Many miles away, I still get the firm gossip. One of the other hiring partners sent me an e-mail saying that at last night's summer associate event he figured out that one of the junior associates is perhaps engaged in some extra-curricular activities with a summer. The catch: one of them's married. And it's not the junior associate. He's not sure if he should say anything -- at least on the order of: "We notice. Be more discreet." I haven't written him back yet; I'm really not sure whether it's our place to do much at all, especially since there's no hard evidence, just this guy's hunch. And they're all adults and are responsible for their own moral failings. As far as we can tell, it hasn't affected the junior associate's work product -- and there's not much work product produced by the summers, so nothing really to affect there. My solution would just be to not give the summer an offer. But that solution will be vetoed.
That brings up an interesting discussion, perhaps: offers. The default, of course, like it is at all of our competitor firms, is that all of the summers get offers. This is a frustrating policy. Oftentimes, despite how much we liked someone during the interview process, they arrive for the summer and we discover either (a) they're incompetent, (b) they're incredibly lazy, or (c) they're terrible people and no one wants to work with them. Perhaps surprisingly, people fall into category (c) much more often than they do (a) or (b). I don't think it's unique to law students, but a lot of people we hire (and it's not unique to our firm) turn out to be jerks. It becomes pretty obvious after any amount of interaction with them. But they do their work. And sometimes jerks make good lawyers. If we could get rid of them after the summer, this would probably be a nicer place. But it would also be a smaller place. So we can't get rid of jerks. Categories (a) and (b) are harder to rationalize as far as giving offers. With (b) we hope it's just the summer. With (a) we hope they fall down a manhole and die. Or fail the bar exam. Which happens. And is a big relief when it does, because it's our only real justification for firing someone, ever.
If it were up to me, we'd give about half our class offers and let the rest go live under a bench in the park. But it's not. And I know that if we did that, no one would come to our summer program. Because all of our competitors would still give everyone an offer, and for risk-averse law students, why come here and take the risk you'll fall short? Of course, if you're confident, you would want to come here, because you'd know you wouldn't have to work with the jerks and the idiots. But it isn't feasible with the way this stuff works. Unfortunately. So instead we have lots of jerks, lots of lazy people, and lots of incompetents. But at least we don't have any fat people.
That brings up an interesting discussion, perhaps: offers. The default, of course, like it is at all of our competitor firms, is that all of the summers get offers. This is a frustrating policy. Oftentimes, despite how much we liked someone during the interview process, they arrive for the summer and we discover either (a) they're incompetent, (b) they're incredibly lazy, or (c) they're terrible people and no one wants to work with them. Perhaps surprisingly, people fall into category (c) much more often than they do (a) or (b). I don't think it's unique to law students, but a lot of people we hire (and it's not unique to our firm) turn out to be jerks. It becomes pretty obvious after any amount of interaction with them. But they do their work. And sometimes jerks make good lawyers. If we could get rid of them after the summer, this would probably be a nicer place. But it would also be a smaller place. So we can't get rid of jerks. Categories (a) and (b) are harder to rationalize as far as giving offers. With (b) we hope it's just the summer. With (a) we hope they fall down a manhole and die. Or fail the bar exam. Which happens. And is a big relief when it does, because it's our only real justification for firing someone, ever.
If it were up to me, we'd give about half our class offers and let the rest go live under a bench in the park. But it's not. And I know that if we did that, no one would come to our summer program. Because all of our competitors would still give everyone an offer, and for risk-averse law students, why come here and take the risk you'll fall short? Of course, if you're confident, you would want to come here, because you'd know you wouldn't have to work with the jerks and the idiots. But it isn't feasible with the way this stuff works. Unfortunately. So instead we have lots of jerks, lots of lazy people, and lots of incompetents. But at least we don't have any fat people.
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