Prestige & Exit Options Forum

[Anonymous User]

I had a general question as I head into OCI...

In terms of prestige and exit options, does a firm's overall reputation matter more/less than practice group reputation? For example, I am interested in antitrust. Some of the firms considered to have the best antitrust practices are considered less prestigious overall. Does this make a difference for future potential to lateral to another firm?

Lets say there is a V10 firm that has an okay antitrust practice vs a V50 that has a top-tier antitrust practice. Is one going to present substantively better exit options than the other?

[L’Étranger]

In this regard use Chambers rather than Vault as a guide.

[ResIpsa21]

Depends what you mean by exit options. If you mean broad exit options to non-antitrust areas (in-house, bigfed, lit boutiques) then you're better off at the V10. If you mean antitrust-specific exit options like smaller antitrust boutiques or DOJ Antitrust Division, definitely consider the Chambers ranking and look at where the partners at the V50 previously worked.

[Anonymous User]

It works much as you would expect: if you exit into something related to your practice group, practice group trumps all. If you "reinvent" yourself, firm and practice group are very important.

My firm is clearly the "best" in my practice group. I talked with a recruiter recently, who was very upfront about the fact that searches for attorneys in my field always start with my firm, because of the group's reputation, but that it would mean much less if I was looking to switch groups or move to an agency/corporation in an unrelated field.

Obviously you have to take recruiters with a grain of salt, but that made a lot of sense, and I have no reason to doubt it based on my observation of other peoples' career moves.

Of course it's worth pointing out that practice group strength and firm reputation are strongly correlated. The firms everyone thinks of as the "best" often have uniformly top-flight practices.

[84651846190]

As stated above, relevant experience trumps prestige every time. If you're switching practice areas early in your career, your grades and law school will matter a lot more than your firm's reputation. I really don't think the prestige of your firm by itself matters for much if it's not tied to a particular practice area that you'll be practicing in at your new job.

For example, if you were somehow hired to work at GDC with a mediocre GPA, no one is going to be like, "OH MY GOD! HE WORKED AT THE SAME FIRM AS TED OLSON!! SO PRESTIGIOUS!!" They're going to look at your law school/GPA and assume you worked in some shitty practice group that had no interaction whatsoever with the appellate group.

[Anonymous User]

If you're in antitrust, other antitrust practitioners will care much more about your firm's reputation in antitrust and the deals your antitrust team has worked on than they will about your firm's overall reputation. If you want to spend your career in antitrust, it would be stupid to turn down a better-ranked antitrust group for a better-ranked firm, all else being equal (which it never is).

That said, from my observation as an antitrust associate, it seems that the differences in exit options are minimal among Chambers-ranked firms. In narrower practice areas like antitrust (compared to, say, general litigation), there aren't huge numbers of associates looking to lateral, so associates in any ranked antitrust group won't have too much difficulty lateraling to peer or better firms, or to DOJ Antitrust/FTC. I haven't tried to lateral myself, but I regularly get headhunter calls for lateral positions, including in groups like Cleary and GDC, and I've seen a few antitrust associates I know move up or go to the government. In-house exit options are a different story, but they depend on more on client connections than practice group prestige (although the more prestigious practice groups generally have more connections with larger clients).