"I'm looking for a summer associate position, but a lot of them are filled at this point. Would it be worthwhile to try to do recon by informally reaching out to recruiting coordinators and asking if they have openings?"
Yes. I think that's a good idea. The best way to get a summer position, typically if you don't have one, I always recommend applying in the market you're from. So if you're in Valasco in Washington, DC, and you're from Connecticut, you should apply to firms in Connecticut. And then, you should also make sure you're doing a comprehensive search and reaching out to as many places as possible. A lot of times people will only apply to firms with openings. My big piece of career advice has always been to make sure that you're applying to many places that don't necessarily have openings that you know about. A lot of times just sending letters to local firms could be effective.
I grew up outside of Detroit in a city called Grosse Pointe. When I was in law school, my first summer, I decided that I might want to work in Grosse Pointe, and so I sent letters. It's a pretty small town. It's maybe 25,000 people, and there were maybe seven or eight attorneys in that town. A couple of them, like three of them, looked okay and I sent them letters, and I think I got interviews with two of them and I could have worked with them in the summer.
It would have been very good experience. And I didn't, but I could have. The point is that, you can typically get jobs if you apply to places where you're from. They're not always going to have openings. It doesn't have to be with the biggest firm. The most important thing if you're trying to get a summer job right now is to make sure you have a summer job because working in a law firm is much more important than not doing anything. So even if you work in a small law firm that you don't think is that great, it still could get you into a bigger law firm the next summer after you graduate because you can always interview in your third year and it will get you good experience because people hire people that look like they're going to be interested in the job.
I would really recommend contacting at this point as many firms as you can. They don't have to be the largest firms and they should be in all sorts of cities. There's a big list of firms on the BCG website. So if you search for top law firms BCG, there's lists of firms in every city. You may have a difficult time getting hired by a large firm, and that's fine because it's late but somebody may hire you. You can even just say you need to get experience, "Could I do an unpaid summer job with your firm?"
When you apply to firms, you don't always need to say that you were a summer associate. You can just put down the dates you were employed there, and that's fine. And that's still experience and most people won't even pay attention to it.
If it was me, I would work very hard to try to get more interviews right now and do everything you can. I see resumes all the time of people that didn't work in the summer and then got into the third year, and even if you go to a top 10 law school, it just becomes very difficult to get a job if you didn't work in the summer because law firms wonder why you didn't work in the summer.
