News: Chicago Lawyer Recruiting Feature Quotes Jake Mihm

The October issue of Chicago Lawyer quotes Summer Associate Program Chair Jacob M. Mihm regarding on-campus interviews for summer associate positions.  To read the full article, please see below or click the Related Files link.

For two weeks in mid-August, a spacious lounge on the fourth floor of the building that houses Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management served as the “command center” for Elizabeth Mooney and fellow law students looking ahead to next summer.

There, amid the buzz on one early afternoon, some of the couple dozen Northwestern University School of Law students in dark suits paced near windows with cell phones cupped to an ear, while others lounged on plush, mint-green chairs, worked on laptops, skimmed through notes, or passed the time with some chit-chat about the Olympics events they had watched the night before.

Nearby, outside several small, closed-door offices, law students clutching leather portfolios stood on deck, waiting for their turn.

The offices were among 40 rooms, situated on three floors of Northwestern’s Wieboldt Hall, that were said to be almost always occupied with a law firm attorney and a law student from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. each day for two weeks, as part of on-campus interviewing — the recruiting process that sends law firms to schools across the country for brief, first meetings with applicants for employment starting the following summer or fall.

“People are coming in and out all day. It’s a beehive of activity. These rooms are constantly going,” said Mooney, who participated in on-campus interviewing at Northwestern, in the weeks before the start of her first semester as a second-year law student there.

Interview season at many of the nation’s law schools kicked off in August, when hundreds of law firms descended on campuses to mark the start of an annual ritual that has long been the model followed by most large firms in the hiring of entry-level lawyers.

For the students being wooed this year, the process offers a chance to land a job as a summer associate in 2009. If all goes well during that summer—when the paychecks of summer associates at top firms between their second and third year of law school could exceed $3,000 a week — the firms extend offers for full-time employment upon graduation.

For many of the law firms, on-campus interviewing — commonly referred to as OCI — is a first step in a recruiting effort that can last several months into fall with the goal of netting top law school talent and a future labor pool.

“OCI has two aspects,” said George Pearce, a partner in the Chicago office of Holland & Knight who oversees the firm’s hiring of entry-level lawyers. “It allows you to try and get good attorneys two years later, but it also allows the firm to sell itself in terms of marketing and letting people know we have a great law firm they’re going to be dealing with. We give out promotional materials and little gifts, but I think the marketing is actually from the standpoint of the interviewer. You not only assess the candidate, but you sell the firm.

“My goal is, if I’m interviewing 20 people, I want every one of them to want an offer from Holland & Knight. You have to sell the firm when you’re doing that.”

While some observers have likened the on campus interviewing process to a speed-dating game, of sorts, Jacob M. Mihm, a partner in Ungaretti & Harris who supervises the firm’s summer associate program, used another analogy to describe the season.

“I wasn’t in a fraternity, but it’s like rush week. But it’s rush fall,” he said.

The process, Mihm added, comes with an element of competition for both the interviewer and the interviewee.

“From the law firm perspective, we need to differentiate ourselves from the other law firms that are, literally, in the offices next to you trying to recruit the same people that we are,” Mihm said. “The quagmire of the law student is: ‘How do I differentiate myself from not only the other 20 candidates this attorney is going to interview throughout the day, but the thousands that will be interviewed throughout the fall in other OCIs?’”

At Northwestern law school, about 270 2Ls and 80 3Ls took part in on-campus interviewing, in August and September, with approximately 600 offices of, mostly, top law firms and some government agencies, said Bill Chamberlain, the law school’s assistant dean for career strategy and advancement. In just two weeks in August, he said, students went through approximately 6,400 interviews.

A sluggish economy is making for a less than certain legal job market this year, Chamberlain acknowledged. But in more typical years, he said, by the time the fall recruiting process ends, more than 90 percent of the Northwestern law students who participated in interviews will have landed jobs for the next summer or fall.

‘You have to be on’
For many of the nation’s law students who participate in on-campus interviews with law firms, the recruiting process has them making decisions about where they want to launch their careers, with as little as one year of law school under their belts.

For those students, much is riding on that first interview, where the aim is to convey — oftentimes in a matter of 20-minute bursts— that they are worthy of a second look.

“Really, your goal is just to try and get that callback,” said Kevin King, a Northwestern 2L who participated in more than 25 on-campus interviews.

Toward the tail end of that August on-campus interviewing process, King, 28, offered some insight into his approach to the 20-minute interview.

“I try and leave them with a very compact message about the practice I want to do and why that connects with what they do. That’s the most important thing for me,” he said.

“But I also want to ask them some questions, and take advantage of that opportunity—to get a sense of the type of people that work at these firms and what matters to them, and why they’re there.

“You get very few opportunities to really look under the hood of these firms, and this is one of them.”
Mooney, who completed 23 on-campus interviews in the two-week period, echoed that sentiment.

“For those 20 minutes, you have to be on,” she said. “The whole process, I think it can certainly be overwhelming and draining. But, it is what you make of it. If you’re excited about the opportunity and the chance to speak with these people, your energy level would remain higher than if you regard it as a chore.”

For Mooney, who said she was looking primarily for East Coast offices of firms that offer a wide variety of practice areas and a “personality” that would make for the right fit for her, the process hardly seemed like a chore.

“I’ve enjoyed the whole process,” she said.

While still in the midst of OCI, Mooney and other students had already received green lights from several firms to proceed with the next phase of the recruiting process: invitations to visit a firm for more rounds of interviewing and lunching with associates and partners there.

“I like having conversations with people,” Mooney said. “These are really interesting people who are coming to interview us. They’re really high-powered attorneys who have done amazing work—a lot of interesting people who have clerked for various judges, or have been editors of various law reviews, or have argued a prominent case. And you can ask them about that, and that’s pretty cool to get to speak to people about that.”

The number of on-campus interviews with various firms in a day varied for students like Mooney.

“I had a day where I had five in one day; on my last day of interviews I had one. One day I didn’t have any; the next day I had four,” she said.

For the interviewers, who could range from a recent alumnus who is now working as an associate, to a managing partner, the process on a campus visit typically consists of seeing about 20 students a day in back-to-back interviews with few breaks in between, said James V. Garvey, a shareholder in the Chicago office of Vedder Price, where he chairs the firm’s associate hiring committee.

During this OCI season, Garvey said, his firm was planning to visit 25 law schools, mostly in the Midwest.

“The goal is to determine, based on that short period of time you spend with someone, whether you think they have the intellectual capabilities that we think would be a good fit for our different practice groups,” Garvey said. “Do they appear to be a person who can take on responsibility at an early stage? Do they exhibit confidence in themselves? Are they articulate? Are they enthusiastic? Do they appear to be the go-getter types who will be able to operate independently when they need to, but at the same time are not afraid to ask questions?”

For the most part, Garvey said, initial decisions about a candidate are based on a gut read.

“The old saying that first impressions are very important holds true in what’s a pretty intense 20-minute process,” Garvey said. “You can get a pretty good sense of who would be a good fit or not for our firm based upon the first five minutes of the interview and, I suspect, the same holds true for the law student.”

The bidding process
While actual interviewing on campuses generally starts in August, the process begins in spring, when law schools set their calendars for the fall recruiting period, Garvey said.

Schools take varying approaches to determining interviewing schedules. Many of them kick off the OCI season with a bidding process that has students signing up for interview slots with law firms, and ranking the firms in the order of their preference.

The computerized bidding process involves some strategizing on the students’ part.

“It’s a very complicated mash-up of factors that results in what results you actually get for your bidding,” Northwestern’s Mooney said. “You have to think about city, size of the firm, popularity, and how many slots they have … If the firm has 80 slots, then there’s more of a chance you’re going to get that firm.”

At some schools, firms are allowed to prescreen for applicants they would like to interview, based on students’ resumes or grades. Or, firms may be matched with students based on the criteria set by the firm.

However, at many top-tier schools, such as Northwestern, interviewers are presented with a stream of students based on a lottery system in which grades or class rankings are not a factor, Chamberlain said.

It is only after a student gets a foot in the door of a first interview with a law firm that grade point averages and similar information about a candidate become known.

“Even people with not-so-great GPAs get to make their pitch to a firm,” said Chamberlain, referring to the lottery scheduling system at Northwestern. “The students bid, and then the computer spits out schedules for the employers, and the employers have to interview everybody on that schedule.

“At schools that don’t have a lottery, it could be the same 20, 30, 40, 50 students that get all the interviews because they’re going for the students who are in the top of the class,” Chamberlain said. “It’s just very few schools at the top of the U.S. News rankings that are fortunate enough to have a lottery system. The firms are willing to see, basically, any student who signs up for them.”

Preparation, efficiency is key
On-campus interviewing can be an arduous process for law students who are new to the recruiting scene, but that’s where advisers with career services offices at the law schools come into play.

“We start with mandatory programs in April for these students,” Chamberlain said. “We have weekly newsletters over the summer. Then, we’re always available for one-on-one sessions to discuss their bidding strategies, interviewing tips, going over some of the rules.

“A lot of the skills they need to prepare for OCI, they need for any job. It’s standard job-searching stuff.”

That preparation, students said, includes researching the firms, as well as the backgrounds of the lawyers who are scheduled to meet with them for a first interview.

For many students, the preparation work for the fall OCI season starts well before April.

“In November, you start talking with your career counselor about what you want for this past summer, but you also start mapping out the bigger picture about what you want out of OCI,” said King, the Northwestern 2L.

“Then, in spring there are these receptions … You sort of mingle and mix and interact with a lot of the firms, and you learn a little bit about them, and then you start honing initial ideas of ‘Okay — I like firm X, but firm Y’s people really are strange. I probably won’t bid on them in OCI.’

“Then the pace picks up in March and April, where we have all-class meetings with career office folks to talk directly about OCI and to talk about your 1L summer and how to use that productively,” King continued. “And then over the summer you’re doing electronic research on the firms and employers, you’re talking with your individual career counselor, you’re developing [ideas about] who you’re going to bid on.”

Students said they also sought advice from rising 3Ls and others who went through the process before them.

“I’ve spoken to people who are interviewing in the market I’m interested in — even down to, ‘How do you figure out your callback [schedule] so as not to miss classes?’” Mooney said.

On that day in mid-August at Northwestern, King—with 25 on-campus interviews already under his belt—checked the schedule posted on a wall at the “command center” to confirm the meeting room location and name of the interviewer he would see next.

He reached his destination on the building’s second floor and settled into a seat outside a closed-door chamber. From there, a fellow law student could be seen through a window, wrapping up his session.

“You always have a little anxiety that you’re going to go in there and stink it up,” King acknowledged. “But that preparation over the summer is why I feel comfortable entering into this interview.”

Students who are up next for a given interview are instructed to knock on the door at their scheduled interview time, King said.

“I try to give them a minute or two over,” he said, moments before offering three knocks. “You don’t want to stop somebody from having a really good interview.

“Efficiency [during the 20-minute session] is key,” King said. “Because, when that knock comes, if you have not gotten your message across, there is that sinking feeling.”

But that didn’t seem to be the result for King, who had worked this past summer in a law firm in Cincinnati.

“They asked me, ‘What was the most rewarding project you worked on over the summer?’” he said, following the interview with two lawyers from the East Coast office of a large, Chicago-based firm. “It’s pretty easy to talk about. Having been through 20-odd interviews, I’ve told that story a number of times before and I’ve kind of got it together on how to tell it quickly and effectively. Practice makes perfect.”

Questions run the gamut
Generally, King said, an interview for him started out by handing over some paperwork, which typically included a resume, a copy of his law school transcript, a list of references, and a writing sample.

From there, the topics covered in those 20 minutes with various lawyers could run the gamut.

“Yesterday, I spoke about skiing in Whistler Blackcomb, British Columbia, for 15 or 20 minutes in one of my interviews—it was fun,” King said.

For Mooney, there were the more formal interview questions, such as: “‘What was the difficulty you faced at your last job and how did you overcome it?’’’ she said. And, there were the interviews that took on a more casual, conversational tone.

“I had a discussion about the best way to make a flank steak salad, because cooking is one of the interests on my resume,” Mooney said.

“Some interviewers want to go through your resume and ask you about each thing on it, and some will pick up on one thing, and it could be something you have in common, and then they’ll run with that,” she continued. “It’s totally the personality of the interviewer and what they’re looking for.”

But it could also be about what the prospective summer associate wants to glean from the interviewer.

“It’s sort of where they [interviewers] want to take it, and also where you want to take it in terms of the questions you ask,” Mooney said. “I always am interested in why they chose the firm and why it’s been the right place for them.”

Michael Roth, an associate in the real estate department of Bell, Boyd & Lloyd, was among the interviewers on campus at Northwestern.

“You’re certainly looking for people who have good grades, are near the top of the class, and have done well in law school. But then, for me, it’s[about] personality. How did they handle themselves? And then, it’s just the conversation,” Roth said. “You get to select people you think would do well in callback interviews … The thing you’re looking for is, at the end of the day, when I walk out of the room, who are the people I remember?

“What I was really looking for is, is this someone I’d want to work with every day? … Is there something interesting about them? What types of things do they like outside of legal work, and what types of questions did they ask that are a little bit off the beaten path?”

‘A worthwhile endeavor’
For the firms offering summer associate programs, on-campus recruiting can amount to a big investment, law firm leaders said, considering the fees firms are required to pay to participate in a law school’s OCI program, the costs associated with candidates’ transportation, and room and board during the callback interviewing process, and the hours spent by firm attorneys involved in recruiting and selecting candidates.

Still, said Ungaretti & Harris’ Mihm, “it is a worthwhile endeavor.”

“Having a summer program gives both the law student and the law firm a chance to take a look at each other before the law student becomes a first-year associate,” Mihm said. “The alternative does not know what you’re buying, so to speak.”

A challenge each fall, for many law firms, Mihm said, is projecting entry-level hiring needs so far in advance.

“We end up with having to, literally, do a little bit of looking into the crystal ball to figure out how many offers to give out, and how many will be accepted,” Mihm said. “Trying to handicap that each fall is a nail-biting exercise. The danger is, we don’t want to end up with more ‘summers’ than we believe we can give offers [of first-year associate positions] to.”

While OCI is a popular hiring model for the big firms, most law school graduates nationwide do not obtain jobs through that process, said James G. Leipold, executive director of the National Association for Legal Career Professionals (NALP), the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit group that tracks legal employment.

According to data collected by NALP, Leipold said, only 22.6 percent of jobs for the nation’s law school graduates of 2007 were obtained through the fall OCI process, about the same number that were obtained through self-initiated contacts, such as a letter or phone call.

The OCI process has worked well in yielding high employment rates at Northwestern, where “we have more firms coming here than we have students to give them,” said David E. Van Zandt, dean of the law school.

However, Van Zandt stressed, the recruiting system that has been followed by law firms for years—from the on-campus interviews, to the callbacks and final summer or fall employment offers—comes with its share of flaws.

“It’s very inefficient for the firms, and it’s not particularly good for the students, because there’s a two-week period where they run through these interviews and they don’t have, really, a good way of understanding how the firms differ, and what might be a better fit for them,” Van Zandt said.

The dean said a main problem with the commonly held approach to hiring new law graduates is that most firms, while focusing largely on grades, appear to be lacking a competency framework for what they are seeking in a candidate.

“Some firms are ahead, in terms of coming up with what they’re looking for—basic skill sets. But I don’t see many law firms doing that yet, where the interviewer is told to go in and rate people on a scale of these different attributes,” Van Zandt said. “What tends to happen now is, go in, have a nice conversation and determine whether you like them. That’s wonderful, but not a good way to find future employees.”

The dean said he is advocating for a more structured recruitment effort, similar to the approaches taken by accounting or consulting firms. “If you look at the way consulting firms hire people,” he said, “consulting firms, in particular, want people to invest by, maybe, preparing a problem or a case analysis … There are a lot of recruitment processes out there that law firms just don’t follow.

“[Law firms] are devoting a lot of lawyer time to traveling all over the country to do these interviews. They’re seeing lots of people that either, at the end of the day, they’re not going to want or, they have a low chance of getting them,” Van Zandt said. “A student will get interview offers from a bunch of law firms and doesn’t really know if it will be a good fit for him or, they’re not particularly invested in a firm. They may have their own pecking order, but it’s certainly not guaranteed to be a good fit.

“If you make the students invest, and you do a better job of selecting, your retention is going to be better.”

Increasingly, NALP’s Leipold said, law firms have been extending offers for callbacks sooner in the process.

“It’s not unusual to get your callback offer the same day [as that first on-campus interview],” he said. “I think law firms are trying to gain a competitive advantage. If they see somebody they like, they feel it’s to their advantage to respond quickly.”

Competition among firms vying for top
Law school talent has become fiercer in recent years. But that trend, Leipold pointed out, has been commensurate with the run-up in the
legal economy.

“The biggest firms have grown in the last 10 years. So, they hired far more associates than they used to. In that sense, what we’ve seen in the last number of years is an increase in competition,” he said. “The economy has beengood, in general, the need for associates at big firms has grown, and the number of law students has remained flat.”

In the current economic climate, however, Leipold said, “it’s too soon to say We may see a backing off from that competition.”