Sponsorships Are Key to Legal Recruiting in the Virtual World

5 considerations to get the most out of your sponsorship participation in 2020

Photo by Allie on Unsplash

Sponsorships are an important part of strengthening relationships with law schools and highlighting your firm in the minds of law students. Sponsorships can come in a variety of forms from affinity groups, to law journals, to practice area expo’s, and more. In 2020 these groups are more important than ever, and can offer great ways to connect with students in the absence of in-person events.

Here are 5 key considerations when choosing the sponsorships your firm might want to pursue this year:

1. Strategize which schools your firm wants to focus on this year. Find out the bidding periods for those schools and focus on making connections around those dates.

2. Stick with sponsorships that offer opportunities for small group interactions. Large meetings or receptions are not as conducive to conversations with students in the virtual environment. Perhaps plan practice group discussions over the course of a week, rather than one large gathering with hard to manage break outs.

3. Invite your former summers and share with schools the events your firm is already doing. Things like CLE panel presentations, heritage month events, diversity roundtables, trivia nights, etc are free and easy ways to showcase your firm’s commitment to these causes even outside of recruiting events. Consider focusing on a different core school for each event to get even more strategic.

4. Plan to follow up. Get a list of participants and a plan to get in touch after the event. Whether it’s to point students to an online portal to apply or if it’s a general thank-you response, do a bit more legwork after the event than you normally would to continue connecting and keep your firm top of mind.

5. Budget Considerations: Most law schools and sponsorship groups are cutting the cost of their virtual events this year due to the format, but even if they don’t it’s still worthwhile to consider paying full price based on your overall goals. The firm will be saving money this year in regards to in person events like dinners, catering, event space, and swag that otherwise would have been spent on recruiting expenses.

With that in mind, sponsorships might be the best place to spend to counter-act that loss.

Big Law and Outdated Biases

Reaction to a 1L Perspective

Photo by Courtney Nuss on Unsplash

I just got off the phone with a first year law student who just began her school year in California. Our conversation was friendly and interesting, and I hope to be speaking with her again soon. During the call, after discussing what we had originally connected for, she wanted to ask me a few questions. She prefaced each of her questions with a brief statement about how “big law firms” are perceived at her school. She did this very innocently, acknowledging that she might be misperceiving a broader viewpoint being so new to the law firm world. It was clear from these statements, however, that her introduction to “big law” hadn’t been favorable.

One of her questions was about pro bono work, and the other was about how comfortable it felt being a woman in law. Fair questions, nothing to see there. What got me thinking was the way she had prefaced the questions, and her reactions to my answers. It caused me to consider the possibility that “big law firms” have a stigma in law schools that is no longer entirely accurate. According to this young law student, doing pro bono at a big law firm is rarely, if ever, done and students who have strong passions for people are better off going the public service route. And as for being a women in law, she seemed to think that big law firms are doing nothing about inherited biases that have existed in law firms for decades.

Both of these perspectives do not do justice to “big law.”

I’ve worked and lived in Washington, DC for four years now, and the entire time I’ve spent in law firms. I got to know the ins and outs of a firm, its attorneys, its staff, and its management. Additionally, I am part of an organization for recruiters that brings people from law firms and law schools in the DC area together, and have gained great insight into the nature’s of other firms and schools through those people. I know a bit about what big law looks like from the inside. Which caused me to be genuinely surprised at the misperception that preceded her questions. I could perhaps understand it ten years ago, but it’s not at all where the industry is today.

I hate to disrupt the law school status quo, but big law is not the uncaring, whip-lashing behemoth they might like to portray it as.

On the contrary, what I see in the people I work with, what I hear in management messages, what I help organize in firm events and programs, and what I read in the industry’s trending and most reported on news is very focused on helping people; their clients, yes, but also their attorneys and staff, their families and their communities. Pro bono work and women’s empowerment are two great examples of this.

Pro bono is a proud feature of big law. Over the course of our four-week virtual summer program we had hour and a half long panels weekly on our firm’s pro bono efforts, often running over from the abundance of stories and questions shared. These big law firm lawyers described their work getting early release for inmates due to covid, keeping immigrant families together, death row inmates and more with a passion any public service worker would recognize. Each year most big law firms recognize significant pro bono work with an awards ceremony, and pro bono work is highlighted in every summer associate and lateral orientation. Some firms have pro bono fellowships where former summer associates can work in public service and be paid by the firm for 3-6 months before they begin working at the firm.

Rather than shy away from pro bono efforts, big law embraces it and sincerely believes our lawyers and our communities are better for it.

As for women working in law, this is another area that firms have sincerely embraced. While I can’t speak for every attorney’s mindset, firms overall are doing everything they can to promote, support, and empower women at every level. Every big law firm will have a women’s committee that aims to do just that, and most are quite active in events and mentor-ship for new and seasoned female lawyers. These committee’s are also powerful voices within the firm advocating for perspectives and initiatives with women in mind. They help put a check on old mindsets, where they find them, and ensure women don’t get lost in the planning and managing of the firms overall goals and policies.

Certainly big law is not perfect, and the fact that they have these committees and policies has it’s roots in earlier well-founded critiques.

Neither is the big law firm at the finish line of righting the balances, as recent articles about persistent gender pay gaps can attest for. But from my perspective they are hitting their stride. What’s more - they genuinely care about getting it right. Being the best in the industry has gotten the big law firm where they are, and that is the same attitude and passion they bring to bear on firm culture and morale. They want it to be at it’s best and won’t stop driving their firms forward until it is.

A Brief Outline of a Virtual Summer Program

After much debate, consideration, and virtual meetings that could not have been emails, our firm decided to host a virtual summer program for the 2020 summer associates. Although some firms had canceled their programs, and some others adopted a “boot camp” version, we felt it was important to mimic our “real” summer program as closely possible, to the extent we felt we were capable of in the uncertain environment.

We felt it was important to mimic our "real" summer program as closely as possible.

The program was reduced from ten weeks to four and was delayed from late May to begin in the month of July. It would be partially coordinated firm-wide (except one Texas office that went forward with ten weeks in person) to help with creating programming at such a late stage in the year. This was necessary since once firm management finally made the decision to go virtual, we had slightly over a month to put everything in place. In a normal year, we would have been planning since January. Many planning heads were needed.

Firm-wide programming coordinated orientations, introductions, wellness, diversity, pro bono, technology, most events, most swag packages, and a few trainings and educational sessions. At the office level we were responsible for our own trainings, practice group introductions, an additional pro bono panel, some events, and one city themed swag package. The programming and events were spread out over the four weeks and throughout the day beginning at 11am EST at the earliest to account for our west coast summers.

The example calendars below show how we organized and kept track of our weekly sessions, and help give a sense of the day-to-day balance:

We did expect our summer associates to produce work product over the course of the four weeks, and two of our trainings were specifically for this purpose. We had always done an appellate training with a reply brief during our summer program and this translated nicely into the virtual environment as our first assignment. The second training we had been talking about for some time but had never implemented, and that was our regulatory training assignment. Lastly, the summers were assigned a “real” work assignment that had been submitted by our attorneys for projects they were working on. By the end of July each summer associate had submitted three written work products to our chairs for evaluation and feedback.

After going through the program with us - sitting in front of screens all month and jumping through the inevitable hoops that come from trying new things in the virtual world - we gave them all offers to rejoin the firm after graduation.

And together we all breathed a sigh of relief that it was over!