Texas No-Offer Rate Forum

[Anonymous User]

Do you really think that the people who say that actually did everything right?

Like I said earlier, that's the eternal question - "Do most SAs who are no-offered somehow 'deserve it', and the rest of us can tell ourselves we have nothing to worry about, or are a significant number of no-offers just bad luck, or decided based upon inconsequential differences between candidates?"

I was in a clerkship interview when another judge came in. He told me that there was one thing I needed to know about the first year of practice at a major firm: Do no harm.

Every SA screws up. At my SA firm, I knew who some of the superstars were. They screwed up just like everyone else. Firms expect SAs to screw up. But there are different levels of screw-ups. Some involve partners who wanted a bit more research when helping to write an article. Some—from another thread here—involve butchering a filing and causing their firm to ask for an extension. Some involve serious lapses of decorum or what have you. I'm apt to believe that no offers, when they happen, generally come from the more egregious fuck ups. (That's not to say that there aren't some people who get hit out of the blue. I'm just guessing that most of those people were at the bottom of the production of SAs, however light that production pool is.)

When you're in the south and firms that do split summers overhired every year knowing they don't have work for everyone because that's the model, they're probably not just punting poor performers

From the posts before, it looked like offer rates in 2012 hovered around 85–90%. Admittedly, this might not be an apt analogy, but when I was in management in a different industry before law school, I could easily tell you who my bottom 10-15% were. If I had a glut of employees, I would have gladly gotten rid of them.

There are reasons to no offer other than just mediocre employees

If SA primarily works in group XYZ and there's not that much work in group XYZ then that dude gets cut

Not at my firm.

[Tiago Splitter]

^^All-time useless post.

[Anonymous User]

FWIW the firm I was at for 1L summer (southern market) no-offered a 1L because no one practice group showed a particular interest in him. That's after they said his work and personality were good. Keep in mind this is a 1L who really has no idea what practice group he wants to end up in, like all other 1Ls. If they were being honest they could have just come out and said they over hired and were cutting their class size. They also no offered a bunch of 2Ls, most of whom summered there 1L as well, so it's not like there were any for issues.