One at a Time

11.13 am

Mid-semester evaluations for the Human Rights Clinic this week, which meant sitting down with my supervisor to talk about where we are in the project, where we want to be, and whether I'm getting what I thought I would from the whole thing. After establishing that the best time to have that meeting will be two weeks from now, when R and I are frantically writing draft after draft of the handbook, he asked how that whole social justice thing was going.

Social justice? What? I vaguely remembered mentioning something about having gone into law school with the idea of saving the world. Then came OCIP and callbacks and offers - and the truth of the matter is that when you're worrying about whether you're even going to have a job this summer, after you've been counting on said job to help pay for your semester in Europe, you start to forget that there was anything to school besides a mountain of debt and a BigLaw job at the end.

My supervisor said something that was oddly reminiscent of something I'd heard in one of those summer blockbuster disaster movies. "You can't change the world. Nothing that you or I do can change the world. But you can save one person. And for that person's family, it matters."

My East Coast Interview Tour

10.59 am

After spending a week interviewing in New York and DC, I can definitively say that there are differences between law firms, even in BigLaw. Some of it has to do with size - an office of forty lawyers feels different than an office of two hundred. Some of it has to do with work - one firm I interviewed with did only litigation, while another focused primarily on finance and international arbitrations. What interested me the most was the difference between the people at the firms.

I'd heard some recruiters talk about how firms hired based on "fit" - and I also heard that was a keyword for "we just didn't want to hire you". I'm more inclined to believe the former than the latter now. One of the firms that I was at this week is European based - and it shows. The attorneys I spoke to tended to have a more global view and to look beyond American law when discussing their work. Another firm, this one based in Texas, had more of a West Coast feel - pro bono work counts above the line there, and the attorneys were doing a "wear jeans/donate to breast cancer research" day.

And while I'm trying to sort out which firms are at the top of my list (extremely difficult, given that I only did callbacks at firms I really want to work at), I'm also sitting by the phone waiting for it to ring and reminding myself that it only takes one.