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I have a 2L SA lined up and was asked to list several practice groups I am interested in. I listed several litigation and corporate groups but am being asked to list one more. That led me to think of bankruptcy. Would I be hindered by not having taken a bankruptcy course before? Additionally, I hear that there has been a slowdown in bankruptcy work. Does the slowdown seem likely to continue absent another recession in the next few years?

My other option is to list real estate, and I'm not sure which one out of the two I should list. I'm hoping that people providing insight into any limitations I have with the lack of course work or the economic factors surrounding the practices will help me make the decision.

Thanks!

Anonymous User wrote:I have a 2L SA lined up and was asked to list several practice groups I am interested in. I listed several litigation and corporate groups but am being asked to list one more. That led me to think of bankruptcy. Would I be hindered by not having taken a bankruptcy course before? Additionally, I hear that there has been a slowdown in bankruptcy work. Does the slowdown seem likely to continue absent another recession in the next few years?

My other option is to list real estate, and I'm not sure which one out of the two I should list. I'm hoping that people providing insight into any limitations I have with the lack of course work or the economic factors surrounding the practices will help me make the decision.

Thanks!

If you think you might want corporate more than litigation, then go real estate. Litigation more than corporate, then bankruptcy. Also, which group does the firm care about more or which one has the better reputation/ranking?

LawIdiot86 wrote:If you think you might want corporate more than litigation, then go real estate. Litigation more than corporate, then bankruptcy. Also, which group does the firm care about more or which one has the better reputation/ranking?

Thanks for the response. I am slightly leaning toward litigation, which was a reason for thinking bankruptcy first. I also like the idea of the litigation/transactional mix in the practice. However, I am slightly worried about the fact that I haven't actually taken a bankruptcy course.

Interestingly, I would say both groups are about equal to one another in reputation. The firm is at the top of its market generally, and both groups are fairly large. However, the bankruptcy group is probably 3/4 of the size of the real estate group. Additionally, the bankruptcy group hasn't hired anyone in the past two years, and the real estate group just brought in a couple of new associates. I get the impression that the real estate group is beginning to expand again while the bankruptcy group has remained stagnant. I'm not sure if the firm cares about one more than the other, though.

I did a lot of bankruptcy work in my 2L SA without having taken the course and I managed to get by just fine. In hindsight it definitely would have helped though.

It was an open system at my firm, and going into the summer if you told me to do a bankruptcy assignment I would have cringed. Ended up doing 1 assignment and it opened the floodgates for more... I think bankruptcy is a really cool hybrid lit/corporate practice. I really enjoyed how everything was real-time, on the fly and high stakes... as opposed to traditional litigation files dealing with facts from like a century ago.