Biglaw lateral associates

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:OP, I am going to focus on this part of your statement:

"Our current associate can handle those types of tasks, but this week dropped the ball majorly on two big things: the first, a client deadline that had been very clearly conveyed, months and months ago, and the second, a substantive research and writing assignment that was just not well done."

Do you know what high schools these laterals went to? Because I have seen modern public suburban high schools because my kids went thru them - supposedly good ones - and they are a) not teaching kids how to write and b) teaching kids it's fine to miss deadlines.

Frankly, I would try to hire people who went to schools like Sidwell and NCS and then to top thirty SLACs or maybe HYP and majored in something writing intensive like English or History.

Public schools kids are not learning how to write and they are not learning how to meet deadlines and work hard. We sent our third kid to private after the mistake of sending the first two to MCPS.

It's a well known feature of biglaw that HYP are the WORST attorneys. The best are top of their class in big state schools, and top 1/3 of their class in the "rest of the best" law schools (GW, Georgetown, NYU, Vandy, etc). The HYP kids are so used to theoretical work rather than "real" work, no grading in law school, and are often such hyper nerds or on the spectrum that they lack the common sense that's a necessary component of a client facing service profession.

No, this is not true. I’m guessing you’re not in big law or even a lawyer since you have a bizarre grouping of ‘rest of the best law schools’. No one in the know would ever lump NYU in with GW or Vanderbilt.

Huh? no of course I'm in big law. For more than 20 years. Of course NYC and GW and Vandy are all in the same bucket of performance. They are very hard to get into schools, but not 'ivy hard'. The difference between getting into one versus the other could just be getting a couple quesions wrong on the lsat or taking a harder major in undergrad.

This is idiotic. NYU and GW are nothing alike. If you’ve been in big law for 20 years, you wouldn’t draw a distinctions like ‘Ivy Hard’. Historically, Cornell and UPenn were easier to get into than NYU, which is typically tiered with Columbia and Chicago. GW and Vanderbilt aren’t T14 and shouldn’t even be part of the conversation.

But we're not talking about how hard admissions are to a school. We're talking about which of those schools correlate to good associates.

My experience over 20 years in big law is that with someone top 1/3 of their class at Vandy vs Georgetown, it could be a toss of the coin as to which one ends up being a better performer. They're both in the bucket of "likely to be a decent associate".

More on this.... also worth noting: I see GW is currently ranked 41 on the US news list, while NYU is 9 and GU is 14. Seems like a big spread but when I was in law school, GW was something like 18. It was, and remains, hard to get into. That it could drop from 18 to 41 on the list is probably related to something dumb like their library collections, or diversity job placement or some other arbitrary feature that has little to do with its quality of education or the quality of kids graduating from there. Point being: schools ranked at #10 versus #50 are all in the same pack.

The employment outcomes of T14 schools vs T50 do not support your theory.

What do you mean "employment outcomes"? Who gets hired into the top firms? Who ends up being any good? Who makes partner?

I think PP is saying that if it were widely accepted that the top 50 schools are more or less the same you would see a more even distribution of kids in biglaw from the top 50 schools when in reality it's top 10% of kids from the schools outside the top 14 or so.