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Below median at HYS. Not a Spanish/Portuguese/Russian speaker.
I had some exposure to international arbitration before coming to law school. I'm summering at a US-based firm's foreign office now and am able to try both corporate and arbitration. The former bored me to death. And my experiences doing the latter make me fairly certain that it is the kind of work I can commit to in the long term.
I fully recognize the difficulty of breaking into the area. Given my not-so-stellar grades, what narrative should I have going into OCI? Should I aim for arbitration intensely and bear the risk of striking out? Or should I go for litigation and hope for an opportunity to transit into arbitration at a later stage (I heard even litigation can be hard with my grades)? I'm open to the option of starting my career in London/Paris/etc. where firms have bigger arbitration practice, but not sure how to land a job there. Any advice is very much appreciated.

Imo, target int'l arb at firms that have large or healthy int'l arb practices, target lit otherwise. There won't be enough firms with even a single-digit number of int'l arb attorneys for you to fill your OCI schedule, I imagine.

Disclaimer: 3L that is not going into int'l arb.

Also, those languages seem random, but again, I'm not an int'l arb expert. As a speaker of one of them I'm curious, are they the consensus best three or something?

Dig deep for firms with notable arbitration practices. Ask around. The field isn't that large. Then you will notice some that aren't all that grade selective and like candidates that have a particular interest in international arbitration.

But of course don't only target that at OCI.

Conventional wisdom is that things like international arbitration are too niche to base your bid strategy around. There just aren't that many of these cases. A firm's "international arbitration practice group" may end up being one partner who from time to time does an arbitration. Probably best to express an interest in litigation with arbitration on the side.

I would just recommend being extremely explicit about this in your screeners. I thought I was totally clear about having this as an interest in a screener with a firm/office with a strong practice. During my callback I met exclusively with the commercial lit people, which seemed like a waste of time for both parties involved.

eta: depending on how much you care about it, check out Chambers and make sure you're bidding in different markets. The big firms for it aren't all in one market and it can work out randomly that X firm in city Y does the work.

Anonymous User wrote:Below median at HYS. Not a Spanish/Portuguese/Russian speaker.
I had some exposure to international arbitration before coming to law school. I'm summering at a US-based firm's foreign office now and am able to try both corporate and arbitration. The former bored me to death. And my experiences doing the latter make me fairly certain that it is the kind of work I can commit to in the long term.
I fully recognize the difficulty of breaking into the area. Given my not-so-stellar grades, what narrative should I have going into OCI? Should I aim for arbitration intensely and bear the risk of striking out? Or should I go for litigation and hope for an opportunity to transit into arbitration at a later stage (I heard even litigation can be hard with my grades)? I'm open to the option of starting my career in London/Paris/etc. where firms have bigger arbitration practice, but not sure how to land a job there. Any advice is very much appreciated.

This is a long shot, but if you get this, could you PM me? I'm interested in breaking into IA and am curious about how it went.