When I was a kid, we didn't get any stinking $150 cab rides

Conor Friedersdorf is a guest blogger at Andrew Sullivan's place. He opines that:

The details of how elite law and business consulting firms recruit astonish me every time I hear them. Even getting an interview often requires attending an Ivy League professional school or a very few top tier equivalents. Folks who succeed in that round are invited to spend a summer working at the firm, the most sane aspect of the process.

But subsequently, they participate in sell events where they're plied with food and alcohol in the most lavish settings imaginable: five star resort hotels, fine cigar bars, the priciest restaurants. A fancy dinner will be scheduled in a faraway city. Summer associates will fly there that evening, spend several hundred dollars on the meal, spend the night in a hotel, and fly back the next morning in time for a 10 am client meeting. They'll expense steak dinners or $150 cab rides without a second thought. The whole process is designed to appeal to their status conscious side, to accustom them to a kind of luxury that requires them to retain highly paying jobs, and to keep them busy enough during their summer tryout that anyone unable to commit their whole lives to the firm won't stick around.

It wasn't that way when I was a summer associate or a practicing lawyer, but then again those were back in the days when the world was still in black-and-white. We actually used things called Wang workstations instead of PCs and phones were plausible instruments of homicide instead of minicomputers. Plus, we had to walk to work in the snow. Uphill. Both ways.

But maybe I just worked at the wrong firms. Or maybe the world has changed. Because over at Above the Law we learn that for some folks the 2010 summer associate program was pretty plush:

• Summer associates at this litigation powerhouse brag that their “workload is super light,” completing one to five assignments over the course of the 12-week summer program, and typically spending about five hours a day on billable work.  Just don’t expect to be making the lunch rounds at the city’s trendiest restaurants.  Summers eat in at the firm’s dining room, which serves free but “excellent” lunch daily.
• It certainly pays to have high-profile clients at this firm, which treats its summer associates to unique social events like the Tony Awards and the NBA Draft.
• The line between summer and full-time associates is blurred at this firm, with summers “put[ting] in well over 80 hours” during some weeks to complete 15 or more assignments during the eight-week summer program.  Despite their high work demands, these summer associates still find the time to be do-gooders by volunteering to cook at the Ronald McDonald House for kids and their families.
• The good old days never left this firm.  Summer associates typically bill about four hours a day on assignments, leave at 5:30 p.m., play softball at Fenway Park, and still get 100% offers. But you might want to think about taking an extended post-bar trip, since you might not start work on time as a first-year associate.
• No complaints at this firm, which gives summer associates “exactly the work that they want” and still provides a “very generous” $65 lunch budget in New York.  Be sure to brush up on your foreign language skills; one-third of the summer class gets to spend up to three weeks working in one of the firm’s overseas offices

WTF? Why didn't White & Case send me to the NBA draft? Arnold & Porter never let us play softball at RFK stadium either. I wuz robbed.

On a serious note, I find it puzzling that some summer associate programs were so plush in this job market. One would think things are so tight that firms could feed associates bread and water and still have the associates walk on hot coals to get an offer.

Thoughts? Comments? (Trolls from the O'Donnell post will be banished.)

Comments

[Matt]

I've never worked at a big-law firm, and, at the places I worked in the summers during law school, we thought it was a big deal to go to the local Indian chain once a week, but I suspect this Friedersdorf fellow is playing fast and loose here, taking the most extreme bits from several different firms and putting them together, as if they all happened at each big firms summer program. That, and the obnoxious ivy-league play at the start makes me think this is mostly nonsense.

[ch3cooh]

I'd love to see someone do a a BigLaw recruiting diary ala infamous Willie Williams football recruiting diaries that the Miami Herald ran a few years ago (http://deadspin.com/5060218/the-ballad-of-willie-williams)

[Thomas]

"The whole process is designed to appeal to their status conscious side, to accustom them to a kind of luxury that requires them to retain highly paying jobs"

That's the key. The issue is not that associates are being "wooed" to accept an offer -- they're being addicted to a lifestyle. The glitz isn't meant to *land* the associate; it's to keep him from leaving when he burns out three years down the line.

[tim maguire]

The problem, as I see it, is that the primary purpose of the new hire is to burnish the firm's bio to justify the outrageous fees charged. Clients don't pay $1,000 per hour for quality work, they pay to have a Harvard Grad or a Law Review Editor do the job. That way if it all goes wrong, the CEO can still say he hired the best. It's called CYA and it's why credentials often count for more than ability in the business world.

I worked at a smaller firm and when we went up against one of the big firms, I never noticed a change in the (generally low) quality of the work. Associates would misstate the law, cite cases that don't support their position (it was an occasional pleasure to knock down a claim citing the same case they used to make the claim). And when I was done, I'd bill my client roughly 1/3rd what their client got billed.

These ridiculous fetes are relatively cheap when considering what those associates' lines in the firm bio are used to justify to the client.

[Anthony]

In the late-eighties, engaged in a protracted search for work in my chosen esoteric profession, I did a stint as legal assistant at Cravath, Swaine & Moore. They, too, lavished attention on their summer associates, so much so we morlocks referred to them as "summer partners."

[SMD]

It is somewhat shocking how inaccurate Friedersdorf's post is. Especially in this economy, no summer associate is expensing a $150 cab ride, nor would they fly off to another city, have dinner, stay in a five star hotel, and fly back for work. I doubt it ever worked that way, but if it did, it isn't now, and anyone that tried to do any of that would be looking for work during their 3L year.

[U.Va. Grad]

SMD is right. $150 cab rides and flights to dinner were never the norm, even during the best of times (when I was a Biglaw summer associate). I won't deny that the whole recruitment process was pretty much ridiculous, and would look offensively decadent to most people, but Friedersdorf doesn't need to overstate his case to make that point. It's enough to point to real cases, e.g., the $3,000 bar tab* that Skadden reimbursed in 2007. Tales of private jets to wherever aren't necessary.

* http://abovethelaw.com/2007/06/skadden-cristal-boy-an-alternate-account/