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I'm a 2L about to go through OCI. I want to work for a law firm for the Summer in transactional(who knows maybe I'll like being a lawyer) and then try and recruit for M&A/finance type roles in the Fall 3L year.

I'm curious what kinds of work you actually get to see as a Summer. Say if I worked for a mid-range new york firm or a top market player in a city like Minneapolis/Atlanta/Saint Louis/Pittsburgh.

Would I be able to say things like "Completed diligence on the merger agreement for a F500 Healthcare transaction"?

Probably very little - it's surprisingly hard to pull summers in on a fast-paced transaction (and most people will go out of their way to avoid giving you diligence or putting you on late-night/early-morning email chains, if it's not an outright firm policy). I'd expect mostly shadowing transactions or ancillary research projects.

Shadow transactions. Stare at black lines and attempt to make sense of them. Change all of the numbers when a boomer creates a word document but doesn't use the auto number feature and one of the paragraphs needs to be deleted. Be on telephone conferences. Blankly stare at the window and contemplate whether you're high enough that death would be instantaneous.

OP here.

So does this mean I can spin the experience as a positive for say IB/Corp Dev in the future?

If you want to do IB / Corp Dev, you should be recruiting for those summer jobs now. Your proposed path is nearly impossible to pull off, even from elite M&A firms. Everyone knows that summer work is a joke - the folks interviewing you will be just as familiar with the summer programs at some of these firms as the summers who just went through them will be.

I'm a SA at a firm doing all corporate. Haven't had the experience thesealocust described. Most of my assignments have been due diligence. Essentially you're given access to an online data room and told to find the red flags. Sometimes you summarize documents in the data room. I've also had to read documents and cross check section references and defined terms. Seems like the type of stuff first year associates get tasked with, albeit I only have to work 9-5 with multiple hour lunches.

I'm not sure how you could spin this type of experience into another job. It's just a SA job, it's not a real job.

OP here.

So its pretty much hit or miss on work that you see. I guess I'll have to ask alot about the Summer programs and see if I can get around the recruiting "substantive work BS". I'm more or less interested in working in biglaw to see if I 'd be interested longer term and as a tester/a signaler that I'm a "successful law student" rather than someone who is recruiting in January because I struck out.

I did a lot of signature pages.

Which is exactly what first years do.

I spent 85% of my time formatting footers.

Anonymous User wrote:OP here.

So its pretty much hit or miss on work that you see. I guess I'll have to ask alot about the Summer programs and see if I can get around the recruiting "substantive work BS". I'm more or less interested in working in biglaw to see if I 'd be interested longer term and as a tester/a signaler that I'm a "successful law student" rather than someone who is recruiting in January because I struck out.

What you do as a summer in biglaw (and frankly, as a first year) has almost no bearing on what the rest of your career will be like.

Speaking as an attorney who has a spouse who recently went through IB recruiting in her MBA program - if you want to do IB, you shouldn't have gone to LS and now that you are where you are, you need to have the stones to just do IB recruiting, full steam. (Frankly, you should've been trying to get into your schools JD/MBA and negotiating for the opportunity to do standard first year b-school IB recruiting.)

If you want the conservative option, you should be recruiting hard for the firms with top M&A practices that you can work in from day 1 (i.e., with no forced rotation) and then looking to move into an IB job around year 2-4. That is a difficult, but not unprecedented, path, but you should understand that your chances of making the switch successfully are very low.

Why not apply straight out to IB summer associate positions? Number of banks hire at t6 for sure.

BizBro wrote:Why not apply straight out to IB summer associate positions? Number of banks hire at t6 for sure.

Which banks? I know CS has a program.

Was speaking specifically of Goldman, but I've seen CS and JPM too. I'm sure if you look around you can try blasting applications everywhere.