The Role of a Legal Summer Associate
The typical legal summer associate position is a paid position for law students to get hands-on experience in the legal field. It generally lasts for 10-12 weeks during the summer while law students are on break from school. Although some firms will hire their summer associates immediately following the completion of their internship, as part of their bid to secure the highest caliber new attorneys, many do not hire summer associates until after they graduate and have received their state bar exam scores and have been admitted to practice law.
While duties, and the pay to be expected, will vary from firm to firm , the majority of legal summer associate positions will include the following responsibilities:
The legal summer associate is essentially a temporary intern attorney and will be pampered by the established attorneys at the firm. However, these jobs should not be confused with legal clerkships. Legal clerks are generally graduate law students who have not yet received their degrees. Sometimes they’re called first year or second year clerks to distinguish them from full-fledged associates. They primarily work in the firm’s research and writing departments.
The bottom line is, if you can keep up you will have an enviable position after you graduate. Failure to appropriately approach your summer job, however, may result in having to pursue another career path.
Getting a Legal Summer Associate Position
Networking is the key to obtaining a summer associate position. Law school career services departments are full of enthusiastic professionals eager to help students make contacts. Take advantage of this service and get in touch with your classmates and professors, too. Professors will know employers directly or indirectly and your classmates will be glad to introduce you. Attend all of the career center seminars and do not hesitate to contact them for one-on-one meetings. Everyone is eager to help.
Nothing is as important to obtaining an interview as a sparkling resume. Put together a resume showing your academic achievements and interests, volunteer work, part-time job, clubs and activities, and interests. No preparatory school will do. It is better to be too short than long. Don’t lie on your resume, as it will backfire on you. Get help with your resume, but make those changes your own. Get your material together early so you can show it to the career center staff and your friends before sending it out. Print your resume on bright white 24 lb. paper that is available at office supply stores. Try to avoid just plain white.
Don’t wait for career day or any special event to meet employers. Call local firms that interest you and ask for an informational interview. Let the attorney know in advance what you are looking for so they can get back to you when there is an appropriate opening. Send out resumes to firms even if they don’t have an opening. Sometimes they will create an opening for an exceptional candidate. If you have contacts at your top firms, arrange for a lunch or coffee with the attorneys who may be doing the hiring. This is a great opportunity to get information as well as a partial interview. Don’t take this lightly and act like you’re doing the lawyers a favor. They want you to be great. Make these meetings go like clockwork. Confirm your participation early and pick a firm location near their office. Be punctual, courteous and keep the meeting to a minimum of 30 minutes. Follow up with an email thanking them for their time.
Preparing for a Summer Associate Position
Your preparation for your legal summer associate experience should begin long before you set foot in the door of your new employer’s office. As you are beginning your law school career, make continual efforts to familiarize yourself with the internal machinations of your potential employers. This will aid you in knowing what to expect, which is essential if you wish to be successful at your respective firm. Invaluable resources include your career services office, employees of your prospective firm (if any opportunity to connect and ask questions arises) and current summer associates at your target firm (again, if the opportunity arises.) Through networking and research, you can begin to understand the specific firm philosophy and how it aligns with your own personal outlook towards a legal career and how this alignment (or lack thereof) may affect your fit with that firm. For instance, in my case, I was quite familiar with the idea of big law as a rising first year law student. I understood that the general practice of big law firms was to hire a large group of summer associates, some of whom would be hired as permanent associates after the summer, and others becoming associated in the following few years. Essentially, through research and networking, I was able to learn that the Axiom law firm that I was applying to was a bit different. Instead of an intern program where numerous students are chosen each summer to experience the similar roles and responsibilities at a big law firm (and therefore be judged equally for a small number of spots), the egalitarian value of the firm was such that they chose a smaller group of interns, but relied on the individual’s skill set rather than the roundness of their resume to teach them the inner machinations of the firm. For me, this person-centric idea made this firm more appealing and gave me greater motivation to work harder to become an intern. So, when preparing for an interview, whether for a summer associate role or otherwise, research is crucial to your success, and speaking with various current and past employees is a great way to get a feel for how an employer operates and how you may best fit within their system.
Getting To Know The Law Firm’s Enviornment
It used to be that new associates would have to go through an apprenticeship of sorts, spending their first year in an office, then their second in a courtroom, followed by time at the firm’s branch offices. So-called "rounds." These days, staying in one office for the duration of your internship is standard. You’ll work closely with more teams, but you will feel more comfortable in your environment as a result.
But that doesn’t mean that you’re off the hook. You still need to adapt to your law firm culture. Be prepared to fit in — or at least try to — with the ideals of personal and professional conduct the company embraces. That means being on time, dressed appropriately and maintaining a positive attitude.
Of course, you also need to demonstrate that you can work well with others in your office. For all the "Lone Wolf" rhetoric you’ll hear on TV and elsewhere, that is not a desirable quality in today’s professional world. Particularly in a law office setting that relies on teamwork and collaboration to ensure that clients are getting the best possible representation and assistance.
That means being courteous, willing to listen to your colleagues and responsive to constructive criticism. You don’t have to be shy about asserting your opinion, but if an editor or fellow researcher has advice, you should take it—and show that you value their thoughts by incorporating them into your work whenever possible.
One final note on the law firm culture part of your summer associate experience. Focus on the people you are working with closely. If you want to be friendly and social, it helps to get to know your immediate team first and foremost. Once you are comfortable in your base of operations, branching out and taking time to learn about your colleagues becomes much easier. It may not be as big of a deal as you think now, but it can provide a real boost to your career and to that of your employer years down the road. As you navigate this multi-month process, think about the future and the opportunities at your fingertips.
Learning to Maximize
Summer associates are encouraged to learn and grow from each work experience. To the extent possible, be proactive in your assignments. Let your assignment coordinator know if you would like to pursue particular substantive or procedural areas of law. If you identify a case or project that interests you, take the time and initiative to learn about it on your own time , or request further assignment in the area from the responsible partner or counsel. Take the time to draft, settle and enter a Court order in that new area of law you have been following for the past month. Keep looking for learning experiences; the firm will appreciate your enthusiasm, and you will clearly be demonstrating that you have the right qualities to be an attorney.
Creating a Portfolio and Networking
Building a portfolio of work
As a summer associate, you are a temporary employee and you have an opportunity that is only sometimes available to full-time employees: You can build your portfolio of work over a limited horizon. Of course, you should do as much "good work" as you can for your assigned work, but a "good work" is simply a "worked for" product. There are other products that you may want to consider producing if you can augment the portfolio with them.
Therefore, if there is a subject that you would love to research and write about, make the time to tell your assignment partner about your interest in it. This might be a topic related to the subject area you are working on or it might not have anything to do with your practice area. Perhaps you became aware of a starting class action suit or some fact pattern that in your academic setting seemed outrageous or illegal or unwise. You might want to find out more and conduct research and potentially write about it. There is no guarantee that the assignment partner will approve your request, but it does not hurt to ask.
Networking with others
All summer associates know that they should be networking with others but most don’t really know how to go about it. In order to network effectively, you have to take the initiative. You should be aware from orientation that you need to go out to lunch with people outside your immediate work group (preferably associates and partners) at least once a week every week that you are a summer associate. You should keep a running list of those you would like to go out to lunch with. Typically, there do not seem to be any expenditures limits on these lunches—just check with the HR department. If you want to go out with other summer associates for lunch, that’s great too and takes up any "empty excess funding" the firm may have. There also will be plenty of "group" lunches where the firm pays the upper limit of the allowable spending as long as everyone is invited (but if you were not invited, it is not your fault). These lunches are usually things like a "Lunch and Learn" with a partner, a summer associate training seminar, or a lunch with one of the practice groups.
With the lunches out, you will have a chance to interact one-on-one with others and establish a personal relationship with those people. The lunch does not need to be formal- just wear nice street clothes and go in with a few things you would like to talk about. It doesn’t need to be super formal or super nerdy. You want to start a relationship with the others that is casual, friendly, and yet still able to discuss specific topics that you are interested in hearing about from others.
Throughout the summer, you should try to interact with all levels of the firm (perhaps in a few instances, the summer associates you met may not be interested in you or vice versa, but you will know that when you see them that they aren’t going to be first in line to help you later). Keep a running list of people’s names and email addresses and put it in your favorites folder. Save a few phone numbers in your phone. At the end of the summer, you will have a long list of people that you can now reach back out to and ask for any of these things:
If you are able to establish 20-30 good contacts with others and you can provide them encouragement, lunches, occasional updates with new info they are interested in, birthday cards, and perhaps even lunch just to keep up with them, you will have a great network of people that will be more than happy to help you find a job, get recommendations, review documents, and even be your coach for your own job interviews for whatever law firm you choose to go with after the summer associate program.
Finding a good mentor can take time. A really good friend of mine at my previous law firm was wandering around (a fellow summer associate) and asked everyone two questions: "Are you a mentor or a mentee?" and "How do you develop relationships?" I sat down with him and joked that those were two great questions to ask because they were really the title of a book I had read on mentoring. The book also pointed out who the mentees were and how to deal with them: They are really hungry to develop skills, relationships, and warmth (yes, Andy, I am a mentor not a mentee). I have learned that everyone in an organization needs a mentor-even the mentor needs a mentor. I also believe that the best way to teach someone how to mentor is for them to be a mentee first. So I think that taking the time to look for a mentor and then making yourself available to mentorees is really the key to being considerate and being able to help others.
Getting A Job Offer After the Summer
There are three primary ways you can increase the likelihood of receiving an offer of employment when you reach the end of your summer associate gig:
1. Do well.
This might seem obvious, but the point is that you should do well at your summer job (regardless of how "secure" you feel your job is at the start)—and we mean be proactive about showing what you can do well. Whether it’s drafting a motion or other document, conducting highly complex research, interviewing and preparing clients for rough deposition or trial, seeking out opportunities to pitch in on ongoing matters, or otherwise enhancing your ability to contribute to the firm, the key is to look for ways to demonstrate your value to the firm beyond the execution of typical summer associate tasks. If you do this, you will shine not only among the summer associates, but also among the firm’s more junior associates and other employees.
2. Seek out and act on feedback.
When you finish a project or task, ask for feedback. For example, ask your supervisor how they liked your research or writing, if they could have used it in a specific way, and if there is anything you could do to improve how you conduct such tasks in the future. Act on the feedback you receive via additional law-related research, writing, or other tasks for your supervisor. You’ll have not only further proved yourself by applying feedback , you will also demonstrate that you care about what the firm thinks of you—or, as one partner we spoke with described it, "How much someone cares really matters." It shows that you care to learn, that earning a position at the firm is important to you, and that you are looking to make yourself an asset to the firm now and down the line.
3. State the obvious.
You need to communicate to your supervisors that you are interested in and want to stay with the firm after your summer position ends. Even if your supervisor has told you "more times than I can count," they want you to be happy in your position, they would love to have you come back, and they will be thrilled if you join their firm permanently, you need to express your own enthusiasm, willingness to stay with the firm, and interest in being considered for an associate position once you graduate. That said, unlike alumni who simply want to make partners at their firms, you do not want to come off as so aggressive that you appear to be lobbying for a position you think you deserve—as one partner described it, "I am not eager to hire someone who does not have the same vision of success as the firm." Rather, you want to make it clear that you have the same vision, you are interested in pursuing that vision both now and in the future at the firm, and you plan on actively working to achieve that vision—while remaining flexible as to how you do so.
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