Description
Why Young Attorneys Should Try to Get into the Best Law Firm Possible
[00:00:00] Currently trying to decide which firm to join as an incoming corporate associate. How are we supposed to know what type of corporate group we want if we have no experience prior to choosing. For instance, if choosing between V10, non New York, M&A / funds with private equity and non V10 handling ECVC, public and private M&A, cap markets, etc.,
I would like to choose the firm practice, that offers the most best exit options down the line as the partnership track is not for me. Any advice?
Okay. So the big thing is if you do want to be an exit position and if you don't want to be a partner in a law firm, then you need to position yourself, in a way with the type of in-house job that you'd want. I don't know why you would want to be making these decisions right now.
But, if it was me, I think when you're a young attorney, I think the best thing you can possibly do is probably work at the best law firm you can get into or the largest law firm and that's important. There are two things that are interesting that you're saying, I'm assuming the non-volatile is in New York and I'm assuming that the V10 is [00:01:00] not in New York and it's in a smaller market. Pretty much, if you want to do anything related to corporate M&A and so forth here, New York is always the best place to get experience. So, I'm not sure how big the firm is.
If you want to do M&A, if you are comfortable on the other market and it's a very good firm, then you might actually be better off working in a smaller non New York. And I don't know if it's California where you're talking about, but I think that typically you're going to have the most exit options working in the largest firm because the firms, especially if what you want to do is go in-house, the firms all have brands. And, when you're going in-house, the in-house companies are often hiring for the type of brand you're in with, and it's unfortunate, but often it's the larger firm that's often considered much better. That can be very helpful if you're working, especially if you're trying to work in a different type of practice setting. The larger firm can often be much better.
The big thing that I would say, though, in terms of you're [00:02:00] searching, if you're looking at between two different offices in your firm and you don't want to do it long-term, you may want to do it. You should always think about maybe working like four or five years out and working in a place where you can see yourself for four or five years.
The reason is because, like I've recommended to several people on this call, getting four or five years of experience is very important. And so going to a firm where there's a lot of stability, where work is going to keep going on for four or five years is important.
So, if you're looking at a V10 firm that's in a branch office that was relatively new, you may not have a lot of long-term stability there. Depending on the size firm you're looking at. So, I would be very careful, many times about non branch offices or branch offices having long-term access to work because you do need to make sure that you have long-term access to work and that is really one of the big things that I always counsel younger attorneys. It's just to make sure that you have that wherever you're going, especially if you're a new attorney.
There's an [00:03:00] article today, for example, in the wall street journal that was talking about, the bond market and how it's signaling that the economy may not be doing as well as everyone thinks.
I've been doing this for so long and what I've seen is, the market go up and down. But corporate is definitely a market that gets overly inflated. And when there's too many people in corporate, the first people to go are generally the junior associates.
And, it can happen very quickly and it can happen like almost like within a month. The market can fall out over some reason. I don't know what it would be, but if there was, for example I don't know, China or something happened at the Olympics or who knows? Any variety of things can affect the market and people getting spooked. And ,then the second it does, a lot of people can be affected negatively. So it's just something to be concerned about and aware of.
Okay. So, I would go to a place. My big thing would be the first would be going to the largest firm you can, because that's going to help you more, especially if you want to go on house and you'll get better training, but the second thing would be making sure if you are looking at a branch office where there's stability. And then, the third [00:04:00] consideration would be for corporate related work, there's different reputations and so forth of different corporate types of departments. And so you should also look into that. The larger departments are probably going to be better than the smaller one.
