Without having a family or friend go through the on-campus interview process before you, differentiating between the firms coming to OCI is like finding a needle in a haystack. Below is a list of items you should use as guidance for your research in preparing your bids:
1. Are you interested in litigation or transactional work? This is an important question because some of the large firms are focused almost exclusively on litigation. That's right, your legal research days will be far from over. Do some online searches and try to see what each large firms is known for. You could also ask your career services office. Often, the counselors are former recruiting members of the large firms or ex-associates themselves. They invite the firms to interview at their school each year and have an idea of what each firm is looking for. If you detest legal research, don’t waste a valuable bid on a litigation powerhouse.
2. Do you want a rotation program? This is a good question to ask in an interview if you cannot find it out prior to your screener. Summer associate programs are all structured differently. Some firms give their summer associates access to a data base where the associates post assignments and the summers grab work that interests them. Other firms use what is commonly referred to as a rotation. This typically means that for your eight or ten week summer program, you spend two weeks in each of M&A, tax, capital markets, litigation, etc. A rotation could be a nice feature because most law students are not fully committed to practicing a particular area of law yet. For someone dead set on tax law, however, having the freedom to choose assignments and cozy up to the tax group early on is advantageous.
3. Culture, Culture, Culture. This one is less of a do or die because your experience at a firm heavily depends on who you are work for. That being said, when a firm is consistently ranked poorly for its culture and the horror stories seem to be endless, do not ignore that information.
4. How large is the firm’s summer associate class typically? It is important to look into the firm’s typical summer associate class size. Some of the larger firms have classes of 20-100+. Assuming your grades are at or close to their ranges, spend more of your bids on those firms than on those with less than ten summer associates.
Happy bidding!
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