<p>“Hiring people from various firms show up on TLS from time to time. They uniformly say they treat transfers as if they were at the previous school.”</p>
<p>All I can tell you is that firms that did not hire from the previous school at all would sometimes hire my transfers. (I was a career advisor at Northwestern Law for 5 years.) I’m sure it varies from firm to firm, but I saw this happen repeatedly.</p>
<p>“Intuitively, that’s really the only way they even could do it.”</p>
<p>That’s the only way they could do it if OCI hiring were all about ranking people by intellect based on grades. It isn’t. A lot of it is about branding. The same human being, with the same 1L year at DePaul, is a different corporate asset depending on whether he’s a DePaul 2L or a Michigan 2L. That may be silly, but it’s true.</p>
<p>It’s also extremely valuable to get in front of attorneys at OCI. People who are great interviewees in person can get callbacks that they would never get by mailing out their resume. Charm is not going to get you into Cravath with a 3.1, but it absolutely will get you into firms that are just out of reach based on numbers alone.</p>