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I'm a 0L with nearly one year of employment with a nonprofit. I will be resigning in June and am considering my exit strategy. What impact do previous work references have on summer employment in law school?

Will 1L or 2L summer employment be heavily influenced by a good or bad reference from w/e?

HRomanus wrote:I'm a 0L with nearly one year of employment with a nonprofit. I will be resigning in June and am considering my exit strategy. What impact do previous work references have on summer employment in law school?

Will 1L or 2L summer employment be heavily influenced by a good or bad reference from w/e?

Not really. A very small minority, a handful of firms really, ask for references come OCI time. You should put legal references if you can, but in the off chance you didn't really have any good references you could put one or two 0L references in combination with one or two law school references. I think that's basically what I did for OCI, had a couple of law school references and a couple of pre-law school references. I am not sure that they contacted my pre-law school references, though I did hear that they contacted my law school references.

ph14 wrote:

HRomanus wrote:I'm a 0L with nearly one year of employment with a nonprofit. I will be resigning in June and am considering my exit strategy. What impact do previous work references have on summer employment in law school?

Will 1L or 2L summer employment be heavily influenced by a good or bad reference from w/e?

Not really. A very small minority, a handful of firms really, ask for references come OCI time. You should put legal references if you can, but in the off chance you didn't really have any good references you could put one or two 0L references in combination with one or two law school references. I think that's basically what I did for OCI, had a couple of law school references and a couple of pre-law school references. I am not sure that they contacted my pre-law school references, though I did hear that they contacted my law school references.

Are these legal references primarily LS professors?

Is this true for 1L summer positions as well?

HRomanus wrote:

ph14 wrote:

HRomanus wrote:I'm a 0L with nearly one year of employment with a nonprofit. I will be resigning in June and am considering my exit strategy. What impact do previous work references have on summer employment in law school?

Will 1L or 2L summer employment be heavily influenced by a good or bad reference from w/e?

Not really. A very small minority, a handful of firms really, ask for references come OCI time. You should put legal references if you can, but in the off chance you didn't really have any good references you could put one or two 0L references in combination with one or two law school references. I think that's basically what I did for OCI, had a couple of law school references and a couple of pre-law school references. I am not sure that they contacted my pre-law school references, though I did hear that they contacted my law school references.

Are these legal references primarily LS professors?

Yes. One was my legal research and writing instructor, who I actually got to know reasonably well as you had one on one meetings to go over your memo and briefs. One was one a professor that I got to know decently well due to taking a seminar with him. And I think one of my references was my 1L summer supervisor. I can't actually remember 100% since this was a few years ago but that sounds about right.

I don't actually think the references were really an important factor in OCI for me, as it's not really expected you will have built up any close relationships with professors by the end of 1L. Having a reference from your 1L summer job is pretty useful though heading into OCI (at least if you are targeting one of the firms which actually asks for and gets in touch with references).