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Dear Fall 1L Me,

-- By RafaelMiranda - 17 Apr 2024

As I conclude my second year of law school, there is one item that ought to be discussed with more disdain to the extent that it should frankly be removed as an option for the 1L Summer: the private sector 1L summer associate.

Background:

To preface, I worked at a law firm before I started law school for around 3.5 years. Graduating from UC Berkeley in 2019. The firm I worked at focused on complex commercial litigation and white-collar defense (interestingly it was founded by the former lead prosecutor of the Enron Case, John Hueston). I chose the firm because the type of work they did sounded interesting to me (and they offered me a job before the other 2 places got back to me). While the details of the job were somewhat non-transferable, I received a phenomenal insight into the daily lives of low level big law associates. I felt the firm hired a variety of personalities, there were neurotic meddlers, "nice guys", passive-aggressive types and others who were united in that they were drawn to a boutique litigation firm after working or clerking somewhere else first. My observations that most of the work they did was highly uninspiring and many quit after working for just one year (part of their hiring model for annual recruitment one partner quipped to me). Thus I came into law school pretty unamused with the "BigLaw" career as a substantive category.

The Private Sector Dynamic in Morningside Heights: The Vault 10 Draft

While It would be naive for me to say that coming to Columbia it was unexpected that there was a high amount of institutional reverence to the "BigLaw" legal industry, I was rightly shocked by the amount of people coming into 1L with standing offers from firms they worked at over the summer.

Too Soon?

One of my issues with this practice is the speed. Students just started learning the fundamentals but if you are already locked in for a job the coming summer—there could be a tendency to lose incentive to really engage for the sake of it. To use the terminology from the class, these sort of dynamics speed up the "tuna-canning process"

My Future & Conflicts:

I knew coming into law school that I wanted to do litigation. In an ideal world, I engage primarily in civil litigation involving police brutality lawsuits and wrongful conviction lawsuits while also maintaining a smaller criminal defense practice. Of course, I feel like to get there I'd like to become a prosecutor first, primarily for the trial experience and secondarily for the credibility for issues related to civil suits against government actors (such as police officers, security guards etc.).

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