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Had an informational interview today with a former associate at a V20 firm I'm interviewing with who indicated that interest in litigation was a reason for the ding immediately following the economic crisis, and that while it's picked up a little, you still need to show that you're very interested in corporate or you risk not getting the CB. Caveat is that s/he's been out of private practice for a bit.

Can anyone speak to this?

God I hope this isn't true, or at least isn't as true as it may have been a couple of years ago, but I have read similar things on this site. It really sucks because I'm about to do a fed dist clerkship and obviously hope to do litigation...

That sounds aggressively dumb, especially since a large percentage of ppl in top law schools want to be litigators and every single firm in the V20 is at least decent in litigation and have a large number of litigators.

As someone who wants to do litigation, I haven't seen any negative impact on my mass mail yield (which included a lot of corporate dominated firms) by saying that.

That's one of the dumbest things I've ever heard anyone say, it's really not even worth time explaining why, since it takes about 3 minutes of basic research to figure that out

txdude45 wrote:aggressively dumb

bearsfan23 wrote:one of the dumbest things I've ever heard

TCR.

There is some truth to it. It certainly was never an automatic ding, but a lot of NYC firms have more corporate attorneys than litigators, and the sea changes in litigation have meant lower attrition amongst litigators and thus less demand for new litigation hires. That couples with the overwhelming interest in litigation from law students who don't even know what transactional law is made it advantageous to be interested in corporate.

That was the case at my firm, at least.

This strikes me as a weird thing to say about "immediately following the economic crisis," considering that corporate was down way more than lit then (unless there was something odd about that firm's business model).

If anything, I'd imagine this is more true now than five years ago, given that firms seem to be looking hard for lateral corporate associates, but that's likely more due to understaffing in corporate since the recession than anything, and I can't imagine it being ding worthy for an SA slot.

There are more Corporate-specific SA and first year listings on Symplicity, but going so far as litigation=ding seems pretty overblown

I've heard that expressing an interest that any office doesn't really have a strong practice in can be a ding. I think of this in DC where virtually every large firm has an office but a lot of them specialize in doing regulatory work or something to that effect. Maybe he was just referring to that?

Emphatically not true for many firms. Emphatically true for some. Do your homework about practice areas, apply to the places that fit your interests, and say the right things in the interviews.

Just do your homework before interviewing anywhere. For example, my office has 4 corporate attorneys and 50 litigation attorneys. Only wanting corporate is an automatic ding. Look through their attorney profiles and try to get a sense as to how many people work in each practice (rather than looking to what they think they specialize in).

that's complete bs. all i talked about was my interest in litigation and have quite a few callbacks in nyc.