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At a school that does OCI bids part firm select / part lottery, how should you interview with a firm that chose not to interview you in the first place but has to because the lottery forces them to? I think obvious answer here is "Just interview like you normally would and don't let the fact that they chose not to interview you affect your demeanor/interview style," but I was wondering if anyone had any other advice.

Total Litigator wrote:At a school that does OCI bids part firm select / part lottery, how should you interview with a firm that chose not to interview you in the first place but has to because the lottery forces them to? I think obvious answer here is "Just interview like you normally would and don't let the fact that they chose not to interview you affect your demeanor/interview style," but I was wondering if anyone had any other advice.

Hard advice to follow when they spend the 25 minutes responding to Blackberry messages.

Lol yeah... is this really what they do? Maybe I'll just aplogize for wasting their time and walk out (jk, sort of).

Or what if you used the opportunity to pick their brain regarding what employers are looking for?

I had one where the young female associate was asking me questions politely, while the older male partner was, I thought, staring at my resume the whole time. I noticed halfway through the interview that his Blackberry was on top of my resume in his lap and he was actually reading messages.

If you're in a similar situation, where you just don't feel like they're taking you seriously, I'd use the 20 minutes to brush up on interview skills. You can even try out different answers to see how they sound. Look at it like a scrimmage in basketball or something.

You won't know walking into the interview where you stand. It's entirely plausible a firm pre-selects an incomplete pool of candidates they would consider. It's also possible that they have already pre-selected more deeply than they intend to hire and you're just wasting their time. Either way, the only move you can make is to put your best foot forward, smile, firmly shake hands, etc.