Too late for a big law job?

KamelAkbar
Fri, 14 Oct 2011 12:40:19 +0000

I apologize for the long read. My wife is a 3L at a mid-30s ranked public law school. She didn’t get an internship in the summer after her 1L year so she was unable to get a big law internship as a 2L. She had a great internship in Germany (she can function in German professionally) this summer and is doing a very solid externship right now with a federal agency.

She didn’t initially think she was big law caliber because her GPA is 3.45 (top 33% class rank), but she wrote for a journal and is fluent (nearly native) in both Spanish and German. Other than that, her undergrad GPA was 4.0 and she had some great international experience as an undergrad.

She got an interview with a big law firm (thousands applied, 9 made it to the final round of interviews, she is the backup for the 1 person who was selected).

Questions:

1) Are there still going to be big law firms hiring 3Ls, or are they mostly done by now?

2) Should she keep cold-calling firms outside of the local area? She’s applied to dozens of jobs that weren’t posted by her career services office, with no response.

3) Does she have much of a shot with jobs that are outside her school’s area of influence? She’s heard that it’s hard to get a job in another part of the country if you’re from a lower ranked school.

4) Do you guys have any other advice to offer her? We would really appreciate that.