Hi All,
This is actually my first time visiting this site; I saw a reference to it when i was reading another blog.
I'm a 2nd year at a big NY law firm. I think it's probably like V15ish, if you care about that kind of thing.
I agree with one poster who thinks Dark Horse's experience isn't very helpful to post-crash biglaw job seekrs. Let me tell you a bit about my experience, and what I gleaned from it.
Lehman collapsed, I think, the second week (of three) of OCI at my T5 law school. This was what, 2008? I graduated in 2010. I remember I interviewed with DEBEVOISE probably an hour or two after the news came out. They were willing to do the interview, but they told me off the bat that they weren't sure they would be hiring anyone this year.
I probably did 50 interviews. While the economy hadn't totally collapsed before Lehman died, it was still pretty clear that the economic situation was bleak at that point. People weren't getting a lot of callbacks, and so everyone was trying to do as many OCI screening interviews as possible.
I got I think 7-9 callbacks out of my 50 interviews, and I was on law review. It seemed totally random who gave me callbacks. I got callbacks (all NYC) at Paul, Weiss; Weil;
dla piper;
clifford chance; Dewey (omg!); Hogan & Hartson (now
hogan lovells); Pillsbury; K&L Gates; DPW; and I think one or two more that I ended up not actually doing because i had accepted an offer by then. (I took an offer from my favorite firm before hearing back on whether i got offers at a lot of places. I only know for sure I didn't get offers from
clifford chance and Hogan.) No callback from CRAVATH (thank god), Cleary, Sullivan (i would have taken that job if I had gotten it), A&O, Cahill, SKADDEN, Foley, Kirkland, Shearman, or a bunch of lower ranked firms. Don't have any idea why i got some and not others.
There was bascially no correlation with grades for people in the top 70% on who got callbacks except the kids at the very top (even including the LR kids). The top 5 kids in the class or so (we were not ranked, but when someone has close to perfect grades you can kinda tell they must be at the top) got callbacks from every firm they interviewed with. Every one. (I had to pry this information out of them; i enjoyed kind of acting as an information broker in my class). Two of those kids later went to clerk for SCOTUS. Another two clerked for Posner or Easterbrook in Chicago, and one to Kozinski (although i think that was the same as one of the kids who went on to the SCOTUS clerkship). Anyway, just an illustration of the kind of grades you needed to really have some confidence in the OCI process at my T5.
Kids on the bottom third or so got no callbacks at all. It was terrifying. This was a first for my school. When I was admitted, a student recruiter called me and said, "Once you got your 170+ LSAT score, your future was made. It probably doesn't even matter if you come here or Virgina or Duke or whatever". That's really how people thought of it back then. There was always a biglaw job at my school for anyone who wanted one. Until my year.
As for my interviews, I'm sure I got a callback at K&L Gates because the interviewer recognized that he had asked me an inappropriate question about my religion and just didn't want me making a stink about anything. I think i got my callback at Hogan because I responded bluntly to the interviewer's blunt interviewing style: (Q: Why should I hire you? I'm goign to lose money on you for two years, and you'll probably leave after three. Why are you different?" A: I'm not different; like all other law students, i have no idea what Biglaw is like, so you're just as likely to win with me as with anyone else. At least I'm willing to admit that we're all just playing games with each other"). Most of my other interviews were totally benign, boring and nondescript.
Why did I get a callback at Weil and not Shearman? Why
dla piper and not Foley Lardner? Who knows? We like to think that if we are really prepared and have called people and are personable bla bla bla that this will make the difference. But really, that will give you what? Maybe 30% control? I think it really comes down to a lot of things that have been mentioned earlier, like if you've been on a vaction to Peru like your interviewer, or if you're the first interview of the day, so you're remembered, or you're the second-to-last-one before lunch, so you're not remembered. Or a thousand other things.
So to answer Dark Horse, yeah, it makes a whole lot of sense to spend 308093209 hours studying and then only 10 on interview prep, because grades really are what matter most, even if they're not the end all of everything. It helps to know what interviewers want (e.g., they want to have some confidence yuo'll stay in the area, they want to know that you're not a sociopath, they want you to take the offer or the callback if they give it to you) and key your answers to that knowledge to the extent appropriate. BUt practice responses in the mirror? Good lord - this dark horse is severely confusing the effect of his "interview prep" with the effects of a wonderful legal economy. You're not going to get callbacks from over half your OCI interviews by being personable and knowledgeable about the firms. That time is over. If he did better than others with the same grades, I'd say he's just a statistical outlier. Someone does win the lottery - but it's not because that someone spent so much time thinking about what numbers to pick.
