5 Things From Big Law For The New Legal Recruiter

The legal recruiting field used to be led by former lawyers, but that's not the case anymore. Here are 5 things you should know before jumping in without a legal background.

There is a LOT to know about legal recruiting. For a rather niche field, the world of big law (law firms with more than 1000 lawyers) legal recruiting has a fairly high “bar” of its own – if only a theoretical one (the bar is the final state/national exam that law students must pass to practice law). In fact, the field of legal recruiting was originally lead by former lawyers, and those with a JD (juris doctorate, or a legal degree) still dominate the career track today.

“For a rather niche field, the world of big law (law firms with more than 1000 lawyers) legal recruiting has a fairly high 'bar' of its own - if only a theoretical one (the bar is the final state/national exam that law students must pass to practice law).”

But it’s not impossible to get in, especially if you’re a quick study in an immersion environment (read: big law firm). Below are 5 things to know to get you started:

5 Things to Know

1. Not all lawyers are the same. More specifically, there is a difference between partners and associates, counsel, and summer associates. These differences are important to them (they’ve worked hard to get there), and important to acknowledge in your interactions with them (you want to keep your job).

• The Partners are at the top of the food chain - they own the firm, bring in the clients, and distribute both wealth and work to the rest of the firm. Learn their names first.

• Associates work for the partners. The kind of work they receive can be determined by their class year, or seniority, and areas of specialty. You can generally get by with learning their names as you go.

• Counsel is basically a sort-of step between an associate and a partner. While those with a counsel title have the experience of a partner, they don’t have the same responsibilities or underlying business association, for whatever reason (and there are usually very good reasons). Learn their names like you would partners.

• Summer associates are law students that are interning at the firm over their summer breaks. They are given “real” legal work to do to prove their skills, however, they have not graduated law school yet. Although not technically lawyers, we include them here because they are a big part of why the legal recruiting world exists (and why legal recruiters never take vacations in summer). You don’t need to worry about learning their names – they will be ingrained into your head before they even step foot into the firm.

2. Be prepared to sacrifice your summer vacation. There are two very important and very major things happening in the legal recruiting world during the summer: the Summer Associate Program and On-Campus Recruiting (OCI). These two programs are typically impossible to escape responsibly as a legal recruiter and will require your presence (unless you get into Partner Recruiting but that is typically a later step in the legal recruiting world – nonetheless, there is hope for future summers!). Also, know these programs:

• Summer Associate Program: Firms like to grow by bringing in law students, so after their first or second year of law school, the firm will select a small group of students to intern at the firm during their summer break. The workload, events, trainings, and overall coordination of this small group of students is entirely up to the legal recruiting team. For most firms, this typically begins after the second week in May and will run until the last week in July.

• On-Campus Recruiting (OCI): How do firms select the small group of students they would like to invite to intern over the summer? OCI is how. OCI is an intense interviewing sprint with many law firms visiting many law schools to find the best students. It currently begins the last week in July (schools and firms keep pushing it earlier and earlier to get the best jump on the brightest students) and lasts until early September. Summer? Gone. (Not to worry though, I’ve taken fantastic vacations in spring, and since no one else is vacationing then my posts get all the attention!)

3. You may get deep fulfillment from watching “your” summer associates “grow up”. So far this article has made a lot of noise about the summer sacrifice, and it would be remiss for us to leave out the other side of the coin. Because in many case you get to see the progression of these students from first interview, to summer associate, to passing the bar, to first year associate and beyond (depending on how long you stick around) and you tend to become quite attached to them and their success. When they “make it” you’ll want to celebrate as well!

4. Not all lawyers go to trial. In many cases, should you choose to go into big law, MOST of the lawyers time will not be in a courtroom. Not what you’d expect by watching TV, right?

So what is it that all these lawyers do all day? The answer has to do with practice groups.

Practice groups are areas of commerce or government that team of lawyers specializes in. There are a lot of things that the rule of law has to be applied to, and that interpretation is what many lawyers in big law are working on all day in their offices.

They ensure that their clients are complying with government regulations, that other countries are treating US companies fairly, structuring real estate deals, modifying, facilitating and updating employment agreements, ensuring healthcare products and placements are compliant, and protecting the consumers from misleading advertising slogans – to name a few. In other words, lawyers don’t need to go to trial to argue, and most of that interpretation can be done outside the courtroom.

What does that mean for you? It’s good to understand because the partners will count on you to help guide the best candidates to them, and the backgrounds of those candidates will vary widely based on the kind of law they practice. Knowing about their practice group (and that there ARE practice groups) will help you ask the right questions.

Additionally, you’ll likely be involved in structuring their trainings at some point in your career. Different practice groups will want to focus on different skills, according to what they spend most of their time doing. Here again, knowing that each practice group can function completely differently than another will help ensure you ask enough questions to tailor those trainings so their group can benefit the most.

5. It’s all about words. Not only do lawyers work with words all day, but there is a general vocabulary associated with working in a legal environment that is helpful to understand in advance. In your case you’ll want to have familiarity with both legal terms as well as law school terms. There are some good guides on the internet to help (my top find here), and below are some basics to get you started:

• 1L, 2L, 3L: A first year law student, second year law student, and third year law student, respectively. Also helpful to know that law school is typically three years and is considered a graduate school (happens after an undergraduate degree.)

• Attrition: It’s defined as the natural reduction of staff (read: lawyers) due to typical courses of business such as retirement and merges. If you understand this as a different way of saying “turnover” you won’t be far off.

• Lexis/Westlaw: Legal electronic databases that are essential for your law students to do their work. They search cases with these tools.

• SCOTUS: Supreme Court of the United States. One of the better acronyms.

• ABA: American Bar Association. Administers the bar exam (see above) and maintains active professional standing for lawyers.

What did you find helpful to know in your first year as a legal recruiter? Let us know in the comments below!

How to Run a Successful Callback Night

Planning tips from big law on how to make your callback night event a success.

After the mad dash on campus to interview 2L law students during OCI comes the inevitable period of callback interviews. Callbacks, when the students visit the firm for a full round of interviews after their initial screening during OCI, can at times feel like a logistical nightmare for the legal recruiting team. As OCI continues to be pushed earlier into the summer months, navigating attorney vacation plans and empty offices has meant that the recruiting team sometimes has to look for creative solutions to bring in the multitude of students that are selected for these interviews. One solution that has been getting traction in big law firms is what is known as the Callback Night.

What Is Callback Night?

“The process is much like a mini OCI.”

Callback Night is when attorneys interview a round of students consecutively in one evening, followed by a reception. The process is much like a mini OCI. The firm invites in 15-20 students at once and have the same number of attorneys prepared to interview. The students rotate through 4-5 attorneys individually for 15-20 minutes each with a 5 minute break. Afterwards the students and attorneys attend a reception, where they have a bit more time to build rapport, meet attorneys they didn’t get a chance to interview with, and experience the firm’s culture. Typically the recruiting team will be busy compiling evaluations during this time, for hiring committee review directly after the reception.

Callback Night Benefits

The benefits of callback night are numerous. Instead of spreading interviews out over weeks, they are grouped together during one block of time, which is more efficient for everyone. Lawyers don’t have to be asked for each time slot individually, but instead have a 2 hour time period set aside where they will be scheduled with several back to back. Evaluations can be submitted and reviewed afterwards for many students at once, allowing for quick and easy comparison on candidates who should receive offers. And the reception following gives the students more free flowing time to interact with the lawyers and experience firm culture for themselves.

Callback Night Guidelines to Success

“Be prepared to strategize"

With as many moving parts as this night entails, detailed planning is essential. So how do you manage and run a successful callback night? Below are some helpful guidelines from my experience in Biglaw.

Get Planning

• Determine the practice group focus. These nights work well when you have a large number of students who will be interviewing with the same general interests. For us this was litigation and appellate, whereas at my previous firm the focus might have been International Trade.

• Outline the space. Get blocks of time reserved on the lawyers calendars and conference rooms reserved at least one month in advance, more if possible. Request the maximum number of attorneys and rooms your team can facilitate in one night. It will be a lot easier to release the time if you don’t end up scheduling as many students as you predicted rather than trying to add it in.

• Guide the students towards your callback nights. When a student calls to schedule, first determine if their practice group interest is aligned with the callback night focus and then suggest your callback night dates. Only after proposing the callback nights first would we suggest other dates if they couldn't make any of them (we had 3 of these nights over 2 weeks).

"Schedule transition time."

• Schedule in transition time. Coordinating people in groups will necessitate needing more transition time, and it’s helpful to have that included in the preplanned schedule.

• Have the students arrive 15-20 minutes prior to beginning the interviews. This ensures that everyone will have arrived and also allows the hiring partner time to introduce the process.

• Ask the attorneys to be in the conference rooms 5-10 minutes prior to the interview start time. That way if an attorney gets stuck on a conference call, or has some other schedule snafu, you have a few minutes to strategize prior to walking a student into an empty room.

• Allow for 5 minutes in between each attorney transition. This gives the interviewers time to finish their conversations and a few minutes to jot down notes or complete a short evaluation before the next student comes in. The recruiting team handled this at our firm by knocking on doors at the 20 minute mark to signal the end of the period. We had the students to knock on their next interviewer’s door after the 5 minute wait time to politely signal the end of the 5 minute period. Additionally, we had posted the bios of each interviewer on the wall next to the conference room door that the attorney was in so the students knew who was in there and stimulate productive conversations.

"Document everything, and streamline evaluations."

• Document everything. Make sure every attorney has a schedule in their conference room and resumes of each candidate they will be meeting. Handout schedules to every student so they know where to go and have extras of everything in case something gets lost along the way.

• Streamline the evaluations. Encourage the attorneys to complete the evaluations during the 5 minute break between students, and ensure that the forms are succinct enough to do so. At our firm we created a Google form that mimicked our internal recruiting evaluations and asked the attorneys to bring their iPads or laptops to complete it in real time. This allowed them to submit it immediately and someone from our team could compile them into the internal system as the next interview was taking place. By the end of the reception, we usually had a complete set of evaluations for every student that interviewed that night.

• Limit the time of the reception. Although this is their time to further increase their visibility, the students may still feel as though they are interviewing and not free to leave. In addition, by setting the reception time to an hour and a half or so, you set yourself up for an earlier night too!

• Be prepared to strategize. Reminders and confirmations are incredibly important in the days leading up to the event but they can’t, and won’t, prevent all mishaps. Be prepared to think quickly and use your resources. Know which attorneys are in the office that day in case you need to replace one. Ensure you have extra help on hand to print or run for materials. Alert your tech team of the event in case someone needs to video in last minute. Try to think through alternate plans for things that may go awry, but also be prepared for the unexpected.

As you can see, Callback Night has many details to manage but the benefits in efficiency make it well worth your time. Let me know how yours went!

Censoring Cocktails: The New Social Hour

What's behind big law firms transition from Happy Hours to Social Hours.

Summer internships at a law firm are a competitive business. While you might naturally assume that it's the law students that are competing against one another for spots at the best firms, as it turns out, the law firms are just as equally competitive. I’m not quite sure when this tradition started, but it is a well established fact that part of the purpose of the firm during a summer internship is wooing the law student.

"The summer internship at a law firm is a unique experience."

How that plays out today is that the summer internship at a law firm is a unique experience. Some might even call it extravagant. From the moment a student accepts their offer to intern at a firm the following summer, the wooing begins. Offer gifts, Christmas gifts, and pre-summer swag are doled out to the future interns throughout the year to remind them of how well they’ve chosen. Planning for summer events begins as soon as the class is complete, and kicks into high gear around January. There will be concerts, ax throwing events, rock climbing, cooking classes, boat cruises, and more, planned for each week of the program by the time the students get their first assignment.

What does this have to do with the cocktail?

It is important to establish that this pattern of wooing the student with such grand gestures was established many, many years ago, when law firms were just rising to the powerhouses they are today. Times were different then. Diversity was not a hot topic, and the idea of gender equality was a distant narrative. It perhaps wasn’t Mad Men, but the idea of treating a summer associate to expensive scotch tastings, or including the best wines at a dinner hosted at a partner’s house, was certainly included as an absolute yes in the wooing process.

For that reason, the firm hosted happy hour and event after parties became a solid fixture of every well established law firm summer associate program. They were so essential, in fact, that even when law firms cut their programs drastically after the financial crisis of 2008 - in some cases going from 45 interns to 8 in one year - happy hours and firm hosted after parties never fluctuated from the programs.

“Suddenly it doesn't seem to be as much of a competitive advantage to be the firm with the most alcohol.”

Ten years later, however, the happy hour is under the microscope. Both diversity and wellness programs have helped raise questions about the message of the firm hosted happy hour, and with the rise of the #MeToo movement and the conversations it has inspired, suddenly it doesn’t seem quite as much of a competitive advantage to be the firm with the most alcohol.

That’s good right?

Yes and no. Certainly it’s good for the student, and for the future of the firm. Reducing the emphasis on alcohol concurrently reduces the firm’s liability should something untoward happen under its affects. Not to mention it reduces the likelihood of anything happening in the first place, keeping the students safer. Additionally, it can help support the student to make better decisions regarding drinking around their potential future bosses. Both are unquestionably good results and something that firms are behind 100%. However, part of the goal of having attractive events for the students is to ensure that partners and associates will attend as well. Ultimately they are the wooers, so it is important to get their participation. Free alcohol is the easiest way to ensure people will show up.

"Free alcohol is the easiest way to ensure people show up."

What’s the solution?

Enter the Social Hour. Renaming the happy hour as a social hour takes the focus off alcohol but still provides all the benefits of getting together in a relaxed environment. It allows those that enjoy a drink at the end of the day to continue to feel welcome to do so, without excluding those that would prefer to forgo. It also continues to offer the unstructured social interactions that was unique to the happy hour, without tying it to a certain kind of behavior - namely drinking.

If you want to evolve your firm while still ensuring enthusiastic participation from your associates and partners, I’d recommend censoring the cocktail and transitioning to the Social Hour. Let me know your thoughts, and what the results have been at your firm below!