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My practice group has been lucky enough to avoid this (knock on wood), but attitude/personality and work product are huge. If you come across as entitled and unwilling to help or to put in the time as a summer, or are generally unable to put yourself in a team mentality, that is going to go over like a lead balloon in most places. Poor work product that is symptomatic of a lack of diligence/care/effort, or poor work product that doesn’t seem apt to correct through training is also a huge red flag.
One of my closest friends didnt get the offer after being a summer in his pinnacle dream role because he simply "didn't buy in enough" to the practice. Which I believe is code for "you don't work that hard and you're difficult to work with."
Oof, that is cold. Duly noted.
Plagiarism (ironic, I know), bad work product, lying to third parties about being an associate, personality issues (arrogance typically), etc...I shake my head each time because the firm is literally over-paying you to be good for 12 weeks in order to give you a high six figure job that we have no idea whether you will be good at and people seem to still not act right.
"You're pre-fired!" - Dwight K. Schrute, California State Bar Board of Admissions
It was 2009.
😥
Only worked a strict 9-5 and thought the other summer students were stupid for working “hard not smart.” Also thought he was entitled to work with the high ranking partners and would turn down associate work that had come from those same partners.
And his work product was terrible because he never spent enough time editing or researching. I’m amazed we let him continue for as long as we did, to be honest.
I’ve seen multiple summers cold offered for not respecting female attorneys. Nothing super egregious, just a pattern of doubting the ability of female attorneys and being insubordinate to them no matter how senior. Hard to feel too bad for those guys.
One of
It’s unconscious bias that the rest of us have become all too aware of. Once you learn how to spot that pattern it’s pretty hard to not want to sit other male associates down and ask
them wtf they’re doing.
Usually there is something socially wrong with them.
Their work just should be passable, not over-the-top good. But if they have a social dysfunction, they are not getting an offer.
One summer from Stanford Law didn’t get an offer because her work contained a lot of grammatical errors, she said she took caffeine pills to get going in the morning, and she was too bubbly to the point it was obnoxious.
Another from Hastings Law, claimed he turned in an end-of-summer assignment, but he did not. Then he emailed it in later, apologizing, but the metadata in the document said the document was created after the summer associate period ended. The implication was that he had forgotten to do the assignment, and did it after he was reminded, and then lied about it.
Things like this result in no job offer.
In one assignment, it told an equity partner that I thought her legal analysis was wrong. I was a 1L summer telling a 30-year practitioner and co-owner of a biglaw firm that she was wrong. I still got an offer to come back for 2L and I was offered an associate position after law school.
Dysfunction is a strong word, but generally I think this is referring to people who (for example) take their stress out on support staff, make inappropriate jokes, and generally make others uncomfortable to be around. Let’s be honest, most lawyers are at least a teeny bit socially awkward, so our tolerance for similar social awkwardness is high.
It veers into dysfunction when it impacts the ability of others to work with you or generally be around you. If it’s going that way, I genuinely suggest seeking a therapist, as there are definitely strategies to deal with severe social anxiety or other issues that can make it all a little easier. Ain’t no shame in therapy. So many people see therapists is almost a badge of honor (and to be clear, pretty much everyone could use a therapist at one point or another).
Hope that helps! Slight awkwardness just makes you one of us. *insert chant here*
To not get an offer, you have to break Rule Number 1. Rule Number 1: don't be weird. Lawyering can really suck. We need to hire folks we won't want to strangle at 10pm on a Thursday when we're already 60 hours into a crappy week.
I'm seconding this. Be likable and do good work.
I’m relieved that none of these answers have anything to do with 2L grades/rank dropping. We haven’t gotten grades back yet, but I am sweating, as always, after finals.
Love to hear that!! Thanks A2
I see you're at patent agent. What is your technical background?
That’s interesting. I’ll have to see if they’re willing to let me bounce around next summer, it’d be great to try it all. I kind of owe it to the IP lit chair for getting me the job in the first place, so hopefully he doesn’t try to monopolize my time all summer.
Appreciate the feedback, A3!
Only one person in my summer class did not get an offer. Never answered emails or phone. Apparently the work product was fine, but just never, ever communicated with the partners or associates.
Not sure this qualifies, but here’s a good one: I assigned work to this guy at 10AM. At 3PM, he sent me half the assignment and wrote that “(someone else entirely unrelated) will send you the complete assignment”. He then proceeded to disappear for the next hour (he probably knew I would want to throw my keyboard at him or he was completely oblivious to what he’d done and went to Starbucks)
It takes guts to do that. I wonder what a partner would do to me if I delegated work that was delegated to me and peaced out at 3 PM.
I’m not sure this qualifies as a response to OPs question because for some reason I did not report him to the partners and instead gave him
a very stern talking to. And told Unrelated Person A to not accept work from people in their same category unless under specific instructions from someone more senior. But it’s a great example of what not to do.
Uh
Getting too drunk* around someone who doesn’t drink that much, or around someone who is insecure about how much they drink.
*not an objective value, depends on how much people, including the person you are drinking around, like your personality to begin with.
Alcohol abuse is so rampant in the profession that I find it both unhelpful and dishonest to pretend that there is an objective line that can be crossed when it comes to acting inappropriately with alcohol as a summer associate (or even as a real associate). But that’s how hiring committees talk about a summer drinking “too much” if it happens. If you don’t know the people you’re working for well enough (hint: you don’t) it’s best practice to drink a couple soda waters with lime and make sure you’re never the last (and also never the first) summer associate to leave an event.
Attitude.
Not as summer associate, but was contracted as a freelance lawyer (mostly 40-50hr billable/week) and renewed for 2,5 years consecutively. When applying for an associate position (=taking a large pay cut and doing the same work with more hours, but opportunity to take the traineeship necessary for the bar) they didn't make me an offer because of 'lack of analytical skills'.
Two days later I get a contract renewal. In other words: hiring you as an employee gives you too many benefits and worker protection since our firm operates under Dutch law. Fine, I'll just keep billing hourly—double for overtime and weekends—and look somewhere else in the meantime 🤷♂️
That’s a truly odd system man
I’m pretty sure you have to be credibly accused of murder and/or sexual harassment.
That’s double hearsay
We had a summer associate no-offered a few years ago because: she had two assigning partners - she told each partner that she was too busy to take on an assignment because the other partner was keeping her so busy. She was able to avoid doing much work over the summer but when the partners happened to speak, they found out each had barely given her work because they thought the other one was and they didn't want to overwhelm her.