You have made it past the bar, went on a fantastic bar trip and are waiting to start your job as a junior associate. Unfortunately, being a first-year associate is not going to be the same as your two months as a summer associate. I know, but someone has to pay for those lunches! I was the first lawyer in my family and learned most of this the hard way. I am here to teach you what I know. I will use transactional terms because that is my comfort zone but these concepts are transferrable to litigation.
No one expects you to know anything at first. As discussed further below, the best you can do is be responsive, double check your work and pay attention.
1. Be responsive. A lot of the work you will be given as a junior associate constitutes a small part of a larger transaction. As a junior, you are not usually responsible for work that will make or break a deal. You will also probably have a mid-level or senior associate reviewing your work. However, none of this means that your team is not relying on you. When you get an assignment, confirm receipt with a “will do.” You are probably going to have questions, especially within the first few months. I usually respond with a “will do” within 10 minutes of receiving an email, review the assignment and consolidate my questions in a singular message back to the assigning attorney. Do a thorough review of the assignment and try to place it within the larger context of the transaction. This will help anticipate questions that might not surface upon a cursory review of the assignment.
2. Double Check Your Work: There is so much that you do not know and therefore are unable to control when first starting out. Focus on what is in your control. You can make sure that your emails and work product are free from typos. In corporate transactional work, associates typically work from precedent documents from a similar prior deal. When drafting a set of closing documents, for example, make sure to update the entity name and avoid leaving names from the previous transaction in the document. This an easy way to convey that you are paying attention without having to know much about the specifics of a complicated deal. Submitting a clean first draft will make it easier for the senior members of the team to do the higher-level customization to fit the needs of the current deal.
3. Know the status of the deal (to the best of your ability). This piece of guidance is of more use about a month or two into your job because if you are like me, at first, you will barely be able to keep up. You are going to be copied on a million emails. It is totally fine not to fully comprehend everything but try to understand where your team is with respect to the overall deal timeline. See if you can deduce whether the deal has priced or is closing. Again, you will not be expected to know exactly what these terms mean but grounding these terms in your lexicon will help you know what to expect for the next time around. As you will see, corporate deals tend to follow the same general process even for different clients.
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