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Hi guys, so I am a 2nd year associate at a small firm in southern California where my practice has been primarily focused on corporate and commercial transactions. I almost exclusively work with one partner with a long background in big law who has been an amazing mentor and has really empowered me to take a leading role on transactions. As a result, on most of our smaller transactions ($1-15 million acquisitions/sales, securities offerings, etc..) I am the one preparing or reviewing the substantive and ancillary agreements, handling all diligence, preparing all disclosure schedules and communicating issues with client and other side.

My question is whether this substantive experience would translate well into possibly a mid/big law corporate position? If so, is it worth it to try and seek out other opportunities now or should I wait and try and lateral as a 3rd year? I love working with the partner that I do, but I feel that I would benefit from the opportunity to work with other attorneys and am interest in working on more complex matters regularly.

I would love to hear your thoughts.

You can probably lateral to biglaw, but your best shot is probably to focus on your commercial transactions work. Tech trans hiring is up and is slated to keep growing, so it should be possible to parlay any commercial transactions work into something like that.

I'd start the search sooner rather than later. The market is great right now, and the lateralling process almost always takes longer than expected, especially for a move from small law to mid or biglaw.

You will probably have a lot more success at lower amlaw firms that aren’t working on the mega-deals.

Middle market firms (especially lower middle market) would be delighted to have an associate who has experience working on similar sized deals.

From there, you can probably lateral a few years down the line to the bigger firms.

I think it’ll be pretty difficult to go from small law to a firm like Latham or Kirkland, but firms like Holland & Knight, Gunderson (tech trans, as mentioned above), or the lower NY vault firms would be a good place to focus on.