Guilt, Lunch, and Other Firm Concerns
From Anonymous Lawyer:
Someone accepted an offer today. Next summer's class is starting to shape up. I hate the people who take forever to decide, and make us send them cookies, or brownies, or t-shirts. Those things shouldn't make a difference.
I've yet to settle on a firm. All I can say is, I really hope none of the firms I'm looking at do send brownies, t-shirts, or whatever. AL's right: it shouldn't make a difference in the decision, and for most students it probably doesn't. What it does make a difference in is the amount of guilt one feels calling up the firm to say you took a different offer.
Throughout this interview season, I've visited most of my firms in the morning, which means that after meeting some associates and partners I'm generally assigned a young associate to accompany to lunch. Don't get me wrong--these have been very, very enjoyable lunches, and I've genuinely enjoyed meeting the people I've interviewed with. But particularly at some of the larger firms, the cost of the lunch has dwarfed my standard weekly lunch budget by factors of four or five.
I can understand the purposes of the lunch interview. On the one hand, the interviewee is more likely to trust an associate's view of the firm if given outside of the building. The associate can make certain that the interviewee doesn't drink from the finger-bowl, pick his nose at the table, or otherwise display humiliating tendencies in public. And of course, there are some secondary benefits: the associate gets to have a nice lunch on the firm, and the interviewee can (presumably) look forward to doing one or two such lunches in the future over the course of their employment.
None of this, however, requires a very expensive lunch. Certainly three figures for a table of two would be far more than necessary. And indeed, too nice a lunch brings its own worries: this is, after all, their client's money they're spending, and their associates time (both in what's spent with me, and what the associate will have to bill to make up the difference in profits). We lawyers are fairly exchangeable commodities, and shouldn't justify that much investment in capture. Besides, if you're about to sell your soul to someone, do you really want them to have spent that much on it before they take possession of the goods?
Anyway, I guess I just wanted to say to the Anonymous Lawyer that the emotion cuts both ways. He doesn't like those of us who are weighing our options "making us send brownies." Some of us feel guilty for receiving them. All in all, I wonder if the brownie companies aren't making out like bandits in this equation.
Comments
Posted by: Tony the Pony | October 29, 2004 2:55 PM
Posted by: Anthony | October 29, 2004 6:39 PM
Posted by: Tung Yin | October 29, 2004 9:24 PM
Posted by: Fr. Bill | October 30, 2004 12:42 PM