviews. But you might love it. I'll let people who know more about white collar weigh in on that.)

[El Pollito]

Lit is like being a student forever but with a lot of doc review as a junior.

[jbagelboy]

For people who want Lit:

I'm trying to understand where you are coming from. Most people I know/am friends with couldn't stand writing their 1st semester memo or 2nd semester brief (I couldn't either). Did you guys HP LPW? Write-on to LR? Am I crazy for wanting to do lit if I didn't do any of the above? Corp/transactional somehow sounds worse, but if V20 lit is basically 2500 hrs/year of LPW, should someone like me either learn to love non-lit legal work or think of doing something else entirely?

Maybe this should go in a more general TLS forum, but any insight from my fellow CLS peeps would be awesome. Thanks!

Both of my LPW memos were on some incredibly dull topic, with a narrow set of obvious case law (even the "open" memo had like 6-8 cases on point that everyone found within a couple hours). I cared so little that I don't even remember what it was about; I just recall my instructor told us at the beginning that there was no "right" way to come out on the issue and we should just provide compelling arguments on both sides, but then when much of the class disagreed with him on the outcome he proceeded to explain to us how we were so wrong and that no one could reasonably come out that way.

For our second memo, he returned the drafts in march, many months after we submitted them.

I don't think LPW is a fair or representative example of what it's like to be a litigator at a large firm. You don't do any fact discovery - all the facts are provided to you. You don't work in a team - except to the degree each person writes up their own section of a brief. You don't interact with opposing counsel or expert witnesses or litigation support or the judge/court clerks. You don't perform doc review or respond to interrogatory or document production requests or strategize motion filings or discuss settlement. You write one order, which is what a clerk does, not a litigator; and if you do a specialized moot court, you're operating in an arbitrary set of rules modeling some niche fora like the ICJ or the ECJ. Others can shed more light on the second semester moot court program, but my sense is its a highly stylized slice of two activities, an MSJ and appellate oral argument.

In a generalist practice, you'll interact with different industries, research different topics that aren't hand fed to you or that are challenging enough to merit the fees these firms charge. You'll also probably spend more time doing the less "fun", academic activities and more discovery/case management.

For better or worse, LPW's not litigation.

[Anonymous User]

For people who want Lit:

I'm trying to understand where you are coming from. Most people I know/am friends with couldn't stand writing their 1st semester memo or 2nd semester brief (I couldn't either). Did you guys HP LPW? Write-on to LR? Am I crazy for wanting to do lit if I didn't do any of the above? Corp/transactional somehow sounds worse, but if V20 lit is basically 2500 hrs/year of LPW, should someone like me either learn to love non-lit legal work or think of doing something else entirely?

Maybe this should go in a more general TLS forum, but any insight from my fellow CLS peeps would be awesome. Thanks!

CLS alum and third year biglaw lit associate. I do a mix of white collar/general commercial/securities. I'd say my job is 40% research and writing, 20% project/case management, and 40% fact research.

What you do depends largely on the size and pace of your cases and your practice area. Bankruptcy litigators, for example, get a ton of experience early as matters move very fast and there simply aren't enough senior people to do everything that they would normally do in, say, a commercial contract dispute. If you're staffed on a lot of "small" matters, it may just be you and a partner and maybe a senior/midlevel. In large matters you may be working for a third year who is working for a sixth year who is supervised by an eighth year who reports to a junior partner who works with the senior partner who has the client relationship.

Research and writing means you'll be asked to do everything from general overview memos to impossible research assignments where you try to track down cases that don't exist even though the senior people insist that they do. I've written substantive portions of briefs and memoranda of law, mostly on issues that are peripheral or either obvious winners/losers. Depending on the partner/senior supervising this may get filed with minor changes or it may get rewritten. It has been my experience that senior people generally don't give two shits about writing a memo in LRW form unless it is going to a client - they just want an answer as quickly and accurately as possible.

Fact discovery usually includes document review and a lot of it. How much and what you do depends on the project. We don't usually have juniors doing first-level doc review (they will do QC or privilege review) but there are still emergencies where 10 bodies have to be thrown at a review over the weekend and everyone who is available gets pulled on. You'll help prepare witnesses for depositions - the work will again vary depending on the pace/size of the case. I've second-chaired depos where I've been integral to the actual prep (figuring out what the other side is going to ask, doing a mock depo) and I've been the fifth person on the chain whose job it is to fetch documents from the system and hand them to the partner and the senior who are prepping the witnesses.

Project/case management sort of straddles the two. It means running filings, supervising document reviews, designing protocols for internal investigations or document reviews, calling people to set up meetings, depositions, or document productions, getting documents from the client. Some people like this aspect of the job, some hate it.

[papercut]

Any lit boutique associates wanna chime in on their experiences?

[Anonymous User]

I'm sure there's no real way to know this, but anyone care to speculate what class rank 3.55, 3.6, and 3.65 are? Is top 25%, top 20%, and top 15% too generous?

[MCFC]

That's what numbers this spits out, so you might be in the ballpark.

http://mylsn.info/rank-estimator/

I used 3.33 for median and 3.41 for top 40%. Obviously not sure either of those is right.

[Anonymous User]

Have my first CB! Any tips/take-home points people have? I've obviously done research on the firm and look at my interviewer's profiles. Want to make sure I'm as prepped as possible.

[Anonymous User]

Have people started mass mailing firms yet?

[Anonymous User]

Yes.

[Anonymous User]

In regards to mass mailing, if a firm is coming to EIP and you mass mail them beforehand (and before our interviews come out), won't they then infer that they essentially didn't make the cut for your bid list?

Is everyone who is mass mailing then focusing on firms that aren't coming to EIP? Just curious to see what people are doing.

[Anonymous User]

In regards to mass mailing, if a firm is coming to EIP and you mass mail them beforehand (and before our interviews come out), won't they then infer that they essentially didn't make the cut for your bid list?

Is everyone who is mass mailing then focusing on firms that aren't coming to EIP? Just curious to see what people are doing.

I'm mass mailing a decent numbers of firms I didn't bid on but are coming to OCI. I don't mention it in cover letters/email and if they bring it up I'll respond with some line about how I'm very interested because x, y, and z but unfortunately it just didn't work with my bid list.

Not sure if this is what others are doing.

[Anonymous User]

In regards to mass mailing, if a firm is coming to EIP and you mass mail them beforehand (and before our interviews come out), won't they then infer that they essentially didn't make the cut for your bid list?

Is everyone who is mass mailing then focusing on firms that aren't coming to EIP? Just curious to see what people are doing.

I'm mass mailing a decent numbers of firms I didn't bid on but are coming to OCI. I don't mention it in cover letters/email and if they bring it up I'll respond with some line about how I'm very interested because x, y, and z but unfortunately it just didn't work with my bid list.

Not sure if this is what others are doing.

And are you essentially just emailing the hiring person they list on their website? I know some firms have default application programs that you can access on their sites. And are people typically sending cover letter, resume, transcript?

[Anonymous User]

Does anyone know if employers look at Linkedin? Should we bother making our Linkedin profiles match our resumes?
Also, is it a smart idea to sneak in information on there that would look weird on a resume such as LSAT score, UG GPA, SAT/ACT score etc?

-Captain Fire

[papercut]

Does anyone know if employers look at Linkedin? Should we bother making our Linkedin profiles match our resumes?
Also, is it a smart idea to sneak in information on there that would look weird on a resume such as LSAT score, UG GPA, SAT/ACT score etc?

-Captain Fire

You should at least make sure you don't have contradictions between your Linkedin and your resume.

I'm not 100% sure, but having standardized test scores is a bit awkward. My instinct is that it makes you seem a bit neurotic.

Also, and I could be wrong, but I don't think CLSers tend to put their honors (Kent/Stone) on their Linkedins.

[Anonymous User]

Yes, we do look at LinkedIn.

[Anonymous User]

^is it odd if we don't have a LinkedIn?

[Anonymous User]

No. I didn't have one till I was a third year.

[Anonymous User]

Yes, we do look at LinkedIn.

Do you look for anything in particular? For example, some people have very detailed and long LinkedIn profiles and others have more barebones ones that may just list former employers and educational institutions, but dont have the same resume-like descriptions.

Also, let's say I hypothetically had a 2400 SAT and a 180 LSAT and a perfect UG GPA. While I would not allowed to showcase this on my resume, would making that prominent on LinkedIn be something a prospective employer would find appealing? Or would it be off-putting/showy/revealing of undesirable anal-retentiveness?

-Captain Fire