The Publicly Interested Law Students' Guide to Surviving Your Law Firm Experience

I think this needs to be written, and I'm going to start writing it. If anyone else wants to make a contribution, please comment or email me and I will post it. Without further ado, here are some tips and tricks for surviving the descent of thousands of malnourished leeches upon your willing young flesh. The most important principles to remember are that you should spend as little time and effort as possible on the firm's behalf that you can without getting fired, and you should protect yourself from the brainwashing. (And obviously, pinch your pennies, but if you are a public interest person you don't need to be told that.)

(1) IMPORTANT: If you must blog (and I must! I must!) take your name off your blog and stop linking to it from your Friendster profile. Pretend that this makes you safe from scrutiny, and ignore the fact that anyone who wants to identify you in your blog could easily do so by looking a the pictures of your ugly mug or piecing together your identity from the fact that you identify yourself as a queer asiatique who went to a particular college is about to start her 3L year at a particular law school.

(2) Spend very little time and no money on EIW. Everyone gets a job, and all the firms are exactly the same, so it doesn't matter where you get one. You can apply for firms that sponsor splits with public interest places, like I did, but you can't let yourself be sorely disappointed when you don't get one, because sometimes it just doesn't happen. Don't spend the hours you have between interviews talking with other chipper kids about your interviews, because you will only be dismayed at how eager everyone is to work for a firm. Law students start aping law firm lawyers as soon as the prospect of $3,050/week salaries appear on the horizon, which means they become (or have always been) really chummy and boring. The chummy bores that populate law firms are discussed in greater detail below. So anyway, to survive EIW, get the hell out of there early and often, and bring The Great Gatsby to remind yourself that all the money in the world won't pull you alive out of a swimming pool filled with pink water that you're floating face down in.

When I say don't spend time on EIW, that means that you should not spend more than two hours selecting firms (don't research - they are ALL THE SAME), and you should not prepare for your interviews. They will all ask you the same questions: 1 - what did you do this summer? 2 - what was your favorite class? 3 - why did you choose this law firm? The correct answers are 1 - I rid myself of crabs, 2 - whatever class you got your highest grade in, and 3 - because I am very impressed by your litigation/credit/m&a/tax/real estate/IP practice/congeniality, no "yellers" here/schwag/dedication to quality, commitment, and dedication.

(3) Minimize callbacks. No one tells you about this, but your face will hurt after each callback because you will have spent 3-4 hours smiling and talking with strangers who you want to show your conviviality to, and smiling while talking hurts your face. It's also not exciting or fun to go sit in a cold office with people who look like they want to cry or run away.

(4) Alternatively, maximize callbacks in San Francisco. You can visit your family for free and have them get really excited by the sight of you in a suit, because for years they have dogged you and accused you of attempting to look like (1) a fat man or (2) a fat black man or (3) just a man because of your mannish, boxy build and attire and freshman (through senior) fifteen and your misguided attempt at developing dreds. Your mother will look on with pride and plot ways to tell Jason Lin's mother all about how her daughter will be filthy rich while Jason is a mere thumbprint on the window of the skyscraper of personal wealth, and your dad will encourage you to think about doing what you love while also secretly taking pleasure in knowing that his daughter will make enough money to buy her freedom should the war between the U.S. and China send us all into internment camps in New Mexico.

(5) Don't do the lunches or the dinners or the special "after you've been extended an offer" events they offer to you. Nothing tastes better than keeping your surly personality just the way it is. If you go to these events, you'll be terrified into to smiling and pressing flesh and meeting and impressing people. Cf. (3), above, smiling hurts your face. I say "terrified" because you will have already invested a lot of time into getting your $3,050/week job, and you will have heard lots of stories from OCS or your forebears about how to behave well so that you can keep that lucrative job, so you will be afraid to express the slightest bit of personality for fear that it will bring the house down. So even if the sashimi you are eating costs as much as a week's worth of groceries and is carved from the last tuna on earth, it will not taste good because you will worry that you are putting it in your face in too uncouth of a way and that a "partner" is watching to see if any of the tender tendons get spread out in an inextricable fan across your front teeth. In addition, food that costs a lot of money does not actually taste good. You can see my post of July 11, 2007, below, for a longer discussion on why expensive food doesn't taste good.

Also, the dinners are a waste of time and you would be better off spending those hours phonebanking for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

(6) Choose a firm that is reputed to make their summers work very little. Obviously.

(7) Choose a very large firm that hires more than 50 summer associates. The reason for this is that the more people there are, the less you will be noticed, so you can duck out of summer events and sequester yourself in your office and no one will care.

(8) Related to (7), and mostly for the ladies: wear extremely neutral colors and very boring styles. In other words, wear the same clothes every day. I have successfully worn black pants, a black sweater, and a black shirt every single day of the last two weeks. I'm not even exaggerating - the same black pants, shirt, and sweater. I change my underwear when I remember, but not my socks. Why can I do this? Because of (7): no one notices me. Also because you are not trying to impress anybody, so who cares? It helps if you are Asian, because I bike to work and back every day and therefore spend about half an hour a day sweating into the clothes, but because I create no body odors my clothes remain unaffected. But I can't imagine that if you weren't lucky enough to have been born Asian, that a couple squirts of Lysol, or whatever it is that you people use, into your pits couldn't take your stench away. Not changing your clothes also saves you a lot of money, especially if the one set of clothes you do wear was purchased by your mom for you at Mervyn's and was tailored by a Chinese lady in Sunnyvale who will do it for free.

(9) Again, avoid summer lunches and events and dinners and bar nights and whatever. You might want to see Shakepeare in the Park without making your lovely genderqueer lover wait in line starting at 7 a.m., but just remember: things that you ordinarily like doing are unbearable when you do them with people you don't like. We'll get to why you won't like your fellow summer associates in a minute, but remember that principle. So once again, delectable foods sour in your mouth when you have to endure conversations about people getting airplanes as graduation gifts, investment strategies, and Zagat's, and interesting cultural events turn into chores. You are better off scouring http://www.nonsensenyc.com/ for free weird bike jousts rather than going along with the other summers to the fancy things. One thing that helps is to take typhoid medication, or at least tell people you are taking typhoid medication, so you can tell recruiting that you don't do summer events because you cannot drink while on medication. Claiming religious reasons for teetotaling probably works too.

An additional reason for avoiding firm events is that you should avoid all associations that you cannot maintain. They want you to develop a taste for fanciness, and to become friends with people who live in excess, so that your standard of living will rise to a level that can only be maintained so long as you continue to work for a law firm. This is a trap. Avoid it.

(10) Law firm lawyers are unbearable people. Why? Because, once again, once you get a high-paying job, you get terrified of losing it. It's like omerta because there's no way to get out of the family once you're in it and so you really have to watch your back. Conversations must be centered on innocuous and inane subjects, controversy and fringe elements are to be avoided, and you certainly should not tell your fellow summers that you like to imagine yourself as a giant who can leave crater-sized footprints and eat deer by the fistful when you look upon forest landscapes. "I can put up with inanity!" you say, but you have to remember that what other people think are innocuous topics of conversation you will find to be incredibly offensive. E.g., an Indian man, the only POC besides me in the van yesterday, gets in the back of the van and says "I feel like Rosa Parks!" All the long-haired white ladies titter in the front. Why is this offensive? Because this is his way of saying, "Hey, I'm a very dark-skinned South Asian man, but I'm cool, I'm down with it, I can neutralize any potential friction the fact of my skin tone might engender by beating everyone to the punch - now it's okay to make jokes about race relations, okay?" It is doubly offensive because he thinks it's an innocuous topic of conversation. Also, when the white guys at the table say that "people are so stupid they wouldn't know to breathe if it weren't automatic," when they are at a Polynesian-outpost themed restaurant where every customer is white and every service person is a short, squat Mexican man or an East Asian man with a fobby accent, it is not innocuous cynicism but actually a manifestation of colonialism. People reading this who do not share my politics will roll their eyes, but the simulacra of the British East India Company was too close to home in that restaurant and the whines of the white man's burden was too thinly-veiled for me to ignore. Also, when that same white guy then asks you - and only you, the only Asian person at the table - to identify the beans in his soup, which he doesn't like eating, and you say, in a flat voice, "Mung bean sprouts," everyone else will continue merrily eating and not notice that anything offensive has transpired, but you will want to tap on his face with a spoon and crack it like a creme brulee.

The moral of (10) is that if you're a mean judgmental bitch like me and put great care into surrounding yourself with people who inspire you, then you will be really disappointed when you find yourself unable to quality control your boring-ass colleagues.

Okay, I'm too lazy to continue this list and also sure that I have violated cardinal rule #1 and will be fired for writing this. I also just got a bill from NYU's bursar telling me that I owe $22,038 for the fall semester. So the final tip I have for everyone is...

(11) Don't think that you're going to laugh all the way to the bank. That's NYU's job. Your job is to sob all the way home from the bank when you realize that the summer you thought you made enough to pay off your tuition will not, in fact, pay for even half of one semester's tuition. I scrimped and saved, folks, and I wore the same outfit every single day. I moved home with my parents and sublet my apartment. I swam at Rinconada Pool instead of paying for a gym. I waited until 2pm to eat the free leftovers in the cafeteria every day instead of spending $5.5o on lunch. Still I did not save enough to pay for one semester of Criminal Procedure and Evidence.

The real moral of the story, kids, is to prepare better for your scholarship interviews and to say more cutting things about Larry Summers. Real world experience, straight from the horse's law-talking mouth.