Anonymous User wrote:I have top grades at a T20 school but with a pretty extensive resume in public interest work. The few screeners and callbacks that I did in a major market all wanted to tell me about their strong commitment to public interest, their extensive pro bono work, blah blah. Then I get dings from all of them, even though the interviews all went smoothly, very conversational, and flowing and positive comments throughout and at the end.
But did my PI-heavy resume kill me or should I reassess my interviewing skills?
Plus, TLS made me think that based on my grades, I'd be getting many more invites to interview than I have. Only 2 callbacks.
Hey there, average grades in a T14 here, and with a similar background to yourself - 5 PI positions on my resume, most of it pretty extreme stuff. I got a healthy amount of callbacks and did alright with them.
A PI-heavy resume won't kill you, but if you don't make it work for you, it'll work against you. When you have the sort of resume that we have, your interviewers are going to start talking to you about PI work - makes for an easy conversation and it's all they've got to go on, but you're not necessarily selling them what they want to buy.
- If they start focussing the conversation on PI/pro bono stuff, steer the conversation toward the area of practice you're interested in. Their baseline assumption is that you're not really into this, so you have to be pro-active and intentional about making sure you have thought about the direction you're going in and why, and centering the discussion around that. Be enthusiastic as hell.
- Its natural for them to be skeptical. More or less every interview I had (and I was interviewed by ~70 attys over all) asked me at some point "So you've done all this stuff, why the hell do you want to do BigLaw?" Have a convincing answer. I generally went for something along the lines of "I started doing human rights work when I was in my early 20s. I'm never not going to be interested in social justice, but I feel like I achieved what I set out to achieve for myself, and its the right time to move on and start building a more stable life." I told some of them straight up that I burned out, and to the extent that I want to be contributing in the near future to the causes I used to fight for, my most effective contribution would be monetary.
-Be able to tell a convincing story about how you got to the choices you have. If you're transactional, then what you really loved about PI work, above the social mission, was the intensity of the work, the experience of the camaraderie working in teams toward a shared goal, the direct interaction you had with people, and, looking at the legal industry, really the place where those skills can be best expressed and you can keep that style of work is in M&A (or wherever the fuck). If you're litigation, you loved the fact that you were engaged in a cause, and in fighting for that cause you had to be diligent, you had to investigate every possibility before moving ahead because the stakes were high and had genuine impacts on the people you were working on behalf of. Think of it in terms of client focus. I found an effective line (and a genuine one) is that working in PI, you're always working with less resources than you need - so you have to be inventive and resourceful, and you get to take on whichever responsibilities you feel able to do - its always all hands on deck. You're pro-active, energetic, and you want to take responsibility. That stuff is really transferable - the people skills, the work ethic, the responsibility, the analytic/systems thinking skills, the goal-focused work. Just make sure you highlight your work experience with regard to these professional skills.
-One of the great things about PI work is that you've probably done way cooler, higher-stakes, responsible stuff than most people you're competing against. You'll be memorable. That makes great for great illustrative stories about challenges faced, teams led, decisions reached, and so on. Don't be afraid to use those stories, because they'll stand out. On the other hand, as above, make sure these stories are illustrating why you've got the skills they need, not that you're really only interested in social justice work.
- Ultimately the aim is telling a story about yourself where the natural next step is that all your skills come together and you become a killer atty for their firm. Thats the same for all interviewees. You've just got a potentially much more unique, exciting, and impressive story to tell than someone who worked for a year in their Dad's accounting firm.
So, TL:DR version is, utilize the stories and be proud of the experiences, but in a framework of professional skills exactly suited to whatever you're going for. If you're just talking about pro-bono and social missions, you're a risky proposition that they're not going to bet on. But if you tell them what PI work is like, and the skills you get in it, that stuff is actually really transferable and will make you memorable. Just keep it coming back to why this stuff is suited to being in Big Law (which it is). If all else fails, make them laugh, tell them you've got karma to burn*. Hasta la victoria siempre herman@.
* Don't do that, thats my line.