Law School Lies

Reduction to the mean… the lowest common denominator… stupid… dumb… idiotic — take your pick.

On my latest foray to attempt to find a job, I doubled down and was able to schedule an interview a day before my ill-fated second interview of Interview 17. This interview was for an Asst. District Attorney position. I figured I had a pretty good chance considering my background which involved working for a DA previously.

This particular DA’s office handled both misdemeanor and felony for the county (i.e. the Cook County system). I had primarily previously been working in a non-unified system, and dabbled later a bit with the civil side in a unified system, so I was familiar with the concept but the painfully bad execution was something new to me. Anyway, I arrived and was interviewed by a division chief of the DA’s office.

It was possibly the worst sounding legal job outside another stint in document review.

Here’s how it went down. First, they explained how the place was setup and where they fit as a cog within the vast machine that was the office. At this point they looked at me and basically said “Why would you want to work here considering what you have on your resume?”  Uh, oh… this has already started off on the wrong foot. Specifically they were pointing to my IP / Patent background and also various specializations. I deflected and basically turned it back to my experience working in criminal law. I talked about my experience and went into my background working in both criminal and civil law. How I had an extensive background doing exactly what they were looking for. Then I talked about my appellate experience and how I enjoyed specifically that I could see a case all the way through to the end, all the way from trial court to the supreme court if it was appealed that far.

They interrupted me. “Yeah, you wouldn’t be doing that here.” Huh? Howso? It turned out that they had a completely separate appellate division and that anything appealed to anywhere, from anywhere went to them. So no more following your case from inception to its ultimate end. Huh… well I suppose that would make it slightly easier for the trial attorney. You wouldn’t have to worry about researching and writing appeals; even though that was one of the more interesting parts of practicing law in a criminal court. Then they told me that they don’t hire directly into the appellate division, so I would not be doing any appeals if hired there at all.

They mentioned something about my materials and I piped up, that if they needed anything else, I could send it to them, and oh yeah I’m not sure if it was included in the packet of information but I have a writing sample and if they want more I have others. I got as far as pulling it from my valise and I had just started to move my hand toward their desk when they waved it off and said “No need. You won’t be doing any writing.”

uhhhh… I was sorta frozen with the pages drooping from my fingers as I struggled to comprehend what they just said. As an attorney… I would not be writing at all… and they didn’t care about my work product. The gears in my brain finally caught and I said, “I’m not going to be doing any motions practice either?” And they said, “Sure you are, but it’s all oral and done on the fly in court.” So, no writing appeals, no written motions. I’m beginning to be confused by what I would actually be doing.

At some point, I went into my trial experience, a great portion of which was summarily dismissed by the interviewer as ‘merely plea bargaining’. They then proceeded to explain what the position would entail, which effectively was significantly … plea bargaining, or at least exactly the same as the experience which was apparently not valid per the interviewer.

Here’s where it got dumb. No matter who you are. No matter your experience and background. This particular office shoehorned you into doing traffic tickets and nothing but when you started. You could be a 10 year veteran appellate partner from a firm, and if you were a new hire at this DA’s office, you got stuck into the lowest position doing tickets. No writing. No appeals. No thinking. You then had to stick it out for a year before you were promoted upward. Each move up, you were given marginally more responsibility. It could legitimately take you 3+ years before you had to write a single page of legal work product for the office based on the career outline they laid before me.

Quite literally, they seemed very proud of the fact that merit had little to do with promotion within the system. Here, then, was the epitome of a government office. Which meant that mediocrity rose in the ranks, because anyone who was worth their salt, left and went onto better jobs. I asked what the attrition rate of the office was… apparently it was high, with ‘someone leaving every week or so’. But that was ok, because it was a big office, and the interviewer was sure they were just leaving because they could get better money elsewhere.

Here’s where it took a turn for the surreal. The interview was winding down, and I asked when they would be making a decision on who to hire. Seemingly a simple question. Well, not so much as it turned out. The system worked like this… The office made offers to graduating law students in the area; some who had interned there and some who had not (the ‘some who had not’ concept was anathema where I had worked previously, for a wide variety of reasons). These positions were guaranteed so long as they passed the bar. Any open positions were filled first by those offerees, and the remainder were filled by outside applicants. I then asked, how many positions they were filling… and this is when they dropped the WTF. They weren’t sure. In fact, the interviewer admitted to me that it was entirely possible that all positions would be fulfilled by the guaranteed positions to the offerees.

*twitch*

So.. I just applied and had an hour long interview… for a job which doesn’t even necessarily exist. What is it with local governments interviewing for non-existent positions. I feel like these job postings should include a warning in fine print *Caution: This job may or may not actually exist.*

So I was applying for a job which may not exist, which required significantly less ability than what I had done as an intern, and would take me years to work up to actually using any cognitive processes, promotion would be on seniority as opposed to merit, and you will be paid badly.

Awesome. Where do I sign up.

At the end of the interview I was walked out of the office to the lobby, and the interviewer met the next attorney waiting to be interviewed for the likely-imaginary job posting. I wish the bar or the ABA would fucking bother to do something about this.

 

** one of the better moments came when the interviewer told me the market was so bad, that they had fully licensed attorneys working in the office for free as interns. I had a moment wherein I was about to ask about the legality of that and if they were being covered by the office’s liability insurance… and then I thought best not to completely ruin my interview for the imaginary position. Their employment violations are their own concern, and any attorney who hasn’t considered what could happen as a result of this is foolish at the minimum.

I did know better. I foreshadowed it in the previous post when I said this could be the most expensive rejection of my career. Well, this was the most expensive rejection of my career.

I was called back for a second interview. I was psyched. The firm was awesome, it had money, the first partner and the firm administrator were very interested in me and apparently this second interview was only supposed to be a ‘character’ interview to make sure I worked well with other people on the team. It wasn’t.

Interview 2 involved being interviewed in succession one on one by two more partners. The first was the named partner. In the Law firm of X&Y, he was Y. The first partner I had talked to fell into the list of names on the door that you typically don’t write down on your cover letter. (i.e. the Law Firm of X,Y,Z,Q,P,T &F) The last partner was not even listed in the litany of names on the door.

So.. down to the actual interview.

So I got an email mere hours after the first interview with the specifics of the second interview. I booked a plane ticket, hotel, and rental car. I was stoked. The first partner had all but told me the job was mine, he just wanted to make sure I played well with the other kids in the sandbox.

I showed up and the firm administrator was effusive and happy to see me. We chatted for awhile before the named partner walked into the conference room. The administrator left us alone and we started talking. I wish I could say that something weird happened in this interview. Nothing did. It was a nice interview, I got along great with the guy (seemingly). We talked on a wide array of subjects ranging from from hobbies to jury selection in various jurisdictions. I will say that the partner had a strangely distracting tic, in that every time he would start talking about something from the past, his eyes starting darting left-right-left-right; almost as if he was reading the synopsis of his past events back to me from a giant scrolling marquee located right behind my head.

There was one potentially bad sign. He read thru the places I had worked at and cherry picked the large firm names to briefly touch on. Though he didn’t really care what I had done for them (contract work) — more that I had just worked for them in some capacity, which seemed odd. I should point out, he hailed from 2 ivy league universities so there may have been a name-game issue here. At the end of the interview, he stood up and said “I won’t hold it against you that you went to Ohio State.” (this seems to be a tag line for “you didn’t get the job”) I’m not sure if this had anything to do with sports, because at no point in the interview were sports of any kind mentioned… so… yeah.

The named partner left the conference room and turned left, while the next partner walked in from the right side of the hallway. This was a partner without his name included in the firm name. He was the appellate attorney for the firm, and damn was he socially awkward. Considering I was socially awkward for a large part of my life, I felt like I was talking to one of my people. We got along fine. He was much more interested in the brass tacks of what I could legitimately do from day 1 if hired. He went thru each employer and asked what I did for them, what portable skills I had. He asked me 3 separate times if the work in my writing sample was my own (I kept telling him, yes… all of it… why do you keep asking). He basically told me he was massively overworked and was looking for someone who knew how to do even part of the appellate process so it wasn’t all falling on him. I was more than happy to explain that I really enjoyed it and that I had done quite a few and would be willing to work with him on any and all cases.

The interview with the last partner was done and he shuffled the papers and said the 3 partners I talked to would get together and discuss me and get back with me soon. Each interview with a partner lasted about an hour or a bit more. The firm administrator then entered as the partner left. She was silent. Which was odd. She seemed very uncomfortable, and brought me out to the bank of elevators without saying anything. Ominous. I said thank you etc. etc. and that I hoped I would be seeing her again soon. “Yes, thank you for coming.”

Crap. Something was wrong. But this could only mean one thing. The named partner had walked out of the conference room, looked at the administrator and said “No.” The third partner had not had a chance to talk to anyone. The first partner wouldn’t have invited me back as enthusiastically as he did if he was against hiring me. The firm administrator really liked me.

But the “my name is the main one on the door” ‘DENNY CRANE’… had overruled everyone moments after leaving the conference room. And had left the third partner to go waste an hour of his time grilling me, when he had already decided not to proceed.

I have no idea what the misstep, if any, there was in the interview. But this has gone down as the most expensive rejection in my career. Even though I knew I shouldn’t… I let my excitement get the better of me and I have no one but myself to blame for flying out to talk to someone, twice, on my hopes and dreams alone. An expensive lesson not soon to be forgotten by either me or my credit card I suppose.

 

Update

I have good feelings about this one. I will say, it is damned expensive to apply to a job out of state and show up for the interviews when they show interest.

So as stated in the previous post, I am done and leaving the city I had been living in. It was a pit, and the legal community was jealously closed to anyone not already ‘in’, and rabidly protectionist. All you have to do is read thru a handful of my accounts dealing with them to understand. So, before I show up in a new city, I took all of my accumulated job finding skills and went to work. I sent out directed letters, unsolicited cold-calls, applications, resumes… everything. I was setting up lunches with people to feel out the area and network so someone could hopefully pass me off to a friend of a friend who would hire me. I was doing everything but hooking on the streetcorners to find a legal position. (I wonder if that would work…)

A random cold-call resume I sent to a firm came back hot. The concept of a cold resume is that you send it to the company / firm and hope that your timing is just right wherein they were considering hiring someone, but they haven’t yet posted the job. If you have incredibly lucky timing, they may very well choose to forgo the job search and dealing with the slew of resumes and applications if you happen to mostly fit what they are looking for.  Out of the myriad of resumes I sent out, I got some mild interest back from a few places, but one mid-sized firm seemed very interested.

They did liability work. And it appeared they were doing quite well for themselves. I got an interview with the managing partner and lead administrator. So I flew across the country to go talk face to face with someone on the off chance they might hire me.

The interview went great. The partner thought my diverse background was fantastic and a perfect fit for the firm. The firm administrator was incredibly nice and we talked about everything under the sun. It was the most comfortable interview I’ve ever had, the three of us just seemed to click. The partner told me right there that he wanted me back for the next interview, but that it was really just a formality to make sure that I could get along with the rest of the team I would be working with. The only moment where I made a mistake was when they asked me what my salary requirement was. I told them and when I said the number, there was the briefest of smiles that played across the partners face. I had quite obviously undervalued myself in his opinion.

We had a very interesting conversation regarding the legal industry. The partner made a statement roughly along the lines that a great number of people drop out of the legal industry over time, and to a certain extent, when you are trying to break into the industry it is like a game of ‘last-man-standing’. The real question is what did you do with your time while you were waiting to be the last man standing. Not really the most comforting concept that to actually be able to work in law, you have to wait for everyone around you to give up and drop out.

For the first time in forever I am honestly excited. I got invited back for a second interview. This is likely going to turn out to be the most expensive rejection I have ever gotten, or potentially I may have hit the elusive job jackpot.

I hesitate to include this one, mostly because it is not nearly so interesting as the others. But I guess they can’t all be rambling and insane. This one was a result of the continued effort to send my resume to every corporate recruiter I could find online. It went thru LinkedIn (Facebook for professionals) and in theory I was applying for an attorney job. This company also had a random legal position and called the job title ‘associate’ but in its own wonderfully backwards logic, it didn’t mean a legal associate attorney … no, no. That would make sense. Instead they wanted a legal associate in more the sense of someone who would do legal style work; and I guess associate with the attorneys. I don’t know. Anyway, I get the call while driving down the road. I talk to the recruiter for half an hour and I hit all the standard buzzwords they are looking for. I honestly have no idea what the company does and when asked I admit that I am not in front of my computer so I don’t have the information at hand about my applications. Then they tell me they are not looking to hire me as an attorney. Huh? But I applied to be an attorney… Well, apparently they want attorneys, but for the associate positions. Which have the potential of someday moving on up to the ‘real’ attorney positions.

What am I going to say. I’m in my car, screw it, I’ll figure this out when I get home. So the recruiter sets up an online video conference with the next level of HR a few days hence. I get home and later that evening decide to do my due diligence on the company before the interview.

Crap. The company is only about 250 people. There are way more than 250 negative reviews about working there, and most of them end with “I quit this horrible gulag”. The churn rate of this company was staggering. The stories told by the reviewers involved managers having tantrums and screaming on a near daily basis. Not one review… no… dozens and dozens. The company fires the bottom performing 10% on a quarterly basis. So every four months, they fire 25 people. I already had decided I didn’t want to work there by the time I got to the news articles talking about Federal investigations, not to mention lawsuits against customers and former employees.

But, of course, I still had the video conference interview. And its always good to keep your skills honed. Plus you never know when you’ll get a good story out of the interview. So ignoring the fact that there was no chance I was going to accept an offer to work there, I logged on to the video conference. I was greeted by a pixie-ish brunette with blonde highlights who said she was just getting the conference setup for the senior HR person. She gets up from in front of the webcam and is replaced by the human incarnation of Roz from Monsters Inc. I mean it was uncanny… it even sounded like her. There was a brief twinge in the back of my mind saying I should take a screenshot but I fought down the smile I could feel starting and soldiered on. It was possibly the shortest ‘interview’ I’ve ever had. It probably would be generous to say it lasted 5 minutes. The senior HR coordinator got on and asked me all of 3 questions before pulling the cord. Somewhere in these questions she seemed to decide I wasn’t a good fit. The questions were:

1. “Did you research the company” – obviously a tricky question, because unless you were quite dense, if you did even a modicum of research you found out what a steaming pile of shit the company was, so I eloquently sidestepped it by saying yes and saying I checked out its historical salary information. Because I wasn’t going to bring up the potential federal probe… seems like it would be a hard conversation starter for an interview.

2. “What does the company do” – once again, pretty easy. There is a whole wikipedia page surrounding what this company and others like it do.

3. “what is your ideal job” – ahh, back to the old standard HR retarded questions. I of course spilled forth a wonderful yarn about a collaborative team based position in which I got to think independently about novel situations and yet I could rely on my team to field opposing viewpoints to what I may be thinking. bullshit bullshit bullshit. My dream job involves being the taste tester for new Ben & Jerrys Ice cream flavors, but I don’t think that plays quite as well with sub-human intelligence HR zombies.

It was at this point that HR lady became more engrossed with something offscreen and she decided she’d heard enough. “Yada yada, pass it on up to senior whomever something something .. we’ll get back to you.” And it was over. They never explained what the job actually was, or what it pays; and I never got to find out why they were apparently interviewing me for a lesser position than I applied to. There’s not a chance I’d take the job, sometime in the not too distant future the company is likely going to be raided by the FBI and upper management will try to claim that some lackey farther down the food chain is the more correct scape goat. Considering the position the first HR phone call mentioned paid about as much as working at Costco… well… I’d rather go work retail than having that on my resume.

Sometimes I think I have bad luck. Othertimes, I know it. The only other possibility is that I severely pissed off a very vengeful deity somewhere (always possible).

This one started out so well. I applied to a position with a medium sized firm that was split in to 2 or 3 practice groups who were relatively segregated from each other. From the description I got, it was as if this one firm was composed of a few smaller firms who really had very little idea as to what the others groups did. I was interviewing for what turned out to be an IP license / transactional associate. It seemed right up my alley.

I was located in another city from the firm, so the first interview I had was with a partner over Skype (maybe.. they self-identified as head of the practice group and led me to believe they were a partner, but maybe not). Anyway, the interview was a little stilted mainly because they started off as every other interview you’ve ever had asking the generic questions “Tell me about yourself” etc. But, fairly quickly they got bored with this and actually tossed the paper they were reading these questions from on their desk. Now it got a bit more interesting. They said they would rather know how I problem solved an actual case, so they picked up a file and told me they had just gotten this case this week and wanted to know where I would start researching and what my thoughts were, as they had not yet had the ability to start working on it yet. The main problem was, with A/C privilege the description of events was hovering right around the ridiculously generic, and each time I would start trying to form some sort of plan of attack, it would turn out the facts were not what I had thought because I wasn’t being told the whole story.

The interview ended and I sat sorta staring at my computer and turning over both the interview and the case. It hadn’t gone horribly well, but it hadn’t been really bad either. Just very stilted as I would propose one thing and they would say “weeellll… we can’t because of this (which I didn’t tell you).” The longer I stared at my computer the more dissatisfied I became with how I had answered the questions. After mulling it over for a half-hour, I realized exactly what the contours must be of the case they had been skirting around the whole interview. It had dealt with open source ‘viral’ licensing and integration into larger database software. But most of the IP was a red-herring, and the case was actually a contract issue. The whole thing crystallized in my mind and I started furiously writing out an email to the attorney. In a rather long email I explained what I thought their case was about and how it was actually a contract issue and not a copyright issue as they had framed it to me.

I heard nothing back for 3 days and I pretty much assumed I must have blown it, either with the not so great interview or maybe I had made some assumption of the case and ended up way off base. On the third day, I get back an email saying, “Based on this email, you’ve got yourself a second interview.”

The second interview was with 2 other members of the practice group. I found out that apparently I had hit a bullseye in my analysis of the case and I had made some friends by doing so. This interview was purely a social one. Almost no law was spoken about, and it was more to see how I interacted with the other people I might be working with. I was absolutely sure I had this job nailed down.

A month went by. I didn’t think too much of it. The holidays were in the middle, lots of stuff gets put on hold while people are on vacation. I get that. But still, just to follow up I sent an email to try to make sure I was kept in mind. The response was that I was still being considered, but basically this stuff moved slowly so be patient.

Another month goes by. Now I’ve sorta given up most hope of this turning into a position. But, since I haven’t heard anything definitively negative either, I drop another email. I get back a one line message from the partner. “Call me”. Intriguing.

So, the short version of the phone call goes like this. (I am paraphrasing and adding expletives where needed.):

“I quit the firm. Those fuckers were cheating me out of my money. But I took my secretary with me and I am opening my own damned firm. We wont have an office till next month-ish, and I’m sorta short on cash at the moment. We should talk about you working for me, but you have to know I’m operating on a shoestring so you’ll have to expect to be paid in accordance with working for a broke solo attorney. I’m sure business will pick up in no time, once we actually open. Oh yeah, and I can’t afford to ask you to work for me until you get this other certification, so let me know when you have that nailed down. I can use someone like you to back me up.”

It also came out that they weren’t a partner. I’m still not sure where in the PLLC they fell, but it was apparently much lower than I was led to believe. I’m also not sure if anyone else there has seen my resume. Just for fun I dropped the firm a note asking if they were still interested in hiring me considering… everything… Honestly, I did it just to see what their response will be.

Update: So the firm got back to me. They said that the member I had talked to “mislead” me and that their departure was unexpected but not unwelcome, and more things kept coming to light after they left. The real partners told me they weren’t looking to hire me but really wanted to talk to me in person. (I am still unsure why considering they specifically said they don’t want to hire me). It also seems odd that they feel I was misled considering I had talked to 3 attorneys there and there were several mentions of conversations relating to hiring with the partners, and oh yeah… the whole job posting. But I digress. Short version is, they weren’t looking anymore.