Top Law Schools

curious if there's any meaningful difference in the difficulty of these switches. if there is, then someone who is ambivalent would do well to start in the one that's easier to swithc out of, all other things equal.

i suspect that there is no meaningful difference, so someone should just do what they're interested in but i dont have any evidence to support my hunch.

Generally there’s just more demand (especially relative to student interest) for corporate associates, and that’s even more true right now. So I would guess it’s a decent bit easier to go lit->corporate. But I wouldn’t start in one assuming you’ll be able to change if you don’t like it, unless you’re exceptionally well credentialed.

If you are going to be a first year biglaw associate, lit to corporate. And it might not even be a choice right now.

It depends on the the state of the market. Right now corp is super busy and they’re pulling in bodies. After the 2008 collapse, a lot (though by no means all) of corporate was slow and litigation was seen as the place to be (plenty of MBS litigation to go around).

For example, look at IPOs by year. It went from 296 in 2007 to 57 in 2008. Think firms were clamoring for capital market associates then? It was up over 400(!) in 2020, but if there’s a market correction and things so down again?

I've heard that it's easier to go from lit to corp because "lit is the more specialized work so lit people can do corp stuff if needed but the reverse isn't true," but this was coming from a lit guy so I'd take it with several grains of salt.

I haven't heard the reverse being said by a corp guy though.