Top Law Schools

Is it just straight corporate firms in New York?

Anonymous User wrote:Is it just straight corporate firms in New York?

They go everywhere. I'm in biglaw in a small city and we have ppl from each of those schools.

The big corporate firms are not actually relatively desirable for top HYS grads. Do a lot of them end up there? Sure. But given the well known sweatshop culture of NYC biglaw, HYS students with options are more likely to go to good firms in places like DC or SF, or to boutiques, DOJ honors, prestigious PI, straight in-house, etc.

My non-vault firm has a good number of HYS students who graduated with honors and in law review. I’m in a small market, so it’s the best gig in town.

Where do they go in Boston?

Anonymous User wrote:The big corporate firms are not actually relatively desirable for top HYS grads. Do a lot of them end up there? Sure. But given the well known sweatshop culture of NYC biglaw, HYS students with options are more likely to go to good firms in places like DC or SF, or to boutiques, DOJ honors, prestigious PI, straight in-house, etc.

This is TCR. Top HYS students tend to shoot for "feeder" D.Ct./CoA clerkships, prestigious PI/fed gov positions (including DoJ Honors, as the previous poster mentioned), academia, unicorn international law positions (esp. Y), and elite lit shops like W&C, MTO, Susman, etc. To the extent top HYS students shoot for the traditional BigLaw shops, they target appellate practices at firms like Cov or JD, which are highly desirable and difficult to get (usually requiring at least a "feeder" CoA clerkship, and preferably a SCOTUS clerkship) because most law students want to do appellate work and these practices tend to have much better QoL than the average BigLaw litigation position.

I don't think straight in-house is particularly common, but anecdotally, top HYS students who end up in-house do tend to go in-house a bit earlier than usual.

Of course, you'll also always have a couple who target a particular market for personal reasons, like H students wanting to stay in Boston. Such folks may, on paper, "underperform" their stats, but generally it's due to their own choice. And it's not even necessarily a bad choice. Sure, prestige means a lot in the legal industry, but at the end of the day, the layperson on the street has no clue how prestigious a "feeder" CoA clerkship is and has never heard of any law firm aside from the local personal injury practice hawking for clients on highway billboards.

Anonymous User wrote:Where do they go in Boston?

To the best firms in Boston: Ropes, Wilmer, Goodwin, Choate are common.

At Y/S, I think fewer people go to the top NYC corporate firms than at, say, HCCN. More target DC/SF, prestigious PI/government work, clerkships, academia, and elite litigation practices (either at boutique shops or in the appellate groups of biglaw firms).

H is sort of its own thing. It sends a ton of people to the big NY corporate firms, but it also has lots of students who seek out the highly selective options that many Y/S students target. It also has a very broad national reach (which is a function both of its prestige and its size), so you see many more HLS graduates at firms in Boston, LA, Texas, Florida, Chicago, Atlanta and other major or major-ish markets than you might see from CCN.

I'm somewhere in the top 5% at HYS and on LR. Based on personal knowledge, the most popular firms on among our top students/LR seem to be W&C, Wachtell, MTO, and Gibson (DC). Cravath and Covington (DC) are also popular, but they also take a much larger summer class. The rest are spread among various firms, or not going to firms at all.

Also, as far as I can tell, most people don't want to do corporate work, so NYC corporate definitely isn't the top choice.

I was at S and the top students in lit would generally go to: Wachtell or Boies in NY, Williams and Connolly or Wilmer in DC, KVN or Munger in CA and then the corporate folks generally wanted Cooley (for EC/VC work) or Wachtell for more traditional work.

QContinuum wrote:
This is TCR. Top HYS students tend to shoot for "feeder" D.Ct./CoA clerkships, prestigious PI/fed gov positions (including DoJ Honors, as the previous poster mentioned), academia, unicorn international law positions (esp. Y), and elite lit shops like W&C, MTO, Susman, etc. To the extent top HYS students shoot for the traditional BigLaw shops, they target appellate practices at firms like Cov or JD, which are highly desirable and difficult to get (usually requiring at least a "feeder" CoA clerkship, and preferably a SCOTUS clerkship) because most law students want to do appellate work and these practices tend to have much better QoL than the average BigLaw litigation position. .

What's an example of a "unicorn international law" position?

spicysalmonroll wrote:

QContinuum wrote:
This is TCR. Top HYS students tend to shoot for "feeder" D.Ct./CoA clerkships, prestigious PI/fed gov positions (including DoJ Honors, as the previous poster mentioned), academia, unicorn international law positions (esp. Y), and elite lit shops like W&C, MTO, Susman, etc. To the extent top HYS students shoot for the traditional BigLaw shops, they target appellate practices at firms like Cov or JD, which are highly desirable and difficult to get (usually requiring at least a "feeder" CoA clerkship, and preferably a SCOTUS clerkship) because most law students want to do appellate work and these practices tend to have much better QoL than the average BigLaw litigation position. .

What's an example of a "unicorn international law" position?

A legal position at the State Department. At the UN. Things like that.