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Just curious. Do SAs at large firms get phones for the summer? I know many full time associates get work phones to keeps things confidential and separate.

Anonymous User wrote:Just curious. Do SAs at large firms get phones for the summer? I know many full time associates get work phones to keeps things confidential and separate.

Mine let us set up our phones to get our email and calendars if we wanted, but I don't think anyone did.

I did.

You can but in most situations you wouldn't want or need one.

My firm and many others I knew expressly did not allow SAs to have firm phones or get access to email on phones (not that it stops some from trying).

You are doing your SA wrong if you are checking your phone for work emails when you aren't in the office. 1) no one cares about your work that much 2) they purposefully don't give you work that you should be worrying about after 6-7 pm.

We got email etc set up on our current phone and got reimbursed for our phone bill

Anonymous User wrote:My firm and many others I knew expressly did not allow SAs to have firm phones or get access to email on phones (not that it stops some from trying).

You are doing your SA wrong if you are checking your phone for work emails when you aren't in the office. 1) no one cares about your work that much 2) they purposefully don't give you work that you should be worrying about after 6-7 pm.

There's always the risk you have an asshole partner or associate that expects a response after 5. I only got one such email, but one is more than zero, and that associate needed revisions ASAP. Some firms give phones, some let you put email on your personal phone and reimburse you. It's hardly the rule that you don't/can't/shouldn't get said phone.

My uncle was given a walkie talkie

We got blackberries exclusively for email, and I probably sent 20 emails a day on that thing. As a device, the blackberry is exactly as terrible as you think, though it did handle attachments better than an iPhone, which actually mattered more than once.

Everyone in my summer class had a different experience depending which partners/groups they worked with—plenty of partners just treated SA's like regular associates and sent late night or weekend emails. May as well get used to it now.

when i was an SA, they gave you the choice of having a blackberry or just setting up your phone w/ the encryption apps to receive work emails. you had to do one or the other. just as the above poster said, it depended on partner/group, but it was not unusual to get emails in the evening or weekend. we were told (and got the feeling) that we were being treated mostly like normal first years when it came to work.

My class got iPhones for the summer.

My firm had blackberries or you could set-up your own phone to receive email. No one took the blackberry option.

It's a good idea to get emails on your phone even if there's no expectation of night or weekend work because you can keep up with what's going on without being at your desk. Being able to respond timely, even if you don't have to, leaves a good impression. Your first goal as an SA is to get an offer, but you also want to be someone that others will remember as being good to work with when you return.

Setting up email on my phone was a first day activity at my firm. The firm technically has a Blackberry option, but according to someone I know who took advantage of it, the IT people have forgotten how to use them.

unlicensedpotato wrote:You can but in most situations you wouldn't want or need one.

Really firm-dependent. I definitely needed the blackberries I got at the two firms where I summered.

My firm gave us a Blackberry for the summer, but once you start as a first year you can choose whether you want to just link email to your personal phone instead.

But yeah ^ every firm is different.