Anonymous Lawyer

I'm going over some papers at home, and I've discovered a pretty substantial legal mistake that one of my associates made. This is not good. He or she will have quite a bit of explaining to do come tomorrow morning.

Anonymous Child had an excellent Tae Kwon Do exhibition that I saw from beginning to end, without arriving late because of work, walking out in the middle to take any cell phone calls, or leaving early to get back to the office. The medical event I described earlier today has me thinking about my life a bit. Family is almost as important as work, and I need to make sure I treat it that way.

A reader sent me an e-mail asking if I ever Google candidates, and whether it ever influences my decisions. The fact that I have a weblog probably makes me one of the more tech-savvy partners here. So I do Google candidates, on occasion, if I'm curious about something on a resume, or if I'm just killing 2 or 3 minutes before the interview. I had a candidate in this past recruiting cycle who had in his "interests" section that he's an "amateur sculptor." That isn't an interest we see very often, so I was curious what else I'd find out about him if I Googled him, and if I'd learn that perhaps he has lots of interests outside the office that would make him an especially interesting person, who may not want to waste the most productive years of his life at a law firm like ours. So I Googled him and discovered he'd won a series of contests for his sculpting, and had a website all about it, and had been written up in some articles, and looked pretty professional and focused, as if that was his real passion, and law might just be a risk-averse way to hedge his bets. Not a recipe for career success, at least not in my opinion. So in the interview, I asked him about the sculpting, and he said it's really just a hobby, and not a big deal, and tried to play it down. Which made me wonder why he'd bothered to put it on the resume, but also made me think he was lying. It turned he was actually too talented for us to pass up, but it was definitely a red flag in my mind.

A girl that I Googled this past fall turned up that she was an officer in the Federalist Society chapter at her school. Which is something she left off her resume. I asked her about it in the interview, just to see what her reaction would be, and she got very flustered and told me she thought it was a violation of her privacy to Google her. I didn't think Federalists believed in privacy rights. She didn't get an offer. Although had she just said something about not including it on her resume because she didn't think it was important then I think that would have had no consequence one way or the other.