The Associate Pirate

I don’t think I realized until my sixth or seventh year out of law school that there were legal recruiters out there who had actually been practicing lawyers first. This is a profession largely populated by sales folks, many of whom have never set foot in a law school, much less a courtroom or a closing. But when I think about it, my own path to legal recruiting really started in law school.

I was in the second semester of my third year, a time when law students tend to “give back to the curve” by devoting a bit more time to beer and softball than to their studies. I had already finalized a clerkship position, had an offer for a firm in Boston for the following year, and had a summer position at another firm in DC to broaden my options, so there wasn’t much left to stress about. My natural habitat had become the law school computer lab, where I whiled away the hours playing dangerously addictive computer games. And one evening, while I was pwning n00bs at Stellar Crisis, one of my classmates sat down next to me.

It turned out that he was applying for law firm jobs for the first time. He hadn’t participated in the hiring process when we were 2L’s, and his grades were, well, not exactly law review. But he had high hopes. Specifically, he had a list of five of the top firms in Washington, DC, and he was going to make them his.

I decided to help him expand his search a bit.

So, over the next two months, I worked with him on his resume, his targets, his cover letters, his interview technique, and even his travel plans. Eventually, he landed interviews with a firm in Long Island and a firm in Washington, DC. The interview in Long Island went so well he wanted to just skip the interview in Washington, DC. But I convinced him we should make a road trip out of it, using the one argument that couldn’t fail: “There’s a place on the corner of 19th and L that has a sushi happy hour. A buck a piece.” (They’re actually at 17th and I now.)

He was sold.

So was the firm in DC. They gave him an offer at the end of his interview, and I was with him in the restaurant when he called his mom to tell her that he would have a job after graduation. A few weeks later, he proposed to his girlfriend, now his wife. Eventually, he moved to a new city to join a boutique that later became a branch of an AmLaw 50 firm. He has since founded his own practice, has a few investment properties, and recently became a father.

I could tell you about my own experiences practicing law, whether as a Big Firm lawyer or an in-house counsel or a judge’s clerk — and many of those experiences were pretty cool — but none of them compare to the experience of helping my friend take that first step in his career, and seeing how that simple moment has impacted his life ever since.

So that’s what I do now.