I took one of the few summers I can tolerate out to lunch today. Somehow we ended up talking about the excessive drinking at the summer associate events. The practice the past few years has been to have an "afterparty" after most events, where the firm will open a tab at a bar or club somewhere near wherever the event was. In the past, the tab closed at midnight and was exclusively for beer and wine. Somehow, in the last few years, it has escalated to the point where the tabs are being kept open until the wee hours of the morning, long past the point when the partners have gone home to sleep and most of the associates have headed home or back to the office, and there's people buying bottles and bottles of expensive liquors and the tabs are really quite outrageous. I've tried to curb this trend, but I can't act unilaterally and there are people who feel vehemently that to keep pace with other firms we need to indulge the summers in this way, and that if this is what gets them back to the firm.... I don't buy this line of reasoning. And it worries me that we create a picture of the law firm as a place for alcoholics, and that we've set up a culture where drinking is not just tolerated but encouraged -- and a situation where summer associates are getting very drunk on the firm's tab -- on a worknight -- and showing up the next day in no shape to do any work, not that we give them any work. But I've seen summer associates vomiting in the bathrooms the morning after events, and not just a few times. It's a pretty regular occurence. The summer at lunch was telling me he thinks there's a reputation on campus of our firm as a place that's especially indulgent in this respect, and I don't like that. I worry not so much that we have this reputation, but that it will scare off students who aren't attracted to this element of the legal culture -- and I'd be lying if I didn't admit that lots of lawyers end up as functioning (or non-functioning) alcoholics, and that is a broader problem than just in the summer class, or even just among the associates, or just at our firm -- and those might be students we'd rather not be scaring off, since they might actually be able to do some work before lunchtime. But I feel like the tide is moving in the other direction and it's just going to get worse, like it has already -- although I suppose it can't get much worse unless we're buying cocaine for the summer associates to snort in the conference rooms, or distributing amphetamines on orientation day -- and I'm powerless to stop it. I don't know. Are there any summer associates out there reading? Or even associates at other firms witnessing their summer programs in action? Is this an issue? Is it bad for the law firm to cultivate a culture of extreme intoxication, or is it what people expect these days?
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