Small litigation firm clerk, want corporate, but bad grades? Forum

[Anonymous User]

Hi all, I was hoping TLS could help me analyze my current employment situation for how to plan my next steps.

As the title of the post suggests, I'm currently a clerk at a small litigation firm (mostly defense side). There are only 3 attorneys, and somehow I managed to make the managing partner adore me. He frequently tells me these days that although he doesn't want me to leave, he'd be happy to hit up his old Biglaw contacts to try to get me interviews at bigger firms. I am 99% staying with this firm for the summer, and likely through 3L unless I can find transactional work, because of the below:

Through working at this job and the corporate law classes I'm taking this semester, I realized I want transactional instead of litigation. The best part of writing a motion for me is making sure all the little details are correct, and I get more of a kick out of unraveling the client's corporate structure than the any prospect of arguing the motion in court. This realization makes me uneasy, however, because of my terrible grades. I have a 3.18 on a 3.3 scale from a T-20, and am a K-JD. The GPA has been on an upward trend each semester since 1st semester 1L, but I know that is still quite abysmal and wont get me any looks from transactional employers. Frankly, I'm not sure how I ended up at this litigation firm to begin with.

I had a few ideas about how to proceed to eventually get a full time transactional job, and I was wondering if TLS could critique them:
1. Get a research assistant position part time this summer, in addition to this litigation job, which focused on corporate law. This way, maybe I can say I am at least familiar with the issues.
2. Get more work from managing partner that focuses on corporate clients and structuring, instead of the tort cases we usually do.
3. Apply...where? I am struggling with this one because, due to my GPA, I've just applied left, right, and center for anything that fits my experiences and is legal so that I could not be unemployed. I am really not sure how to proceed with discovering a newfound interest in corporate law, when I don't have anything that would make me attractive to these employers. Do in-house positions of small companies still hire at this time of year?