Anonymous Lawyer

I've been surprised at the quality of the law students we've hired from the University of Iowa. It's only been a couple over the past decade or so, but both excellent. The ones from USC, a higher-ranked school last time I checked, haven't been nearly as good, overall, although there have been many more of them to form a judgment about. It's interesting how one or two students can make or break a school's reputation at a firm, and really affect decisions. Like just because a guy last summer from Chicago had stains on all of his shirts, I have this image of Chicago students as dirty and unkempt. I think of Berkeley as being a female-dominated place, just because we've tended to have mostly women from there. Northwestern is a place they really teach legal writing well -- because the one guy I remember who could really write went to Northwestern. Penn lawyers are good at golf; Michigan lawyers are fat; NYU lawyers come into the office drunk; Georgetown lawyers quit the firm after two years to go make babies. I know my biases probably don't make any sense, but they affect me. I'm less likely to call back a borderline candidate from Yale than from Harvard, because I don't like the Yale guy here. It's almost impossible for a Cornell student to get an offer here because the last two were terrible. A girl from UT-Austin caught me looking at porn; so no more students from there. But Virginia lawyers look great in skirts, so they get offers. It's weird how all of this works.