I’ve been to very expensive BigLaw offices and weird flyby night solos. And after all this time I finally ended up in a conference room with Smartglass windows. The cool windows that are clear and then turn opaque white at the flip of a switch. I’ll be honest, it was probably the highlight of this interview.
Midsized firm was looking to add a litigation associate. I wasn’t that interested, but a headhunter had contacted me and sorta pushed the interview and I finally relented and agreed to be submitted to the job. The interview request came pretty quickly and I showed up at a nicely decorated office. Notably, the lobby had been decorated with a rather large painting of 4 wolves. It was so amazingly obvious and cringeworthy that the partners fashioned themselves the “wolf pack”. And juvenile. Did I mention juvenile? Anyway… The secretary honestly looked to be about 17. Braces and all, and she ushered me into the conference room and flicked the switch on the cool windows. We talked for a few minutes about the windows actually once she did.
I will mention that as cool as the windows are, I was slightly disappointed. When they were translucent, they still had this slightly foggy appearance to them, almost like someone had washed the windows with a dirty sponge. I’m guessing that happens over time, which I guess is good to know. But still pretty cool.
Several partners came in to interview me. Notably, not one person there was a partner who I had been informed was going to be interviewing me. Basically they sent in the second string for the interview, which made me wonder a bit about how seriously they were actually looking. At the end of the interview I was even informed that the senior partners may want to have me back to a second interview. I was half showing up for fun, so it didn’t really phase me but it was worth noting.
The interview was amusing, but not for the right reasons. One of the partners was sharp enough to at least note some of the weird movements between firms that I’ve done and I got to regale them with a couple stories listed on this blog. Never great for a serious interview, but they were all damn amused by the stories. Had it been a job I was more interested in I probably would have camouflaged everything a bit better, but I was already mostly checked out of the interview pretty early on. The main talker of the partners had said they wanted about 2000 hours but that I would definitely have more because they were drowning in work and then they started talking about how this one had billed 260 that month and it wasn’t even up and the other guy had done the same or more… they had wanted to hire someone in to dump a ton of hours who would live at the office the same as them. I nodded and of course said absolutely I could, but that was the death knell for the interview in my mind. So telling them some incredible industry stories didn’t really change what was going to happen.
I left and wasn’t going to show for any further interviews. They may have felt similarly because I didn’t get invited back for the senior partner interview either.