STB v. LW (NYC) Forum

[Anonymous User]

The prestige obsession on this thread is unbelievable. Take it from someone who just finished being a SA in NY, almost all of these firms pay relatively the same and do similar work. Just a fit question for you OP. Also for the record people in the real world don't care what school you went to, they care if you're a good lawyer. Many of the best NY trial and transactional lawyers did not go to Harvard, or whatever.

I strongly disagree. This thread greatly underestimates the prestige obsession at the most elite Manhattan law firms. Ask anyone who has done an SA at Davis, Sullivan, etc. and went to a T6 law school. Ivy-laden partners and associates constantly make snide remarks about law schools like Virginia and Cornell in casual conversation (when graduates of those schools aren’t around). CLS graduates are in my experience the worst. Prestige is the lifeblood of this profession and it matters far more than you could imagine. The fact that the pay is the same is completely irrelevant to people who think this way (i.e., all partners and associates with elite credentials at these firms).

Hi prestige troll. Maybe all these people make snide remarks because they suck, and are really insecure about their employment prospects? My experience has certainly not been that prestige is the lifeblood of the profession. Take DPW (a firm you mentioned) and their 2017 class of new partners. https://www.davispolk.com/news/davis-po ... w-partners. Of the 10 elected, I believe two had JDs from NYU, one from CLS, and the others either had LLMs/masters or JDs from lesser ranked schools (WashU and Duke *gasp*). None went to Yale, Harvard, or Stanford. It doesn't matter where you went to law school, whether it was the University of Melbourne or CLS. If you are good at your job at a big firm and you genuinely enjoy it, you can definitely succeed there.

Their partners went to, counting from the top: Cambridge, NYU, University of Hong Kong (and she works in HK), NYU/University of Melbourne, NYU, Cambridge, Columbia, Stanford/University of Toronto, Duke, and WUSTL.

WUSTL is the one "non-prestige" school here. University of Hong Kong is very legit in Asia, as is University of Toronto in Canada (he added a Stanford degree). Cambridge is Cambridge.

I'm sympathetic to the "prestige doesn't matter" people, but if I went to a T25, this list wouldn't be encouraging.

Obviously prestige mattered when those associates were being hired. But do you think when the partners sat down and were deciding who to give a muti-million dollar piece of the cake to that they considered where the associate went to school a decade ago?

[Anonymous User]

The prestige obsession on this thread is unbelievable. Take it from someone who just finished being a SA in NY, almost all of these firms pay relatively the same and do similar work. Just a fit question for you OP. Also for the record people in the real world don't care what school you went to, they care if you're a good lawyer. Many of the best NY trial and transactional lawyers did not go to Harvard, or whatever.

I strongly disagree. This thread greatly underestimates the prestige obsession at the most elite Manhattan law firms. Ask anyone who has done an SA at Davis, Sullivan, etc. and went to a T6 law school. Ivy-laden partners and associates constantly make snide remarks about law schools like Virginia and Cornell in casual conversation (when graduates of those schools aren’t around). CLS graduates are in my experience the worst. Prestige is the lifeblood of this profession and it matters far more than you could imagine. The fact that the pay is the same is completely irrelevant to people who think this way (i.e., all partners and associates with elite credentials at these firms).

Hi prestige troll. Maybe all these people make snide remarks because they suck, and are really insecure about their employment prospects? My experience has certainly not been that prestige is the lifeblood of the profession. Take DPW (a firm you mentioned) and their 2017 class of new partners. https://www.davispolk.com/news/davis-po ... w-partners. Of the 10 elected, I believe two had JDs from NYU, one from CLS, and the others either had LLMs/masters or JDs from lesser ranked schools (WashU and Duke *gasp*). None went to Yale, Harvard, or Stanford. It doesn't matter where you went to law school, whether it was the University of Melbourne or CLS. If you are good at your job at a big firm and you genuinely enjoy it, you can definitely succeed there.

Their partners went to, counting from the top: Cambridge, NYU, University of Hong Kong (and she works in HK), NYU/University of Melbourne, NYU, Cambridge, Columbia, Stanford/University of Toronto, Duke, and WUSTL.

WUSTL is the one "non-prestige" school here. University of Hong Kong is very legit in Asia, as is University of Toronto in Canada (he added a Stanford degree). Cambridge is Cambridge.

I'm sympathetic to the "prestige doesn't matter" people, but if I went to a T25, this list wouldn't be encouraging.

Obviously prestige mattered when those associates were being hired. But do you think when the partners sat down and were deciding who to give a muti-million dollar piece of the cake to that they considered where the associate went to school a decade ago?

nah, but it matters throughout your associate years, insofar as like, you've got your informal CLS network and your informal HLS network and what have. partners are more likely to go to bat for people who are part of their tribe. and if you go to YLS and you fuck up, people go "oh well he went to YLS, he's still learning the ropes, blah blah blah." whereas if you went to Not Elite School and you fuck up, people go "why did we hire this guy instead of someone from Elite School."

credentials create priors, which perpetuate the existing inequities.