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!
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