Summer in the city
Never mind articling — increasingly, the key to landing a job in many large law firms is to secure a summertime position as early as first year. Not everyone thinks this is such a great development.
By Brad Mackay
High-stakes power lunches, late-night cocktail parties and Byzantine strategy sessions. A day in the life of your average high-powered lawyer, right? In reality, it’s the summer job experience of a growing number of second-year and even first-year law students.
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“When you realize that they’re hiring maybe two out of 600 students that they interview across the country, it becomes really devastating.”
Elizabeth Mah, University of Saskatchewan College of Law, Saskatoon |
Thanks to the ever-escalating recruitment efforts of law firms over the past few years, who are determined to get the best law students before the competition does, the articling year is no longer many students’ first exposure to the life of a lawyer. Hundreds of students are being immersed in law firm culture before they even crack open a second-year textbook.
Consider the 113-page Career Planning Handbook given to new students at Queen’s University Faculty of Law in Kingston, Ontario this fall. Aside from sage job-hunting advice ("Have a sense of humour, some Tylenol and a good suit") and key grammar tips for résumés (remember: "It’s LL.B. — not L.L.B."), the publication offers telling testimonials from past graduates.
In one, a recent grad recounts a first-year brainstorm that would likely impress the most Machiavellian minds along Bay Street: "I made and distributed professional business cards with my name and cell phone number (if you don’t have one, get a cell phone for interview week) so that they had something handy to remember me by," she writes.
"It was easy to track me down without having to sift through my application and possibly calling my home number instead. It worked out really well." She ends with some advice on scheduling interviews with competing firms: "Don’t get upset if something goes wrong or feel bad if you think a firm gets mad at you. You have to look out for yourself first, so if you have to slot a ‘great’ firm in at 4:00 and they don’t like it — too bad."
The glamorous life
This kind of career savviness, once exclusive to third-year students who’d been through articling interviews, can be traced back to a policy change enacted by many law societies in 2000. Spurred by requests from law firms, the regulatory bodies agreed to allow schools to open the summer-job process to the first year of classes.
This controversial decision saw summer jobs — traditionally the domain of keeners with connections — develop rapidly into the flashpoint for an on-campus careerist frenzy. Recent law grad Elizabeth Mah says it’s common to hear about rookie students juggling late-night cocktail meet-and-greets with nine-o’clock Torts class.
"I was totally sucked into the process myself," the 24-year-old recalls. "I fell for all the glam — the dinners, the receptions, everything — I was head-over-heels. Then you realize that they’re hiring maybe two out of 600 students that they interview across the country, and it becomes really devastating. I began to doubt my ability to get any law position."
After applying for summer work two years running and braving several levels of "superficial" interviews ("All they asked me was what did you do last summer and what movies or sports I liked"), she came away empty-handed. The process proved highly demoralizing, and Mah says it took her two more years to regain her confidence in her future profession.
Now, as the co-chair of the Careers Committee at the University of Saskatchewan’s College of Law, she acts as a conduit between recruiters and students. The general feeling among both groups seems to be that summer employment has effectively replaced articling as the proverbial "in" to a full-time job.
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How to land a summer job... And what to do if you get one.
If you’re a first-year law student, chances are you’re at least curious about the crown jewel known as the Summer Job. But once you get through all the buzz and gossip surrounding them, it becomes clear there’s no real formula to go about actually getting one — much less what to expect if you do.
Firms will start with your marks. "Step one for getting an interview is grades. Undoubtedly that’s the primary factor," says Michael Urbani, co-chair of the summer student program at McCarthy Tétrault in Vancouver. Then they use résumés to start culling the interview list, looking for diverse work backgrounds and extracurricular interests.
But come time for the actual interviews, the process becomes less clear-cut. "You’ve made it through the door at this point, so we’re picking people that we think will work well with us and, more generally, work well with other people in the firm," Urbani says. "It’s really almost a gut feeling."
Urbani, who himself started his career as a summer student at McCarthys, says this gut feeling often hinges on simple interpersonal skills. "They have to be able to talk about their résumé experience that made them so interesting in the first place. They have to bring that out for us."
Say you surface from this admittedly murky process as one of the chosen. What next?
While expectations vary from firm to firm, most summer-student positions exist to fill a role somewhere between office temp and articling student. And while the days of stepping out to catch a matinee on firm time may exist solely in the nostalgic minds of senior partners, Urbani says not to expect too many late nights.
"Works tends to be a little more research-based and memo-writing than they might get as an articling student," he advises. "We try and make it a practical thing. We really want them to get exposure to the law firm, so they quite often tag along at meetings and sit in on conference calls — work that’s not really ‘work.’ It’s more observation."
So even though you’ll likely sweat blood during the summer hiring process, don’t expect to sweat much at all if you’re lucky enough to actually make it through. |
Consider the lightweight duty normally associated with summer work — "As long as you don’t burn the firm down or lose $800 million, you’ve got it made," says Mah. As a result, students find themselves willingly or unwillingly captured by a herd mentality, rushing to get to the head of the pack in a fevered effort to secure a rarified spot.
"I think it’s much more apparent to students early on that somehow this is the Holy Grail, and that has a pretty negative effect on the law school atmosphere," says Gillian Ready, Career Services Director for Queen’s Faculty of Law. "It affects how first-year students view the process, before I even have the chance to get to them."
With application deadlines for summer jobs in Alberta and East Coast firms due in October, and deadlines in other regions and for government jobs not long after, students are forced to map out their careers as soon they step through the door, Ready says.
And while she acknowledges that a well-paying job at a prestigious firm is important to many students — especially those facing enormous student debts — she says the attendant sideshow that comes along with a recruiting drive is difficult to accept.
"I think it’s fair to say our school and many others weren’t too keen on the idea, but went along with it anyway," she says. "Then they added campus interviews to the process, and then students were applying in the first week of classes.
"I dislike the current system, but I’m willing to work with it," Ready adds. "But the faculty hate it. The professors just hate the pressure the students are under."
A necessary evil?
Still, those in charge of recruiting defend the process as a necessary evil. Michael Urbani, co-chair of the summer student program for McCarthy Tétrault’s Vancouver office, contends that the rush can be blamed on the heated competition for the best students from both Canadian and U.S. firms.
To those firms that can afford it, the summer job serves as the latest, and perhaps ultimate, perk in attracting the best and the brightest. Not only do the positions pay better than most other summer jobs, but typically the expectations are low and students are offered an easy way to ingratiate themselves into the firm’s culture.
"We make it pretty clear when the summer starts that this is not a job where you’re going to kill yourself," Urbani says."It’s just a primer to the firm — like Law Firms 101. We’ve had summer students who don’t work out, but that’s pretty rare. Nothing is ever guaranteed, but it’s almost automatic that you’re going to get hired back."
With about seven positions available at his office (almost double the number in 1996), Urbani agrees that a summer student packs a significant advantage come articling time. Still, he says the heightened significance of summering has given rise to unforeseen complications for employers.
The sudden shift has meant the articling process has suffered a trickle-down effect, with interviewers only able to offer two positions not already filled by summer students. "I think it’s unfortunate," he says.
"If we had the ability to do so, we would have hired way more than just the two we ended up with. It’s getting really hard for good candidates who don’t summer — for whatever reason — to get good articling positions."
So are students who don’t get summer law jobs completely out of luck? "I don’t think that there’s any perception, at least here, that if you don’t have a summer job that there must be something wrong with you," Urbani says.
"Students shouldn’t feel like it’s all over at a large firm if they don’t have that summer job. That being said, the numbers do make it that much more difficult for them, so I guess you just have to maintain your grades and keep at it. It’s a tough position to be in — but it’s not impossible."
Closing doors
James Rossiter, an associate with Merrick Holm in Halifax and Chair of the Young Lawyers’ Conference of the CBA-Nova Scotia, believes summer recruiting has had a more subtle impact on student’s introduction to the law.
"They’re starting career planning two weeks into classes — I think that’s sad," he says. "When I consider how exciting and wonderful and new law school is in first year ... it’s the stuff of drama. I mean, there were no law firm recruiters in The Paper Chase. It’s a time when you’re first becoming nourished in the law and the concepts are so new and interesting and challenging. Recruitment really is a distraction from all that."
Besides, he adds, "the law firms who recruit the first-years don’t even see first-year marks. They haven’t even waited to see what the students will do in the way of joining committees, participating in governing bodies and being active on campus."
Rossiter doesn’t thinks competition from American firms can still be used as a rationale for summer hiring, given the downturn in the economy south of the border. He urges lawyers to reconsider the summer-job crunch they helped launch back in 2000.
"I don’t think they even want to recruit first-year students," he says. "They do it because it’s an accoutrement to the package that they feel has to be offered to attract quality candidates. So I think there’s good reason for firms to look back on what they consider to be the glory days, when there was some level of regulation across the country."
Gillian Ready would be inclined to agree. While her job requires her to write career guides and offer advice to any student who asks for it, she herself was a law student at Queen’s during the 1980s and remembers that the only employment information available then was inside a row of binders on a shelf — no postings, no on-campus interviews.
"There were a few summer jobs back then, but it was really very much a low-key event," she recalls. "There wasn’t this culture where people were talking about it all the time."
Ready thinks the intense focus on law firm summer jobs also serves to deflect students away from the broader range of summer opportunities out there, such as Queen’s own International Business and Public Law program in England. As a result, there’s been ongoing discussions among Queen’s and other law schools about pushing the summer job process forward to at least the second term of first year.
"Some schools are very opposed to the idea," she admits. "But I’ve laid my cards on the table, I think more than any other school, in saying personally and as a representative of our school’s position that I would prefer to have it in the spring."
Whether or not this comes to pass, some students are learning to adapt to the new reality as best they can. "I think the mentality now is that there is just this ‘elite’ out there," Elizabeth Mah says of the students she now counsels. "A lot of first-years didn’t even apply this year. There are way more articling jobs out there [at all the other firms] than there are summer anyway, so people just invest their time somewhere else."
Though Mah’s experience with summering was severe, the initial disenchantment she experienced eventually helped her to align her career aspirations with her life goals.
"These big firms in Calgary, Toronto and Vancouver aren’t looking for everybody," she says. "Even though you can do the job and even though you have the grades, they’re looking for people who are willing to dedicate themselves completely. So if you lead a more balanced life, it probably won’t work out for you.
"I think I realized after a while that the right firm will find me," she says. "I think people just have to remember that."
Brad Mackay is a freelance writer in Toronto.
Photo: Tony Bounsall
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Emplois d’été ou stages?
Oubliez les stages. De plus en plus, la clé d’une embauche dans un grand cabinet, c’est un emploi d’été... dès la première année de droit si possible. Mais les avis sont partagés sur le bien-fondé d’une telle stratégie.
En 2000, à la demande des cabinets juridiques, les barreaux ont résolu de permettre aux étudiants de première année des facultés de droit de postuler des emplois d’été juridiques. Cette décision controversée a eu pour résultat de plonger les jeunes recrues dans une frénésie de carriérisme jadis réservée aux étudiants de troisième année.
À cause de l’escalade des campagnes de recrutement où les cabinets tentent de mettre le grappin sur les meilleurs étudiants avant la concurrence, des centaines d’étudiants en droit goûtent à la vie d’avocat avant même d’ouvrir un manuel de deuxième année. « J’ai succombé à l’attrait — les dîners, les réceptions et tout — j’étais sens dessus dessous », se souvient Elizabeth Mah, une récente diplômée âgée de 24 ans. « Puis vous réalisez qu’ils vont embaucher seulement deux des 600 étudiants qu’ils interviewent partout au pays. J’ai commencé à douter de ma capacité d’obtenir un emploi en droit. »
Après avoir postulé sans succès des emplois d’été pendant deux années consécutives et avoir subi plusieurs entrevues superficielles, elle a fait chou blanc et a mis deux ans de plus à rebâtir sa confiance. Maintenant, à titre de coprésidente du comité des carrières à la faculté de droit de l’Université de la Saskatchewan, elle agit comme intermédiaire entre recruteurs et étudiants. Le sentiment général, chez les uns et les autres, c’est que les emplois d’été ont effectivement remplacé le stage comme tremplin vers un emploi à temps plein.
En Alberta et dans les cabinets de la côte atlantique, les demandes d’emploi d’été doivent être reçues au plus tard au mois d’octobre. Et les tombées des gouvernements suivent de près. Les étudiants se trouvent obligés de songer à un cheminement de carrière dans les premières semaines de leur première année en droit, explique Gillian Ready, directrice du service des carrières à la faculté de droit de l’Université Queen’s.
« Je pense qu’il est juste de dire que notre faculté, ainsi que d’autres, ne sont pas enchantées par cette idée mais nous avons collaboré », dit-elle. « Puis ils ont ajouté des interviews sur le campus, et les étudiants se sont mis à postuler durant les premières semaines de l’année scolaire. Je n’aime pas ce système, mais je suis prête à collaborer. Toutefois les professeurs le détestent. Ils détestent la pression à laquelle les étudiants sont soumis. »
Pour les cabinets qui peuvent se les payer, les emplois d’été permettent de recruter les étudiants jugés les plus brillants. Pour ces derniers, c’est une occasion de trouver un emploi estival bien rémunéré sans avoir à travailler trop fort. « Nous disons très clairement au début de l’été qu’il ne s’agit pas d’un emploi où l’on se tue à l’ouvrage », explique Michael Urbani, coprésident du programme étudiant au bureau de Vancouver du cabinet McCarthy Tétrault. « C’est seulement une introduction au cabinet — comme "Cabinets juridiques 101". Rien n’est garanti, mais c’est presque automatique que l’étudiant sera réembauché. »
L’embauche de sept étudiants durant les vacances d’été a cependant eu un effet imprévu sur les stages. Cette année, le bureau de Vancouver de McCarthy Tétrault n’avait que deux postes de stagiaires à offrir en concours libre. Les autres étaient déjà comblés par des candidats qui avaient occupé des emplois d’été. « Il est devenu très difficile pour des étudiants qui n’ont pas travaillé l’été d’obtenir de bons postes de stagiaires », reconnaît Me Urbani. |
