Help a 2L pick a law firm

Congratulations on what sounds to be three great offers. I would first strongly encourage you to continue your due dilligence on all of the firms, if you have not already done so. In particular, I would pay close attention to the 2L offer rate as published in the NALP guides, and search Above The Law and the WSJ Law Blog for articles about the firms. The media coverage is admittedly anecdotal, but can give you lots of flavor for what's going on. How the firms handled deferrals and layoffs in the past few years should provide you with insight as to what you can expect. I would also pay attention to the attrition/retention numbers -- that should give you further hints as to what's going on. I think the economic realities of ths current legal market have changed things greatly, but I would also pay very close attention to the mid-level associate salary numbers. The three firms are all starting at the same salary and likely pay similar first-year bonuses, but there are some firms who have shown significant compression in the mid-level associate salary numbers. If you're at one of these firms with severe salary compression, we're talking about potentially tens of thousands of dollars in salary in difference. My own impressions of the "satellite office" issue are based on my being in a satellite office of a very large midwest firm, and then the "mother ship" of two other BigLaw firms. The issue means pretty much zero for your first few years, but it can be a determinative factor when dealing with partnership decisions. How big a deal this is depends on how strong your local management is when viewed in the context of firm and practice group politics, as well as the exact logistics of how partnership and HR decisions are made. (It varies greatly from firm to firm, and is often opaque to the associates.) For example, say an associate in the satellite office does awesome work for several big name partners in some other offices. They write him great evaluations. But unfortunately, the associate also has a bad assignment for a local partner who writes a really bad evaluation. The personnel committee theoretically weighs everything equally, but the local partner in the satellite office may have a lot more pull than the big names from the other offices. This can be especially unfortunate if hiring and firing is done on a purely local basis. A related point is how much the firm views itself as a single entity (with cross-staffing across the various offices) versus having individual offices be individual profit centers. Different firms take a variety of approaches. As a summer associate, you will be able to pick up a lot of hints as to how much cross-staffing really takes place, and how much the "interesting" work from DC gets farmed out to NY, etc. Likewise, for partnership decisions, there are some firms where the decisions to promote associates to the partnership are very much tied to inter-office politics. This can be as stupid as "we haven't made any litigation partners from the LA office recently, so this is real important" to "New York has three litigation associates up for partnership this year, they can't all make it". I have seen people get dinged on partnership for truly maddening reasons, and others be promoted because they were in the right place at the right time. Those with mentors/advocates going to bat for them in front of the various committees can avoid a lot of this drama. There are also other firms where the partnership decisions might be dominated by the executive committee in the HQ office. It varies greatly from firm to firm. I'm not saying that you should be planning your partnership run right now, but rather wanted to give you a little more information about the full context of the "satellite office" comments you may have heard from others. Based on my personal preferences, I would avoid #1 like the plague given your other opportunities. It is very hard to be happy with your work-life balance when you are a fungible billing unit and everyone knows it's a sweatshop. Your option #2 seems to be where you are headed, although I would severely discount your actual ability as a junior associate to "dabble" in the DC-specific areas. Feel free to MeMail me if you'd like any further clarifications on what I've said here.

Everybody else seems to be steering you away from #1, but I'm going to point you back to it. There's a reason why you listed it first. For everybody else besides you and the thoughtful few, #1 is the no-brainer. It's the biggest, most prestigious firm on the list. Here's the thing about practicing law, and with all employment: you are never stuck in one place forever. Not today, in this day and age. I mean, sure you can stick it out at one firm until you make partner; but that's not as common as you think, and you have to consider that you will grow, change your mind, maybe hate any place you work at including #2 and #3. Things change, you change, so you have to be prepared for that. Here's a what-if: What if #1 actually has a really great culture, and it turns out the people are very cool, and the work is very cool? Well, that makes it the no-brainer. What makes it difficult is that big firms with douchy lawyers get a bad rap. Not saying that it is not deserving - I've never worked in a big firm, so I don't know, and I can't say I harbor any bitterness toward them. Here's another what-if: What if you go to #1, #2 or #3 and hate it, or for some reason end up not going back to whichever one you chose after you pass the bar? When a recruiter sends you to another law firm, consider which one looks best on your resume; and which one reflects your own value best. You can always move from biglaw down to boutique litigation. I'm in boutique litigation. I'll tell you that I will never make my way into biglaw; biglaw isn't usually interested in people who have been in boutique litigation their entire life. (I'm not either, but that's beside the point.) You won't know if you like biglaw until you do it. And it's possible that you won't ever know if you like biglaw if you don't do it now. In the boutique litigation community, there are a ton of lawyers that came from big firms. Some are great lawyers, some not. But coming from those firms also comes with a badge. If you go to #1, hate it, and move on, then you will be following in the footsteps of many great litigators. If you go to #1, love it, and stick around, you will also be following in the footsteps of many great litigators. I think #1, by your description, opens the most doors and offers the best opportunities. As a side note, if you are interested in intellectual pursuit, litigation is the best practical hands-on way to achieve it in a fast-paced environment. Outside of being a law professor or an appellate lawyer, litigation done right should tickle your intellectual fancy.

It seems to attract the kind of people I feel an affinity for The name of the game is to work with the people you like best. You then do your best work and make the best connections. So I'd suggest choice 2. As for the satellite office thing, that's hooey. For example, I know a woman who worked for my large firm's Alaska office. Alaska IS off the beaten law trail. She excelled, went to the state trial bench, became chief civil judge, was appointed to the Alaska Supreme Court and is now headed to 9th Circuit. And no, she isn't a Republican. Go where you can and will do your best work.

Send me a mefimail if you're comfortable doing so. I suspect that I have some very specific insight for you.

I'd think about your employment prospects two and even five years down the road. There's no point (in this economy) summering at a firm you'll love if the chances of staying employed there aren't really high. That makes me worry a bit about firm #1--what's the attrition rate of the 100 people you start with? Of course it also makes me worry about firm #3, but you'd want more reliable information than just the people at firm #1. But if we were to assume you'll have continuing employment at all of these firms, I think you just need to ask yourself what your goal is and which firm is going to get you closest to your goal. If your goal is to work for the government, do you know what type of government work you want to do? Or is "government work" just some vague escapist idea because you're not enthusiastic about billing hours and feeling unappreciated in a big firm environment? Reading between the lines of your descriptions, firm #1 isn't for you and it would be a big mistake to go somewhere you're not happy. It's not far-fetched to believe that this could show through and you might even not get an offer. Anyway, only you know what's most important to you. Which one of these firms gets you closest to the things that are important?

Something to keep in mind is that the big corporate firms are almost a difference in category from most mid-sized and small firms. I'm in an insurance defense firm. We do tort litigation, all day, every day, with the odd IP or contract dispute thrown in for good measure. We don't do a lot of regulatory work (though I'm trying to change that). Firm #1? To the extent that they do litigation, it's almost all going to be between large corporations that can afford to shell out better than $500 an hour. This means that the amounts in controversy are unbelievably large. I've got a friend at one of the best firms in Chicago, and he tells me that if there's less than $25 million at issue, his firm isn't even interested. By contrast, the biggest case I've seen my firm handle is in the $4 million range, but the vast majority settle for less than $100,000. Any case with a value in excess of $25 million is either a mass tort or a contract dispute. Another reason this is a difference in kind rather than just a difference in degree is that 1) a lot of it is going to be transactional rather than litigation, but 2) the volume is just completely different worlds. My friend at the big firm is in litigation, but has only worked on about a dozen cases in the last four-odd years. I worked on half that many yesterday, and some of the partners have between 350-400 open at any given time. So even though we're both doing "litigation," I've actually got more experience with the mechanics of civil procedure than he does, even though I couldn't even begin to brief some of the issues he sees on a daily basis. It's just different worlds. We aren't even in competition with the big guys most of the time. We don't have the experience or a bench deep enough to handle one of these massive corporate lawsuits/transactions, but they can't turn around a million dollar tort action for less than five times what we charge, let alone a few hundred of them at once. And the thing of it is that my firm is about as close as you can get to big firm practice in a mid-sized firm, as we don't do any criminal, family, or bankruptcy law, the practice areas which are the bread and butter of many small firms and solo practitioners. Associates and partners at my firm do regularly move up into more corporate firms both in town, elsewhere in the state, and to a lesser extent around the country. But we're about as "low" as you can reasonably move from one of the bigger firms, as firms smaller than we are don't even really do anything analogous to biglaw. This is something you need to keep in mind as you're making career choices. Getting a job at a big firm is the big kahuna of law school, and it looks like you're set up to do that. But remember that once you do, leaving for anything other than another big firm is not as easy as it's made out to be. You won't learn much of value about what the vast majority of lawyers in the country do most of the time. My friend at the big firm has been unsuccessfully trying to get into a prosecutor's office for two years. No one's even really interested.

If you want to memail me specifics I might have some insight.

Satellite offices - if it's the NY office, it should be pretty busy, despite not being the headquarters (very general statement; litigation is slower across the board right now, but you'd be starting in 2013, so who knows where the legal market will be then). Satellite offices, in my experience, also tend to be a bit more chill and not as bureaucratic as the head office. Go where you like the people best. Seriously. The other stuff doesn't matter. You'll be spending 12+ hours per day at your office. Practicing law in a big firm, especially in your first few years, is a very very isolating experience. The majority of your work will be done alone in your office, or from home, without interacting with others. Having a good rapport with the other attorneys can make this tolerable.

I started out in a small boutique litigation firm and left after 5 years to go to a larger firm. While I was not in the main office in Dallas, it was not really considered a satellite office (in Austin). But it was a much smaller office. Here are my impressions: I got a lot more hands on experience in the small boutique firm as a litigator. I tried a small case by myself in year 2...something unheard of in a big firm but necessitated by the nature of a smaller firm and workloads. I had a lot of client contact, learned how to try cases from beginning to end very quickly and wasn't stuck doing exclusively menial type work for the first few years. Yes, I did a lot of it, but it was interspersed with higher level work including handling hearings, trials, etc. I left the boutique (which paid the same as big firms) to move to Austin and to a much bigger firm as a fifth year lawyer. I noticed immediately that I had a much better grasp of the litigation process than those that started at that firm in the whole. Consequently, I was given a lot more responsibility and didn't really miss a beat as far as handling hearings, client contact, etc. when I moved to the larger firm. The nice thing about moving to the larger firm though was that I had plenty of first and second years to handle some of the drudgery that the smaller boutique did not have. I also had the opportunity to work on one of my cases concurrently with a large NYC firm...they billed ridiculous soul-crushing hours so I think your feelings on your first choice should be heeded. Sounds like a terrible fit and doing that for even a month would be horrific IMO. All that said, I think either option 2 or 3 would work for you. Although I was not technically in a satellite office, it was smaller and more laid back (although that might be a product of differing cultures between Dallas and Austin more than anything else). But if you want to be a litigator, go where they will give you the most responsibility...this is as much a product as the lawyers you work with within the firm as anything else though. I always steered clear of the micromanager lawyers and worked with those who were more hands off on the day to day workings of litigation. Those will be the ones who will let you do a lot more and gain more hands on experience. But a lot depends on you. When I was a senior associate/young partner at the big firm, I always encouraged the young associates to come to me with their thoughts about what we should do next in the case as opposed to just waiting around for me to give them assignments. The ones who did so are now partners and the ones who just waited for the next assignment are not.