What is Conflict Checks Clear and Why Make Sure of It When You Lateral
[00:00:00] When lateraling to a new firm, when do they need your official transcripts and reference letters in general?
At my old firm, it took my transcripts like six months to get there and they never contacted my references. Didn't seem to bother them.
My buddy's firm required official transcripts for an interview and contacted his references like the day after.
Is it okay to ask interviewers to wait to contact references until you have an offer? I don't want to shoot myself in the foot at my current firm.
My current firm didn't require official transcripts. I only needed the unofficial one for an interview and they still haven't asked about my official one years later and only contact with my references once they told me I basically had the offer.
Okay. So yeah, it is firm specific. Meaning, large institutional firms with lots of procedures and processes will dot their I's and cross their T's with this stuff. The smaller firms are ones that are very busy. If it's one of the largest firms in the country, they probably have very good systems and stuff in place to make sure this stuff happens because it's actually funny. But what happens with a lot of young upstart firms is, they will hire people who didn't go to law school and never took the [00:01:00] bar. I'm serious and who knows, who forged transcripts, all that kind of stuff.
That's happened before, not to my candidates, but they told me the stories. And so that's what happens a lot at the young firms.
And then what happens is the firm gets more older and established, they put all these processes and bureaucracy and stuff in place to make sure that doesn't happen. I think that in terms of reference checks, there's all sorts of ways reference checks can be done. They can be done by the law firm, or sometimes law firms will hire companies, whose job is to go and do that sort of thing.
And so when the company goes and does that sort of thing, they typically will ask questions like, would you hire the person again, if you had an opening and so forth, but it's okay to ask. Wait until you have an offer.
The other thing that you didn't mention that's important is to wait until conflict checks clear. So what conflict checks are, meaning if you worked on behalf of one client and your new firm is adverse to that client or something, then the law firm typically needs to do, what's called a conflict check, just to make sure that there are no conflicts with the existing firm and with [00:02:00] that firm. They don't want you to be able to have information that they can use.
