Description
Must-Ask Questions When Choosing Between Firms
[00:00:00] I'm a third year lateral trying to decide between similar offers at V10 firms and have some second look conversations to help me decide. What questions would would be good to ask folks to get a better sense of which firms to choose?
Okay. The first thing is, it depends. It depends on what you're looking for. If your goal is to go in-house or work in area partner in this law firm, or do something, one of the questions that will be good to ask often is, especially, if you have the offers, which is great.
What has happened? Who am I replacing? Where did that person go? All that sort of stuff. Trying to understand what your future is at that firm and what they the see future is. Now, you may be interviewing, I don't know if you're getting similar offers at V10 firms. One of them may be a branch office and the other may not and understand the differences there. Understanding the quality of work you're going to get. Understanding a little bit about what is going on in terms of that type of work that firm has access to. Meaning, did they have access to large clients? Would you be working with smaller clients? I don't know. I'm assuming you're probably corporate, but I don't know.
What [00:01:00] type of work would you be doing? That's the first question.
Another important question is always going to be related to, what happens with when work slows down? You need to try to understand the kind of the client base and who, and what, what would happen if the work would slow down there?
And, I've been saying this for the past several months. When corporate slows down, tons of people lose their jobs. Lateral and large law firms and people don't remember it anymore. 'Cause, there's institutional members, very slow or very shallow. But, you could be talking about like in even major firms, like 50% of the corporate associates losing their jobs.
You need to make sure you understand, like how big are these institutional clients. Most Balton firms, they typically don't have a lot of attrition or layoffs when things slow down, but understanding that, and then the other thing I would ask that's very important is, who would you be working for?
Do you want to be working just for a senior associate or do you want to be working directly for a partner? A well known partner and you'd be working for a service partner, is that partner a someone that has business because if you work with someone that has a lot of business, that person has the power to make you partner than a lot of V10 [00:02:00] firms.
I don't know a lot, but several of them have one tier partnerships. Meaning, you can make partner there without any business and you're a partner.
Those are things to understand. I would try to understand who you're working for. I would try to understand what type of clients the firm has in your practice area where the work comes from.
Sometimes work in a branch office may come from the main office, which means that's kinda risky. Understanding the context you would develop, because the closer you are to people that have a lot of business, the more success you're going to have in the long run in your career.
