1693 wrote:LeDique wrote:1693 wrote:How has the internship search been going for you current students? I was recently accepted to Denver with a nice scholarship and am still waiting to hear from CU. I love Colorado and want to practice in the Mountain West so I am hoping I have a choice to make.
Also, best of luck with finals!
Are you asking about 1L internships or 2L or both? Paid? Unpaid?
One difference here that is relevant to your decision is that CU does not allow you to intern with private employers for academic credit. DU currently does but we're pressuring them a lot to change that.
Both in your experience as a student. Paid/unpaid isn't a concern to me as I expect most to be unpaid. How do you feel about the competition from DU students for positions (I imagine that is the biggest competition).
Also, I'd love to practice in an area such as Golden. I imagine CU is the way to go for that.
Edit: thanks for taking the time to answer!
I think top 10% from CU and DU definitely compete for larger firm jobs in Denver. The hiring partners are often mixed from the two schools, or, even more likely, went T-14. In that case, they owe no allegiance to either school, and are picking the candidate they like the best.
I know there are CU employers who don't look past CU for hiring, but assuredly there are DU employers in the metro that do the same for DU. I just don't know any because I go to CU.
However, I think to a very real extent CU and DU students are looking for different jobs. There is overlap, but frankly many of the CU students get first crack at the better clerkships, gov. placements, business jobs, and non-profits. (by the way, many of these "better jobs" I'm talking about aren't great for TLS standards-- think 50k-55k a year but with growth and resume cred.) When CU students strike out, I've noticed they are more likely to refuse doc review/dead-end legal jobs and look to a different field. I think more people go to DU who actually want to practice law, and they will try to get whatever they can. I'm not sure if that is a positive attribute about the school or not, but I think its a cultural difference that is worth mentioning. Also, our professors might disagree, no idea, but I'd guess that you can get the same high-level education at either school.
CU has a smaller class and a better reputation, and I've heard from government employers and judges in the Denver metro that they wish they would see more CU applicants. Personally, I think one thing that helps CU students is that the whole class seems to have varied interests. Without stellar grades, I have been successful finding (paid) 1L work for a firm and the government internship of my choice for 2L summer. I think it helped that the employers wanted to hire CU students and I was only competing with a handful of other CU students who wanted each job. DU has a harder time compiling an incoming 1L class with high LSATs and varied work experience. They have pretty much been the second choice law school in the state since both schools opened over a hundred years ago. According to our admissions office, DU has never enrolled a class with higher credentials than CU and has only beaten CU on the colorado bar exam 4 times. No idea if that's true, but if so that would be like 4/220 or something (assuming they still offered the bar twice a year back in the early 1900s?).
If you want to work in the Denver metro, DU is a good school and has a good reputation with the layman. I think the caveat for me is that you really need to be sure that you don't end up in the bottom half of the class. CU grads are spread out over the state and the immediate region, so if you end up bottom quarter after 1L, not only are your chances of still getting a metro/front range job way higher than from DU, you have the ability to sort-of, call an audible, specialize in a niche area, and look for an unpaid gig up the the mountains or outside the front range with a CU friendly office. It may not lead to the legal job you wanted, but it might actually lead to a legal job. Bottom half of DU pretty much needs to start looking at non-legal options or settle on the idea of going solo. There just aren't enough jobs.
But hey, DU has been giving out great scholarships lately. I'd go solo in Denver with less than 20k debt, maybe just me. So I just realized I typed for a long time (probably because I do not want to study). Don't get me wrong, there is a ton of competition in law school, but I think that generally CU students compete with CU students and DU students compete with DU students.
Let me know if you have any other questions. Hope some of this has been helpful. You can google CU vs. DU and read some prior TLS threads on the topic. GL.
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