Big Law Offer Scenario Forum
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Anonymous posting is only appropriate when you are revealing sensitive employment related information about a firm, job, etc. You may anonymously respond on topic to these threads. Unacceptable uses include: harassing another user, joking around, testing the feature, or other things that are more appropriate in the lounge.
Failure to follow these rules will get you outed, warned, or banned.
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ConfusedOffer
- Posts: 2
- Joined: Thu Jul 24, 2014 4:52 pm
Big Law Offer Scenario
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Last edited by ConfusedOffer on Wed Dec 28, 2016 7:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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OneMoreLawHopeful
- Posts: 1191
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Re: Big Law Offer Scenario
I know this isn't what you want to hear, but this is going to be very difficult to answer without more specific information.
Let me give some examples to explain why.
If your first choice was gen lit, but you were made an offer for IP lit for business reasons (bunch of IP coming in while gen lit is flat), then you probably (as in, at most firms) stand a good chance to transfer to gen lit down the road. You could probably ask to be cross-staffed on some matters (because there's a lot of overlap in skills between IP lit and gen lit), develop connections, and change groups within a few years without a big problem. In an instance like this, you probably want to go with the "firm you know" over some random firm at 3L OCI that you didn't summer with and just won't know that well.
However, if the offer from IP was not for business reasons, but because the gen lit partners hated you; but the IP partners were willing to overlook any personality defects with their eyes on your undergrad comp sci degree...well I hope you can see why this is a very different scenario. In an instance like this, you might be better off rolling the dice at 3L OCI (and I write this fully acknowledging that a recently offered summer might not be privy to any of this info behind his/her offer).
Likewise, is it even possible to land your "dream practice" at 3L OCI? Some groups are just notoriously hard to get into and unlikely to hire out of 3L OCI (antitrust, appellate, etc.). If your dream job is something like that, consider a longer-term strategy about how you can maneuver your career to get where you want to be (clerkship, cross-staffing, etc.), because 3L OCI is probably not going to get you there no matter what.
Finally, how mismatched are your offer and preferred practice area? If it's something like offer for corporate, but preferred lit, then you should probably put a lot of effort into 3L OCI because the longer you work a corporate job the harder it's going to be to switch over to lit, and the more likely that you will have to take a pay-cut to do so (who wants to pay a 3rd year salary to a litigator with 2 years of corporate experience and 0 years of litigation experience?).
Even all of this leaves out a ton of firm-specific factors to consider (e.g. How big a presence does your preferred group have at the office you are offered at? Would you realistically have to switch cities to practice in your ideal area? What is the firm culture like, is cross-staffing even possible? Is there a particular partner that might help/hinder your effort to move to a different practice area? etc.).
Let me give some examples to explain why.
If your first choice was gen lit, but you were made an offer for IP lit for business reasons (bunch of IP coming in while gen lit is flat), then you probably (as in, at most firms) stand a good chance to transfer to gen lit down the road. You could probably ask to be cross-staffed on some matters (because there's a lot of overlap in skills between IP lit and gen lit), develop connections, and change groups within a few years without a big problem. In an instance like this, you probably want to go with the "firm you know" over some random firm at 3L OCI that you didn't summer with and just won't know that well.
However, if the offer from IP was not for business reasons, but because the gen lit partners hated you; but the IP partners were willing to overlook any personality defects with their eyes on your undergrad comp sci degree...well I hope you can see why this is a very different scenario. In an instance like this, you might be better off rolling the dice at 3L OCI (and I write this fully acknowledging that a recently offered summer might not be privy to any of this info behind his/her offer).
Likewise, is it even possible to land your "dream practice" at 3L OCI? Some groups are just notoriously hard to get into and unlikely to hire out of 3L OCI (antitrust, appellate, etc.). If your dream job is something like that, consider a longer-term strategy about how you can maneuver your career to get where you want to be (clerkship, cross-staffing, etc.), because 3L OCI is probably not going to get you there no matter what.
Finally, how mismatched are your offer and preferred practice area? If it's something like offer for corporate, but preferred lit, then you should probably put a lot of effort into 3L OCI because the longer you work a corporate job the harder it's going to be to switch over to lit, and the more likely that you will have to take a pay-cut to do so (who wants to pay a 3rd year salary to a litigator with 2 years of corporate experience and 0 years of litigation experience?).
Even all of this leaves out a ton of firm-specific factors to consider (e.g. How big a presence does your preferred group have at the office you are offered at? Would you realistically have to switch cities to practice in your ideal area? What is the firm culture like, is cross-staffing even possible? Is there a particular partner that might help/hinder your effort to move to a different practice area? etc.).
