Top Law Schools

A guy on the legal team at my investment fund, just finished up OCI at a couple law schools for a summer position.

The overwhelming feedback was that the top ranked students were woefully unprepared for interviews and didn’t realize that we weren’t a law firm. I get that there is a lot of interviews to do at OCI and such but that feedback was a bit startling.

We ended up bringing in 4 people for super days who weren’t in the top of the class but more or less people who understood what we did at all.

“I really want to do Real Estate Finance!”


“....we don’t have a Real Estate Finance group.”

YES! When I did OCI interviews, nothing made the interview go downhill faster than having a great candidate say something that indicated they literally knew nothing about the firm - like saying they wanted to only do international arbitration or something else we don't really do. Unless you know for sure that the firm does something in particular, there's nothing wrong with hedging a bit ("I would like to work in litigation" might have landed that candidate a callback). We don't refuse callbacks to people because they're still trying to decide between litigation and corporate, but we will reject you if it's clear you didn't spend 5 minutes researching the firm.

Yeah, I've done over 100 recruiting interviews for my firm. Maybe 5 said things that indicated they had done research about the firm.

Funniest is when people interview with a lit boutique and ask about their M&A practice. Especially when they've only looked at Vault and walk into an interview with a hyper-selective elite boutique thinking that it's a safety for them.