Anonymous Lawyer

Tomorrow begins the final week of this year's summer program. The summer associates, as usual, have contributed virtually nothing and cost us a great deal of time and money. Mostly our fault, since we don't even pretend to be giving them work of any consequence. The problem is that it's impossible to know at the start who is competent and who is not, and we can't take that risk. Nevertheless, most of them will be getting offers to come back. One will not. This is a recent development. We discovered that he has been printing resumes, cover letters, and writing samples at work, and sending them to other firms. His secretary clued us in. She saw him running to the printer a number of times in a row, and was curious what he was doing. So she checked out the papers before he came to fetch them the next time, and gave the recruiting coordinator a call. We expect that some of our summer associates will reinterview as 3Ls and contemplate taking jobs at other firms. We do not expect that they will use our resources to do that. For this, we decided we could justify not giving him an offer.

We will, on the other hand, be giving an offer to another summer, who has told everyone she has encountered in the past month that she hates the firm and can't imagine coming back, has failed to return calls and e-mails regarding assignments, and has sabotaged her work product on more than one occasion by fudging Lexis case cites, misstating the law, or just demonstrating general laziness and incompetence. She also keeps coming to work drunk, or so I've heard. Mostly we're giving her an offer just to keep up our recruitment stats, since we're pretty confident that she has no interest in working here. If it turns out she's been fooling us, and actually does intend to come back, we'll deal with it then. But we think it's a pretty safe bet, and with one summer not receiving an offer already, we'd rather not decline to invite another one back. It could hurt our reputation on campus.

She is this summer's "one." The one who is clearly here for the salary and nothing else, and if we didn't make our summer hiring decisions based almost entirely on law school name, 1L grades, and law review membership, hopefully we'd have a process that would weed people like her out. I've never seen a summer with none of these creatures like her, but I've also never seen a summer with more than one. If there were two or three, I'd imagine they might band together and expose the evils of corporate firm life, and turn everyone else against us. They also might figure out that if they stopped showing up at the office, no one would notice. But when it's only one of them, they're afraid to do anything too bold and risk the paycheck stopping. Not that we would actually fire someone mid-stream for anything less than a criminal offense. We've even had a summer associate ask for time off to address his drug problem one year -- and still we continued to pay him. In fact, he's currently a 4th-year associate, and one of our brightest young stars.