The adage is "fire fast and hire slow." When I was applying for my first job out of law school, the adage felt more like "fire fast and hire never."
When I chose to go to law school at Tulane University in New Orleans, I was excited about the prospects of going to a top-50 school, living in a truly unique city, and enjoying some warm weather. My expectations of New Orleans (or "Nola," to those in the know) were more than surpassed. What I did not anticipate, however, was the difficulty I would have in finding a job back in Detroit, despite having a successful transcript.
As a job applicant in the Detroit market coming from a law school where the common misperception was that I was taught a European-based body of law (the Civil Code) and where not one of my hoped-for employers conducted on-campus interviews, I discovered that the process of finding a job was much more difficult than I had anticipated. However, with persistence, luck, and connections made through my involvement in the Oakland County Bar Association, I was able to find the right jobs at the right times in my career.
Of course, as many attorneys will experience, I eventually transitioned from being one hoping for a job to being one who becomes part of the decision of who gets a job. Having the opportunity to protect the culture of my firm and identify future partner-level talent is an important responsibility and, next to associate mentoring, has always been my favorite firm-related responsibility.
Over time, I have formulated two underlying premises for hiring that are interrelated and unorthodox and unpopular: (1) College or law school pedigree is irrelevant and (2) big-firm summer associate programs are an archaic, exclusionary, and inefficient means of discovering true talent.
Before explaining why I believe in these premises, I should first identify what I am looking for in a job applicant (in this order): (1) good character; (2) work ethic; (3) hunger; and (4) an entrepreneurial spirit. As I have said in many lateral recruiting meetings, I can teach anyone the law or how to write, but these four characteristics cannot be taught. They are innate in a person, are forged by life experiences, or are a combination of both. Quite simply, they cannot be taught by the time these individuals are lawyers.
Premise No. 1: Beware of the "resume junkies." These are people in recruiting positions who salivate when they see educational pedigree on a resume. Names such as Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Notre Dame, simply because of their presence, cause resumes to work their way to the top of the pile and cause reviewers to either intentionally or subconsciously create built-in credibility for the applicant. The same is true for prior law firm experience. For some people, experience at places like Skadden, Latham & Watkins, and other silk-stocking firms translates into success in finding sought-for characteristics. In my 20 years of watching young lawyers matriculate from associate to partner, I've found that the most successful lawyers (defined as lawyers who have been positive contributors to firm culture and firm finances and who have remained at the firm) have not come from Ivy League law schools or big New York City firms; they have been the lawyers who graduated from one of our local law schools not named "Michigan" and have cut their legal teeth at jobs that may not have paid a lot but gave real experience: solo, boutique, and midsize law firms; clerkships; prosecutors' offices; legal aid; and similar workplaces. The key to these environments is that they cannot afford to have the lawyer simply dust off countless boxes (or, in 2021, conduct Relativity searches) full of thousands of pages of documents. Again, my experiences certainly influence my perspective. The practical legal experience I gained at a midsize law firm gave me a competitive advantage against my peers when I was hired at a much larger law firm.
Premise No. 2: Especially in the extremely competitive Detroit market, big-firm summer associate programs are an inefficient vestige of a bygone era where lawyers graduated from law school, went to work for a law firm, and stayed at that firm for their entire career. If one were to judge the success of a summer associate program by counting the number of summer associates who matriculated to equity partner at the same firm, the program would be mothballed by practically every large firm in town. On the other hand, if one were to track laterally hired second-, third-, and fourth-year associates and their progression toward equity partner, the numbers would be invariably higher (of course, my conclusions are entirely subjective and untested).
The biggest problem with summer associate programs is that they have a large implicit bias against my perfect candidate. Part-time law students, people who are going to law school while they work at other jobs, and people who have families or other obligations simply cannot commit themselves to the three-month paid vacation of a summer clerkship. The people I want to hire - the hardworking, entrepreneurial, dedicated, and hungry people who fall into this category - are cut out of the opportunity to get positions out of law school at the big firms with the big salaries. On the other hand, every second-, third-, or fourth-year associate I have been part of hiring has become a fantastic part of the firm they were hired to.
Of course, there are many broad generalizations contained in this article and there are numerous success stories that have originated from top-tier law schools and summer associate programs. The goal of this article is not to cast any shade at the people who have excelled in those programs. I write this article with the hope of generating attention to a method of hiring that is more qualitatively based than quantitatively based and where a candidate's intangible qualities are valued higher than the brand names that appear on their resume.
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Kaveh Kashef is the 89th president of the Oakland County Bar Association.
