Dana Lake ‘23
Production Editor
This article is inspired by my own choices through On Grounds Interviews (OGI). For 1Ls, OGI happens in stages. The first and longest stage, which you are already in, is networking. Then comes bid selection, then screeners, and hopefully callbacks and offers. All the way through callbacks, I found myself regretting choices I made along the way. So here is some unsolicited advice, from someone not so far removed from the process, who could have avoided a lot of trouble by reading something like this in the fall of her first year.
Lawyers love to rank things. It makes sense, considering that we’re a profession built from some of the world’s most competitive people. In law school there is a real feeling that every part of your resume exists on a continuum from worthless to gold, with the dreaded median in between. One example among hundreds is how we treat journals. It isn’t enough to be on a journal for the experience and community it can bring—there is a best journal, and the others are secondary. An offer from Law Review isn’t something you turn down, even if the content of a specialty journal is something you’re genuinely interested in. Even among the specialty journals there is an understood hierarchy. The pattern repeats again and again—we rank law schools so it seems like there are fourteen that really matter and the rest are borderline scams, even if privately most people can acknowledge the US News and World Report list is an easy system to game. We rank students by GPA but grade on a curve, so that some will always have to be on the bottom no matter how finely we need to split the hairs between exams to make it so.
For competitive people, even those who call themselves “collegial,” this is fun. It’s fun to try and be the best at something, and it’s fun to win. This author would not dare to suggest otherwise. The problem comes when this mindset is carried outside the law school bubble and contaminates the real world.
When you are deciding between public service and private practice, the V100 is something you’ll hear a lot about. If you’re new to the legal field, go to Vault.com and find the top one hundred list of best firms to work for. Just thinking about it, a list like this seems like total hoopla. We rank markets in a similar way, with New York and DC and Los Angeles existing in a mythic plane above the rest of the world. Will you be 100 times happier at Cravath in D.C. than at Hunton Andrews in Miami? Is it some guarantee you’ll get along with your co-workers and spend your time doing substantive work in a field you love? Are the compensation packages even that different if you account for taxes? No. But the big firms are similar to the big law schools, and just like you’ll find people who believe Georgetown might as well have shut its doors when UCLA overtook it last year, there are people who believe a firm that falls outside the V100 (or even drops in ranking) is suddenly a toxic place, probably without any clients and paying associates a measly $170,000.
It makes sense, given how the private practice hiring process is structured, to go to the best law school that will accept you. It makes sense to boost your resume by participating in extracurriculars you don’t necessarily care about in order to be the most competitive applicant you can be. It makes no sense at all to carry that thought process through to the real world.
The problem is thinking that the achievements you unlock are the end in themselves. To employers, they are a sign you have the skills needed for the world of billable hours. But if you are unbearable to be around, or even if you are wonderful to be around but terrible at interviewing, you’ll lose out on opportunities to people that on paper seem less qualified. That’s because firms are a business, and the pursuit of prestige is carried only so far as it helps the business.
Students need the same mindset when choosing a firm. All the lists of rankings in the world will tell you only which firms have the best PR teams, but still the temptation to “do the best you can” is incredible. It’s probably what you’ve tried to do your whole life up until now, and in many ways it is the easier course. Choosing where to start your career is absolutely overwhelming, and it requires a lot of questions only you know the answer to. It doesn’t help that these are all decisions that you have to make during one of the busiest years of your life so far. It’s a much simpler matter to choose prestige. This appeal is simply to say, if you are trying to build a real career or relationship or family, choosing the most prestigious option, if that choice is based on prestige alone, won’t make you happy in any way that matters. There will always be someone doing better. Think about what is really valuable to you and the life you want to live outside of work, and look for a firm that aligns with those goals.
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dl9uh@virginia.edu