Category: Interviews

Ever since recent events, I’ve reached out to some of my friends and prior work associates and effectively stated I’m looking because I got royally screwed over (major story to appear shortly). An attorney friend from my previous job called up and told me that opposing counsel had offered a name-drop guaranteed interview with a firm (drop her name and I would absolutely get an interview with the managing attorney). How can I say no to a nepotism interview? It takes the hard part out of applying!

Here’s where it got fun though, the firm with the guaranteed interview? It was the one from Interview Story #15… yes, I was going back to somewhere I had a fantastically bad interview story nearly five years later. But I mean, come one… how could I not — I’d finally get to see the firm and put a face to the name. Plus, it just makes a lovely bookend for the first story to come back years later and take another whack at it.

So I send off my resume and put the name drop in the email and I get back a pretty quick answer from the managing / named partner telling me to come in two days later on a Friday morning. I head over to a rather nice modern mid-rise which is as nice inside as it looked from the outside. I’m relatively quickly met by the named partner and we head back to his office. Walking through the firm actually gives me a bit of hope as it is done up much nicer than most firms of the same size, and it even has a dedicated break room which looked really nice (also very rare for a small / mid sized firm).

As I walk in he motioned for me to sit in one of the large chairs in front of his desk. They were weirdly shaped and upholstered in cow hide… (shades of Interview #27) I was better this time and didn’t hesitate to sit, although the same question lingered about whether his chair was going to shed on my suit.

(sidenote… I happened to find out where the weird as hell chairs came from in Interview 27… I was talking to another attorney and something came up in conversation about that DAs office and I joked and said I had interviewed at that looney bin, and described the chairs and table. They laughed and said they knew exactly where they got them. It turns out there is a catalog of prison made furniture and accessories, those clunky ugly things were basically made in the prison woodshop. Because it was a DAs office, they got even more special pricing as a state agency and could basically buy whatever they wanted. So yeah, Game of Thrones table set were prison furniture. The defining characteristic were the huge brass studs on the cowhide, I guess prison furniture has a particular style. Creepy and fitting I guess.)

Thankfully, the partner had not remembered my name from whatever he may have heard regarding whatever had gone on at his firm 5 years prior. On the other hand, I actually think he almost viewed me with suspicion because the person who referred me was a plaintiff’s counsel. Which was weird, because as I told him, I really didn’t know the referrer other than they were opposing counsel to my previous office on a few cases, none of which I was ever assigned.

The interview itself was slightly strange. The partner did a good 80% of the talking. He didn’t ask many questions and instead I felt I was getting an elevator pitch as to why they were a good firm. What made it even stranger was that the partner was not saying they were a good firm, quite the opposite. His opinion was that he wanted to be slightly better than the average, as if that was somehow a huge selling point. To make matters a bit stranger, 75-80% of their business came from one client. It appeared that when the guy I had interviewed with several times in Interview 15 left, they closed down his practice group completely, leaving only their one main client and a few one off cases here and there.

Their one client had one guy in the big corporation who had been referring them business for the last 15+ years. My read on that is the guy referring them business was close to retirement, and it is a toss up as to whether anyone taking over that position would keep using the same firms or not. This law firm was literally surviving on a single client which could disappear tomorrow. (but hey, They hadn’t disappeared for the last many years, who is to say it would happen anytime soon. Just that it could.)

The interview went for about 45 minutes, mostly the partner talking about himself and his weird elevator pitch to me. He also had not bothered looking at my resume at all prior to me walking in (bad sign) and kept making comments about remedial training (which I trivially don’t need based on the experience listed on my resume). The partner got up to walk me out but the conversation continued for several more minutes standing awkwardly in his office before we finally started to walk out.

He then walked me out of the office all the way to the elevator bank, again slightly odd, where he finished the interview / conversation and then quite literally walked into the bathroom after saying thanks for coming. I’m not saying, he walked down the hallway to the bathroom… no. The bathroom was directly to my right, and he just shook my hand and in the same fluid motion opened the bathroom door and disappeared.

I’m pretty sure he ended the interview because he had to use the bathroom… but dear lord why would he literally walk me to the bathroom and say bye as he went in. Just… weird.

I didn’t hear anything from him. I don’t think there was an actual job, the partner never talked about money or benefits, start date, or anything else to give an indication there was an actual job. It was more a stilted social interview given as an obligation to the person who had referred me over to him. The same person he felt strangely paranoid about.

I don’t understand what the situation there was, not sure I care. At least I got to finally see the actual law firm from Interview 15, worth it in my mind just for that.

I was talking with co-counsel on a case, we were probably talking about the case for about 5-10 minutes before we made a few jokes about how crappy the case was and how our job in general sucked. Which led to me complaining about my job in specific, the phone call turned into a half hour conversation at the end of which co-counsel said, “well you do the same thing as us, why don’t you just walk over here if it’s as bad as you say it is there…” It took only a moment for me to ask if they had an open position and to say I would love to.

I dropped my resume with them and they passed it up to the managing attorney. I got a fast track phone interview which in turn immediately passed me on to the in person interview. 

I showed up at a nice high rise and walked into a bright, nicely furnished office. Nothing ostentatious, but respectable and professional, a welcome change from where I work. (I should really take some photos of my current office before I leave for comparisons). I sit down in a conference room with 4 senior attorneys, at least one of whom has their name on the door.

The interview started out slightly rocky. The first question was “why do you want to leave your current job and come over here… you’re doing the same thing as us.” It is a sticky moment because quite literally the first rule of interviewing is you’re not supposed to malign your current / previous employer. And yet that is literally what I was being asked to do in effect. 

I pretty much answered with that statement that it was a tough question for just that reason, but since we were all in the same industry and same town, some of this would be known. What followed was probably one of the more interesting interviews I’ve had simply because everyone in the room did the same work but my comments hit home nearly always. “I want to leave because our office tech sucks, explain… explain… example: the fax is still the centerpiece of the office.” This drew a huge laugh as one of them said they had to send a fax for the first time in over a year recently and couldn’t figure it out on their machine because it is used so infrequently. In our office, we use it like it’s still the 1980s. 

The interview lasted an hour and a half which in effect traced how my office did things very differently from their office and why I felt it was a bad situation. I don’t mind the work, I just thought our office was badly managed and the higher-ups didn’t care one iota about sufficiently staffing the office or providing what we needed to do our jobs. 

There was a general agreement that my situation was not great where I was and that it was much better at their office. I had actually thought I was going to get the job… they liked me, I had the experience and could hit the ground running from day one, and I had an internal referral from a lifer in the office. 

A couple weeks went by and I was pretty certain I had it and they were just finishing the paperwork. I got the email rejection about 3 weeks after it all started. Not completely sure what the mis-step was. There were possibly two, one more disturbing if that was it. One I could think of was a variance in their metrics of how they graded the attorneys and that of my own office. Apparently in their office you lived and died by your resolved and active numbers. My office really couldn’t care less (mostly). I was asked in the interview what my numbers were and I said I had no idea… someone had told me once probably a year ago but it wasn’t something any of us knew off the top of our heads. The managing attorney found that odd since in their office every attorney could recite that number cold. I can’t imagine that was the major issue since so much was different between the offices it shouldn’t be surprising our grading methods differed.

The slightly more disturbing one was about time at the office. I was asked how many hours per week I put in at the office, I said I don’t know exactly. Its an odd question in my line of work because it has a lot of answers. Time literally at the office is often only 50% of time spent working because you travel for a fair amount of litigation work. Depositions, hearings, trials… I said it was highly variable and that one of the current issues at my office was that I used to put in stupid hours and I was usually one of two or three people who closed the office daily. I said there was more of a problem now because the workload had increased per attorney by nearly 100% with no change in expectation of what had to be done on every case (and no further staffing). I had said it was unsustainable and that I had a hard out these days at 5 to pick up my kid at daycare. 

The interview ended and I walked out nearly certain I was going to be putting in my two weeks in no time at all in my current job. I have a bad feeling I “was not dedicated enough” due to having children; which is a common enough statement heard in the legal industry sadly.  

edit: on a slightly positive side, I did actually find out why I didn’t get the spot… after interviewing me, another inside hire showed up who had 10 yrs experience as opposed to my 3 in this sub-specialty. Basically they had someone else show up who they couldn’t pass up so I just missed out. 

Lately I have been attempting to get out of where I am working with renewed effort. Short version is that my current job / company is a good springboard with a recognizable name, but the office I work at is horribly mismanaged and the company itself is penurious to the point of absurdity. I tell most people I am lucky they supply pens (and in truth it is almost that bad). 

Anyway, I applied to a position listed for civil litigation with ‘the state’. Nice amazing sounding position working for the County DA’s office. Salaried but straight bankers hours, any OT is flexed over to whenever you want to take it back. The position pretty simply said it was for a civil litigator with very generic background requirements but nothing specific as to what one would be litigating. There is a pretty large basket that encompasses ‘civil’ and I have a pretty significant background in a whole bunch of it so I figured I would give it a shot. Usually getting these positions require an inside track but I tossed out a resume because you never know. 

And it turns out it paid off. I got in for an interview pretty quickly and sat down with several people who had been at the office for well over a decade. Positions didn’t open up often there, the job situation was great and apparently most people only left the job when they retired, died, or moved cities. 

The interview was going great. I had worked in a County Civil dept before so I was aware of most of what they did and what would be expected. The fateful moment came when they asked why I was attempting to leave my current job. I told them I was trying to get out of Personal Injury work. 

At which point the DA said, that’s too bad… we were trying to hire you to do Personal Injury defense for car accident cases for us. 

The job description had never mentioned this. Anywhere. I had a print out in my interview folio; I almost wanted to pull it out mid-interview at that point just to verify I wasn’t crazy. I tried to save the interview from the flaming death spiral the it had just become, but the damage really was done. Even though they had literally said ‘we are looking for someone exactly like you’… it was apparently not me; it was I guess someone exactly like me who wanted to do more personal injury cases. 

I’m guessing they hired someone exactly like me, only different. 

So I showed up to the headhunter obtained interview. They made a big deal about the firm having a maritime background, which is why I was going to be a perfect fit. The office was decently high up a mid-to-high skyscraper.  It occupied half of the whole floor, so I figured it must be decently solvent. The firm itself had few offices in a couple states so it wasn’t small either.

Upon getting to the firm, I noted that the lobby was nicely furnished and I chatted up the receptionist for a few minutes. She had been there for years, so I felt there might actually be decent retention. I was ushered into a conference room with a long wooden table. The table had some big slabs of glass over it to protect it, but under the glass was so much dust and dirt, I actually didn’t really want to rest my arms on the top of the glass. I should elaborate slightly, the top of the glass was clean, but between the glass and the wood, was a layer of dust so thick it looked like someone had spread ash all over the table and then put glass on top of it. Odd, definitely, but not a dealbreaker.

I met with Frank, one of the senior attorneys. Frank was a nice guy and actually seemed to like the place. I think the firm may have been a decent place to work at one point. Frank talked a bit too reticently about the halcyon days when the firm had significantly more maritime work, and he stated it has mostly dried up and will continue in that vein for at a minimum, several more years. The firm, it seemed, used to be more of a niche firm and in recent years has had to branch out trying to find a new niche, and was apparently failing to make a real distinction for itself in the market.

When it came to the question of the salary, Frank almost seemed embarrassed / confused by his own firm’s compensation scheme. To give you the short version, he told me that starting in the new year they “weren’t going to have salaries anymore” and “you could work as much or as little as you wanted“. That tag line is almost universally used when someone is selling a scam. In fact, it is the exact wording people use when trying to sell a Multi-Level Marketing / Pyramid scheme. I’m pretty sure Frank knew he had said something wrong. I had been unconsciously (nervous energy… what can I say) moving my chair back and forth ever so slightly, and at his mention of the above I stopped instantly. I know my body language changed, it was a visceral change.

Their new compensation scheme that gets rid of salaries is, in Frank’s words: “you eat what you kill”; which is the same model used for plaintiff’s contingency work. The major difference is that the delta for the payoff on plaintiff’s work is significantly higher on most all cases than it is for hourly defense work. Which is why “contingency” style compensation doesn’t work for defense work. (sorry if this is boring for non-lawyers, but I think most attorneys will agree 100% with me on this one.) Since they haven’t implemented this yet, Frank didn’t know how it would work with new associates while they get acquainted with the firm and work, and there would also be what sounded like a fair amount of required “un-billed but credited time” which he was even more fuzzy on how associates would be compensated. Ridiculous compensation schemes aside, I was also told that if I was considering the equity track, I would have to be consistently billing out at 2500 hours.

My guess was someone at the top seems to have decided they wanted to start getting the type of money they used to when they were a successful niche firm, and the easiest way for them to get more money was by taking it from the people at the bottom.

So… no salary and an hourly (very likely unattainable) expectation over even most Biglaw norms.

Starting in the new year, every non-partner level attorney (and likely some partners) are going to be trying to find a new job. That firm is set to become even more of a revolving door of attorneys than it was currently.  From a legal recruiter’s standpoint, this place was win / win. You’d get new clients as everyone jumped ship, and also be able to keep selling the firm new blood to try to fill the ever-present gaps created by the inane compensation scheme (at least until the office closed down).

The final punchline of this interview was that after I told the recruiter this information, they said they had a “long history / relationship” with this firm. Which was odd considering the local office has all of about 10 attorneys in it. What long relationship can a headhunter have with such a small firm unless they are already a revolving door.

I’m still undecided as to whether this was just a crappy job thrown out by the headhunter, or a specific pick based upon my previous interaction with the other headhunter at the agency.

I am in a rather solid job at the moment; I like who I work with quite a bit. The main issue is that there is significantly more work than can be accomplished yet we are expected to complete the work regardless of the hours and oh yeah… the pay is not great. And each attorney effectively operates 100% autonomously, pretty much with no support. It’s like being a solo attorney in a big firm setting.

So, although I am lucky enough not to be plastering the whole city with my resume, I am cautiously sending out my resume to select employers. Mostly because if I stay at the job I am at now, I don’t think I could ever pay off my student loans.

So using my newfound desirability as an actually trained and experienced attorney, I have sent out a few applications. This particular interview was garnered through networking. I had showed up to a happy hour event where someone had mentioned their caseload and I had laughed and told them my numbers. We worked the same types of cases but I had 4 to almost 5 times as many cases as them. This led to a short discussion wherein they mentioned their firm was looking for someone new. I shot off an email with my resume later that night and got a call back for an interview that same week.

The office was set in a nice glass and steel mid-rise office building. I showed up on time and was ushered into a conference room where the decorator must have been given the request to make as many things white as they could. If you know styles, it probably was exactly minimalist modern continental. To say the office appeared spartan was an understatement, but they appeared to have (some) money so it must have been more by choice (I think).

The firm’s local partner eventually ambled in holding nothing but a coffee cup. I’m still unsure if this was on purpose or if he had lost my resume and didn’t want to ask for a new copy, because it seemed as if he had never bothered reading it at all.

What followed was the least interesting interview I’ve ever had. The partner started off by asking me to tell him about myself.  I do believe that was the first, and damn near last question he asked during the interview. Most of the interview was me asking him questions and then having a little bit of back and forth on them. The partner stated they were looking for an associate but didn’t really seem to have any idea why, or what they would be doing.

It was quite difficult trying to interview for a job when the interviewer seemed so disinterested in interviewing. The interview went on for about an hour. By the end of it, I am pretty sure the partner had figured out he didn’t know what he wanted, or even if he wanted to hire anyone. Thinking back on it, I don’t even think I got a rejection from the firm, just silence. It was not a better position than the one I am in, and it didn’t seem to pay anything decent over my current offering either. It was relatively forgettable, but I made note of the firm so I wouldn’t make the mistake of applying there in the future.

So this partially explains my hiatus. And at the same time, continues on  with more interview stories.

So I became gainfully employed earlier this year, shortly before the posts stopped. In point of fact, I was hired on here as a full associate. I said yes because… well… the job title was “Associate” and I figured if nothing else, I could stick it out for a little bit and then lateral to something more palatable. Plus they were paying real money! Not a fabulous salary to be sure, but it was a damn sight better than the majority of jobs I have been running across of late. I also have this horrible addiction to food and living indoors, which for once, I am able to cover fully on my own! (woo for being an adult!)

Well, sticking it out has gotten very difficult. I will be posting a bunch of stories about the weird as hell (and ultimately ethically bankrupt) stories garnered from working at a huge Personal Injury firm. After working there only a little while, I realized I needed to get the hell out, and fast. I talked to several attorney friends of mine, and before I even got to some of the good stories, I was told by every one that I was ethically obliged to quit the job due to Professional Responsibility reasons. These stories are going to appear once I am safely away from this place. But until then…

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Only a few months in I am now worried for my license if I don’t get out. So, I started up the application process once again. It wasn’t nearly so difficult, mostly because all my jobhunting bookmarks were still fresh enough and I never actually unsubscribed from Indeed.com’s job alerts I had setup forever ago.

For the first time ever, I got a hit off of a LinkedIn job posting for a small to mid size law firm. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a call back from a LinkedIn application, so this was a novelty at the minimum. Maybe having the ‘Associate’ title actually did grant me a little bit of cache as I was hoping.

I showed up at the office in a small mid-rise building in one of the nicer areas of town. Mind you, it wasn’t in the expensive area… it was more like it was a few blocks down the street from the expensive area. Enough so that rent was lower, but you could still claim your office was in the right neighborhood to clients.

I walked into one of the larger, and nicer lobbies for a smallish law firm that I have seen. Besides the significant use of glass walls, the first thing you had to notice was the wall-to-wall plush red carpet. It was just solid, bright red and slightly squishy when you walked on it. I thought it was a little bit of an odd choice for a waiting room, but didn’t think much more about it. The receptionist brought me into the back offices and I immediately noticed the red carpet continued on throughout the whole of the office. All I could figure was there must have been some super sale on it, because who would put this in their whole office?

I get put into a small, oddly shaped library room / closet with (red carpet) a little table. The managing partner came in as the interviewer, which I suppose is the benefit of a somewhat smaller firm. The firm is a general practice and for the first time ever, they thought my resume and background, with all its weird specialties, was a perfect fit. They loved that I had done a whole bunch of different types of law, and they were very interested in several points on my resume which not one single other firm has ever asked about. I am hopeful about this one.

I was also told that I was only one of a couple applicants they interviewed, out of a stack about 3 inches thick. So apparently I am gaining mad skillz at resume creation, maybe.

We got down to talking about how much notice I’d need for my current job and things which sounded very hopeful. I had the same unfortunate moment of most likely low-balling my requested salary, especially as we continued talking, the managing partner dropped the bomb that the firm had its own private jet. This was a new one… even with some of the big firms I’ve been to, none had seemingly had their own private jet. Truthfully, that was my big take away from the interview. I am sure there were nuances in our other discussions as well, but “private jet” loomed large in my mind walking out the door after the interview.

The interview was thankfully normal, and the managing partner was quite nice, plus the billable requirement was seemingly attainable unlike many other firms. I am hopeful. They’re supposed to bring back a few for a second interview. I’m hoping I have to take a sick day to head over to a second interview because I really like the feel of this firm… minus the squishy red carpet.

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minor addendum:

So even though the firm was talking with me about how soon I could start working for them, they never bothered to get back to me. After 2 weeks, I dropped an email to the interviewer / partner. They told me they had gotten really busy and hadn’t made any decisions as of yet, so not to worry as he was going to get back to me very shortly. That was literally the last I heard from them. I followed up with a thank you card via USPS about another week to two later. Basically said thanks, I would love to work there if they were still looking etc. etc. Nothing came back. Not even a rejection. I mean at least send out a short note to the very very few people you had come in for an interview. Shit… be human about it.

When I started law school, I swore I would never work in Personal Injury. When I graduated law school, I planned on working in Intellectual Property litigation and patent work and never even considered the possibility that I would work in Personal Injury. As the years have worn on, I broadened my scope and began applying to everything and anything  in various sub-specialties in an attempt to become gainfully employed, but still I completely avoided Personal Injury like the plague– it was the one field I never sent an application in for. As you may guess, my most recent interview was for a very large personal injury firm.

My chronic addiction to food has worn down my extreme distaste for PI work, and as it seems to be one of the few legal fields which is actually consistently hiring in this economy I swallowed my pride and my morals and applied to a Plaintiff side PI firm. Not just any PI… no, I sent off to one of the big ones. No late night infomercials advertising the ‘hammer of justice’ who will ‘fight for you’. I suppose a high mark in their favor is that they are a particular, somewhat higher quality PI firm who doesn’t resort to such tactics.

I got a phone interview very quickly from my application and I talked with the recruiter for about an hour. The most interesting tidbit dropped by the recruiter was that if I move up the ranks in the firm I would ‘probably not have to worry about money’ and then gave me some very interesting potential dollar figures. They rather quickly setup an in person interview at the main office. I trekked down to the physical office which was not horribly local to me for a face to face to see what it was that I had been avoiding for the last couple years.

My first thought on arriving at the office was “I thought it would look nicer.” My impression from researching them was the firm makes …. a lot… of money. But the physical office space was, to be nice, cheap. Small waiting room, cheap flooring, chipped paint, sparse / non-existent furnishings… it just didn’t exude money the same way as other offices I have had the opportunity to pass through.

After a few minutes in a tiny waiting room with all of 3 chairs in it, a paralegal comes by and says she’s taking me back to a conference room. We head back and bypass several decent sized conference rooms, with the standard large table and 10+ chairs around them, and instead I’m led to what may well have originally been a large closet. But the closet has a table and 5 chairs around it, so I guess technically it is a conference room for itty-bitty conferences. It was so small that if someone were sitting in one of the afore mentioned 5 chairs, you could not technically walk behind them unless they got up out of the chair, pushed the chair in, and allowed you to pass. What was it with this firm and tiny rooms? It merely lent to the idea of ‘cheap’ even though I still had the impression (hope?) the firm was doing very well for itself.

So after a few minutes, what turns out to be a junior partner, walks in and starts the interview. It was intended to be a sequential interview of increasingly more senior attorneys. The concept of speed dating comes to mind. After a few minutes, one was supposed to bow out, and another come in. The junior partner and I got along famously. The only glaring warning bell that went off was when they asked ‘why I was applying there considering I was very overqualified for the position’, while they sort of waved my resume at me like an accusing paper flag. It’s hard to know whether it was an honest question, but I think it probably was; where the firm is located likely made my credentials stand out glaringly against others from the same locale. Other than that, it was a very friendly interview bordering on just being a fun conversation. They seemed quite happy with me and ducked out to tag in the next attorney.

The second attorney comes in, and starts asking more difficult questions. Quite a few of which I’d heard before… ‘what were you doing between college and law school.’  ‘What is with this or that specialty and why do you have it.’ ‘Tell me about your research / litigation experience with X or Y’,  Etc. etc… Had I not heard most of these questions before, I might have been more ill at ease answering them, but since I have had a great deal of time to consider answers to them in light of the post-mortem provided at least in part on this blog… well, I had some pretty good answers.

About 5 minutes in however, another attorney wanders in and sits down and says something along the lines of ‘oh you started without me’. So apparently it wasn’t quite like speed dating because you usually don’t try to flirt with several people at the same time, at the same table; Unless of course you are on some horrible FOX reality TV show. The problem was, they both continued as if they were alone conducting separate interviews. They each had divergent lines of questioning, and they stuck to their own scripts. So one would ask a question, I would start answering and within a few moments the other would break in to try to get you to answer their (generally) unrelated question. The main problem was, the new attorney was asking decidedly negatively themed questions.

This went unabated for about 10 minutes when the door opened again. This time an interesting change in tenor happened. The only way I can describe it is when Norm from Cheers walks into the bar, as the other two shout out his name and start joking around. And the image wasn’t far off… rather than wearing a suit this partner was in jeans and a Bermuda shirt. They wander in and setup at the head of the tiny table. (which of course involved everyone standing up and shuffling a bit so they could actually get to the head of the tiny table). I immediately assume ‘rainmaker’ as everyone was a bit deferential and one of the attorneys actually fistbumped him over a dumb joke he made. It turned out, this guy wasn’t even on the roster of attorneys I was supposed to be interviewing. They were passing by and just decided to pop in for amusement value I guess.

This became an exercise in a bit of the ridiculous as the previous two part unrelated questioning became a 3 part rapid fire non-sequitur. The only difference now was that the rainmaker was also throwing in some off color / bawdy jokes instead of questions or referencing owning high end luxury cars. So I had one attorney who was joking around and asking nothing of import, one who was asking substantive questions, and one who was asking probing and relatively hostile questions. None of which were arranged in any sort of order, so I would finish answering one and the other attorney would start up “getting back to my question…” (which I think we had left 5 minutes previously and I now had little recollection of what you asked after the unrelated conversation inserted between…) Maybe this was some sort of deposition tactic to throw you off guard; maybe it was just several large egos jostling in the same room. Either was legitimately possible. It felt like a ‘good cop, bad cop’ routine with an added ‘Frat-boy cop’ thrown in.

The most irritating concept reared its horrible head from the hostile attorney. They pointed out that I had mentioned in a previous answer that I had interviewed for a job in a different legal sub-specialty… not PI, and followed this up pointing to my diverse array of specialties. And he said that it seemed I was just interviewing everywhere to get a job. There was a beat of silence in the room before I said, yes that’s right. And I explained it was less about the specific specialty and more about the rigor of the work and novelty of cases. I gave a good accounting of this reasoning, and as you might expect, the other two liked my answer and Mr. Negative really did not. His opinion seemed to be that he didn’t want to hire me if I needed a job; he only wanted to hire me if I already had a job and didn’t need a different one. This type of backwards thinking permeates the legal field and it is infuriating.

‘We only want you if you don’t need us.’

Shortly after battling off the hostile attorney the rainmaker decides it’s time to make an exit and takes the hostile attorney with him as he leaves claiming he needed them for something. So I finish out with the original attorney, and they then say there is one final attorney to speak with. He leaves to find this last attorney and disappears for a good 10 minutes before reappearing and telling me the last attorney couldn’t be found and apparently went home for the day so I won’t be talking with them.

I am walked out of the firm and the implication was I would be contacted very soon. I guess I have to decide pretty quickly if I actually want to work in PI. The salary range they gave was pretty damn attractive, especially when compared to other places I’ve interviewed and knowing the salaries of friends who got into firms… I guess the money is spent on the attorneys and not the office. Not a bad system I guess. We’ll see how it pans out.

I never wanted to do this, but at this point, I will.

 

 

So I scored an interview at a government agency. The downside was that it was about 3 hours away from where I am now…  Hey I’m happy to relocate if they want me.

I got a phone call setting up the interview and as the secretary was trying to get off the phone I reminded her she didn’t tell me where the interview was… as in the address or office… or anything. So she seemed bemused at forgetting and relays the address to me and says ‘head up to the 3rd floor once you are there and they will direct you where you need to go.”

Seemed simple enough. Well, first off, I show up and it turns out the secretary actually gave me the wrong address… but it wasn’t a big issue because there were enough signs along the road to direct me to the right place, not the best first impression though. I wander in and am confronted by the security desk who wants to know who I am meeting. I say I wasn’t given a specific name.. merely an interview with the legal department on the 3rd floor. This doesn’t seem to go over well but after a minute he begrudgingly hands me a visitors badge and lets me pass muttering that I really should know who I am supposed to see (well thanks for the helpful info!). I head up to the 3rd floor and the elevator opens into.. well basically a maze of cubicles. I look around and wander over to what I assume is a secretary since their cubicle is more open than others and ask who I am supposed to see for the interview. They give me a name X and send me to another secretary on the opposite side.

I talk to the second secretary and tell her “I am here to see X for the job interview.” The secretary turns to look at me, and quite literally looks me up and down, and says ‘I don’t think so… what are you supposed to be here to interview for?’ I respond the attorney position…

Ah, she says. ‘X is interviewing for legal secretaries, and you,’ (with a wave of her hand) ‘don’t look like a secretary.’ I suppose that’s a point in my favor.. I guess. So I finally get routed to the correct people and I am ushered into a conference room with 2 other attorneys in it.

One attorney introduced himself and told me the other one was there to basically transcribe my answers. The second attorney introduced himself and thereafter never spoke a word during the interview. The first attorney started off by asking a few quick standard questions before asking more pointed and specific ones. This is where it got fun… the attorney asking the questions… I guess was tired (or something) so he would ask a question, wait a beat or two for me to start talking, and then he’d just close his eyes and seemingly doze off.

I’d continue talking to the half asleep attorney and directing the answer moreso at the silent one writing everything down, and once I’d reached an end point and silence would fall on the room, the first one would re-animate and ask the next question, only to once again start to doze once he was done.

I really don’t know what the point of the interview was considering the complete lack of interaction and impersonality of it. I could have just written answers to the questions and emailed them considering the level of conversation that went on. (later, a friend of mine helpfully suggested maybe the interviewer was mentally imagining my answers… about litigation.)

At the end, the interviewer woke up enough to walk me back to the elevator and confirm my fear that I would be working in one of the cubicles if I were hired. (shit). Then as it happened, they knew the city from where I had driven up from and mentioned he hoped I had a good drive back. So, maybe bonus points for driving a really long time to have a shitty interview? Dunno.

Got back into my car and drove the 3 hours back annoyed at how unprofessional the interview had been conducted. Par for the course I suppose. There are so few normal, decent people in this profession it is astounding.

I had a few interviews recently, and most of them are going to be posted. I’ve just been banking them up, all the while hoping one would come through.

So one of the more recent ones… I got a call for an interview for an insurance defense position. The phone connection was a bit broken while I was talking to them (not sure if it was my cell, or their slightly odd phone system) but the end result was I ended up missing a few words here and there. Most of the conversation was fine, but I didn’t want to keep saying “I’m sorry, can you repeat that?” too much so at a certain point I just decided I would figure out some of the details after the phone call. So I was able to get the address of the interview and who I would be talking with. I mostly got the name of the company but the phone kept cutting out, but I was 99% sure I had it. Let’s call them Insurance Company X, or InsCoX for short.

So the phone call ended and I decided to look up the pertinent info for the interview at InsCoX while it was still fresh in my mind. Here’s where it got a bit odd though. The address I was given was not for the insurance company’s offices. It was instead for a small law firm called “the law offices of Name1 and Name2”. But, the principals for the firm both had listed under their credentials that they were Staff Counsel for InsCoX.

As I had previously interviewed at several insurance defense firms, this seemed somewhat normal. From the scant information I had, it sounded like InsCoX subcontracted out their regional litigation work to this firm; but there was veritably no information online about the firm (also not too strange… for example try looking up information about consumer collections firms, you won’t find hardly any info… something about having angry defendants show up and send stuff to their offices I imagine).

So armed with very little info about ‘the law offices of N1 and N2’ I head over to the interview. The office was in a seemingly half vacant office building which had seen better days. I arrive at the door which has a modest black and gold plaque outside saying ‘the law office of Name1 and Name2’. I enter the office and the inside of it is just as dull and a bit on the side of run down as the outside parts. I head into the interview and meet with a single older gentleman. The interview starts and he asks me what I know about them.

I answer honestly and say not much as there wasn’t much available online. He looks surprised and says, there wasn’t much info on InsCoX? I say no… there was almost nothing online about your law firm. Now he looks confused, and says ‘what law firm?’ uh oh. Something is wrong. I respond – The law firm of N1 and N2. He says .. Oh yeah, that.

Apparently ‘that’ was a smokescreen. InsCoX puts out a fake law firm name as the place of business and stick up a plaque at all of their litigation offices so angry people don’t show up complaining. Good to know, probably better to know before the interview but how was I supposed to get that information.

Anyways, the interview continues on. He asks questions, I answer. There were a few I legitimately didn’t know and I quickly admitted I didn’t. Most of those, when explained to me, I quickly turned around and ended up saying ‘oh, that is identical to what we do in this other legal specialty and this is how we do it…” So ideally I was at least showing I was competent even if I wasn’t familiar with their specific code sections. Conversely, the interviewer seemed to sincerely dislike admitting they didn’t know something and there were several times during these discussions when I would mention some point of legal specialty he didn’t know and he would claim he did… and then it would become really obvious he was completely clueless when I continued on the topic.

The interview wound down and I wandered back out of the dingy offices. I feel like the confusion as to who they really were may have reflected badly on me, but how could I have known.

Much like the interview, this post will be short.

I applied to a BigLaw opening and somewhat surprisingly got a call back. The HR director gave me a quick run through the position and dangled a truly wonderful salary in front of me. It was supposedly for a real attorney position and in my specific field too. So I was excited at the prospect of working somewhere substantively in exactly what I want to do.

They got my availability and said they would double check with the partner to see when they were available for a phone interview. A week went by, long enough that I tried calling back but got no answer or return call. Finally HR called back and setup the phone interview for a week later. An odd sidenote, but rather than have them call me for the phone interview, I was directed to call them; a little weird.

Doing the usual pre-interview research I decided that if this man asked me to murder someone for the job I would. The job was almost literally everything I could want. At the appointed time, I called in and started talking to the guy. The job was even better than I could have hoped. They actually said they had a hard time keeping attorneys in the position because the corporate clients kept hiring them into higher paid in-house positions. It sounded amazing.

First the job suddenly was downgraded to a staff attorney position; still possible although I am sure the salary was also downgraded. It is possible he was not using the right terms, because he did say something about required billables which usually staff attorneys don’t have, so I’m not sure. Then the real stupid started. You see, it turned out the partner didn’t know the difference between a “Contract Attorney” and an “Attorney-who-does-contracts” (i.e. transactional work). Now, I know how to draft and edit contracts, but apparently they looked at my resume and thought “Wow, look at all the contract work this person has done. They sure do have a lot of experience with contracts!”

The next few minutes were horrible as I had to explain to a senior partner at a huge law firm exactly what a contract attorney actually is. Mind you, I know their firm has probably hundreds of contract attorneys working for them everyday. And this guy had zero clue about what they did or how they were hired (i.e. direct hire contracts versus 3rd party companies who provide contract labor etc.) He actually asked who is “Insert Giant Contract Attorney Provider Company Here”. The interview wound down pretty quickly thereafter. I don’t expect a call back.

I think I should have lied.