Week Twelve, Part 2: Making Partner

I wander into the Career Services Office at Notre Dame Law School. At one end is a reference library and newspaper rack. Beside it an old photocopier.

Two students, a guy and a girl, are paging through loose-leaf binders at the faux wood table. Both have Constitutional Law casebooks next to them. Upperclassmen, I figure. They slide their chairs forward and let me slip by.

I pull a recruiting brochure off the shelf. On the cover is a night view of the Los Angeles skyline. Inside it describes “Career Opportunities” at Latham & Watkins, a LA-based firm with 850 lawyers worldwide. Hong Kong. London. Moscow. Tokyo. Singapore. I imagine myself as a Latham lawyer, working in “high-stakes litigation” or “complex, sophisticated transactions.”

“You still clerking downtown?” the guy asks.

“Twenty hours a week,” she answers.

“Trying to make it hard on yourself?”

“Poverty does strange things to an individual.”

I sit down and skim the testimonials from Latham associates, all of whom have bright smiles and thick hair. Jeffrey B. Greenberg, a Northwestern Law grad, writes, “We are one of the few firms in the country doing extensive utility restructuring work. The deregulation of the electric utility industry involves tearing down massive existing legal structures and replacing it with something entirely new.”

Hmmm. I wonder if that’s a good idea.

The girl at the table says Dean Link is writing her a letter of recommendation.

“He’s probably great at that,” the guys says.

“How would you know?!”

“Dean Link has always struck me as something of a bull-shitter.”

She slaps him on the arm.

“Seriously. Most of what he says is to put the law school or the faculty and student body in a better light. But then I think, maybe that’s just his job.”

“Exactly!” she says.

“But he seems to do it for everything.” The guy lowers his voice an octave. “When I played Bookstore Basketball, there were two Division I players on my team.”

They get up to leave, ignoring me – a lowly 1L – the whole time.

By now I’m at the page entitled “Making Partner.” The brochure says associates are considered for admission to the partnership after eight years. The Associates Committee presents its recommendations and the partners vote on each candidate. I expect a paragraph about “henceforth true riches await them.” Instead there are individual pictures of five middle-aged men: the Latham & Watkins Executive Committee.

I put the brochure back and walk to the bulletin board outside the main entrance. In addition to job postings and career information, there’s a photocopy of a newspaper article from Business Journal. It’s titled, “Glut of lawyers in Denver leaves new grads among underemployed.” The author interviewed six greenhorns who have been unable to get jobs.

One of them, Tamatha Blase, is a graduate of Washburn University School of Law in Topeka, Kansas. She decided to “hang out her own shingle after sending dozens of resumes and landing only two interviews.” To pay the bills, she tends bar at night.

The author writes, “Her law-school reveries of becoming a glamorous corporate attorney working in a posh skyscraper on high-profile cases came crashing down. And the realities of long hours and potential ethical conflicts set in.”

I grab a Career Services Handbook from a large stack and head to my cube. With so much at stake, I better start studying.

* * *