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Okay, quick question. Patterson Belknap is mostly known as a NYC lit "boutique" (not sure you can be a boutique when you have that many lawyers, but whatever). Basically the little brother of Boies Schiller. But they also have this small, really cool practice on transactional work and advising specifically for tax-exempt organizations that I have never seen anywhere else. (First off, does this specialty exist anywhere else?) I'm not at all interested in litigation, but I find their TEO practice fascinating and would love to get involved. Is it advisable to bid on PB for 2L summer and tell them at the interview I'm mainly interested in their TEO practice, or would the fact that the vast majority of the firm is devoted to litigation make bidding on them without an interest in litigation a little bit ridiculous?

the EO group at PBWT is tiny and spots in the group are not available each year. I would call recruiting, stress your interest in the EO group, and see if you can learn more about it before wasting a bid if you are truly not interested in litigation at all. On average, 9 out of 10 summers go to the general litigation group and one might get an offer from one of the smaller transactional groups

Several firms have practices focused on the nonprofit sector, including CWT, R&G. Check those out.

Update from 2012, I spoke to several people at Patterson who said it's basically impossible to get into EO, so awesome as it sounds, I wouldn't suggest going there for that reason. One of the people I spoke to is directly involved with hiring, so she definitely knows what's up and said she was telling me this because people who have gone to PBWT exclusively for EO have often been disappointed. That said, it still seems like an incredible place to work overall.