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I'm a rising 2L who was lucky enough to receive a SA offer. The offer is from a great firm in a region that I hoped not to practice in until later in my career, and which doesn't have the practice area I'm interested in. I'd likely be doing litigation. The pay is amazing, so I will obviously take the SA position, but should I attempt to rerecruit next year or what are my options?

What are thoughts of people who have been in a similar situation?

You don’t really have a choice other than take the summer position, do as well as you can, and leverage the experience to find a position you want next year.

You can keep looking during 2L but legit 2L summer recruiting is really thin after OCI and you probably aren’t going to find better than what you describe unless you’re one of those guys at HYS or near top of class at lower T-14 that just fell through the cracks for some reason.

notinbiglaw wrote:You don’t really have a choice other than take the summer position, do as well as you can, and leverage the experience to find a position you want next year.

You can keep looking during 2L but legit 2L summer recruiting is really thin after OCI and you probably aren’t going to find better than what you describe unless you’re one of those guys at HYS or near top of class at lower T-14 that just fell through the cracks for some reason.

Thanks for the advice! Do you have any info as to how often people are able to leverage SA experience to find another position?

At GULC when I was there, almost everyone with non-shitlaw (roughly paying more than 15k+ for summer) was able to upgrade or move during 3L if they looked. I personally was moving from DC to NY for personal reasons and I had multiple offers, a good chunk was straight to CB then offer a few days later. My grades weren’t great either. Once you got that SA stamp and someone else invested the time and money to train you for 10 weeks, you are MUCH more employable.

Don’t know about other schools but I can’t imagine the situation being much different. Firms love poaching other firms’ SA’s.

Anonymous User wrote:

notinbiglaw wrote:You don’t really have a choice other than take the summer position, do as well as you can, and leverage the experience to find a position you want next year.

You can keep looking during 2L but legit 2L summer recruiting is really thin after OCI and you probably aren’t going to find better than what you describe unless you’re one of those guys at HYS or near top of class at lower T-14 that just fell through the cracks for some reason.

Thanks for the advice! Do you have any info as to how often people are able to leverage SA experience to find another position?

If this is the only offer you have, you should accept it while you look for something that interests you - you can always back out (though you burn a bridge if you do).

To the extent you can't find something else, you can always look for an associate position at 3L OCI. That can be unpredictable, but unless you really fell through the cracks (as notinbiglaw describes above), it's probably your best bet.