The Corporate Deferred: Associates Who Took a Different Path
The American Lawyer
By Zach Lowe
November 06, 2009
The article below was first published on The Am Law Daily.
When Hayley Goldman found out last spring that Proskauer Rose was pushing back her start date from this fall until January 2010, the University of Pennsylvania law grad didn't panic. After all, Goldman reasoned, the deferral wasn't so long that she had to scramble to find a Plan B. Initially, she and a law school friend discussed the possibility of traveling to Peru for a month and taking Spanish courses there.
But then Proskauer called in August and told Goldman her start date was being pushed back until next April. That made finding a Plan B somewhat more urgent. Luckily, the Proskauer staffer who called Goldman happened to mention one possible backup option: T-Mobile, a longtime Proskauer client, was looking for a deferred associate to work in the litigation department at its Seattle headquarters. The unusual solution appealed to Goldman more than public interest work, and the stipend Proskauer was offering--$5,000 per month starting in November--was not contingent on landing a job at a nonprofit or public interest group, she says. She expressed interest and got the job.
"It just seemed like a rare and fantastic opportunity," says Goldman, who started at T-Mobile in October. "It's an adventure most people don't get the chance to embark on."
Interviews with more than a dozen law firm hiring partners, legal recruiters, and career-services administrators suggest Goldman is right--very few deferred associates have managed to land in corporate positions. Several law school officials we spoke to, including those at Harvard and Yale, say they haven't heard of any of their deferred alumni ending up at corporate positions.
Companies, for their part, haven't jumped at the chance to hire inexperienced attorneys even though those attorneys would come (mostly) free of charge. Firms sometimes send midlevel associates to work at corporate clients for a fixed period of time (an arrangement known as a secondment), but finding takers for lawyers fresh out of law school has proven more difficult. Right now, six of Proskauer's incoming 72 associates are working with corporate clients. Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe has placed five of its 45 deferred associates with corporate clients, and Weil, Gotshal & Manges has done the same with 13 of its 85 incoming associates, according to numbers provided by those firms.
"This was not in our original plans," says Melissa Scanlan, the in-house lawyer in T-Mobile's litigation group that coordinated Goldman's hire. "We have done this before with firms and more senior associates, but we never considered this. Candidly, there was a bit of a question among some of the lawyers in our group about how we were going to fit her in, since she is brand new. But we were not wondering whether Hayley would be useful, because Proskauer is a great firm. And in the end, I'd be sending this work to outside firms and paying hundreds of dollars for it."
Indeed, T-Mobile is paying nothing for Goldman after Proskauer agreed to start her stipend in October, when she arrived at T-Mobile, instead of in November as scheduled, Goldman says.
The payment issues aren't always so simple. Jesse Infeld, a deferred Orrick associate, landed a gig at the New York City Housing Development Corporation, a hybrid public-private finance agency that issues bonds for affordable housing projects (Orrick often counsels the underwriters of those bonds, according to Infeld and Rene Kathawala, Orrick's pro bono coordinator and the partner who supervised the placement of the firm's deferred associates. The HDC pays its law firms at or near full rate, Kathawala says.)
Infeld, who won't start at Orrick until January 2011, was supposed to begin receiving about $5,000 per month from the firm in January 2010. One problem: The HDC wanted him to start in October, since fall is typically a busy season. Everyone got together and worked out a plan under which the HDC will pay Infeld an amount a bit lower than the stipend until the firm starts paying him in January, Infeld says.
"I remember trying to explain all of this to my potential landlord and thinking it would be a nightmare," Infeld says with a laugh.
Caitlin Melchior, a deferred Weil associate working at the private equity firm Oak Hill Capital Partners, faces a different complication related to her $90,000 stipend that covers the fall of this year and all of 2010: Weil offered that stipend to deferred associates who logged at least 1,000 hours at any legal job, and Melchior is working so much at Oak Hill that she will hit that 1,000 hour mark well before her Weil start date in January 2011, she says. She's not sure what to do if she reaches the mark early.
"I'm working a minimum of 40 hours a week," Melchior says. "I'm working full time. Not law firm hours, but definitely full time. I just want to reevaluate when I get to 1,000 hours and see what makes the most sense for me. I really enjoy working for this company." Melchior says she enjoyed her exposure to private equity work during her summer at Weil and wanted to use her deferral to gain more experience in that area rather than working at a nonprofit. "This is what I was supposed to be doing when I started at Weil," she says.
Indeed, the corporate deferred we talked to were unanimous in their praise for the in-house experience. All of them say they are being tossed headlong into work and responsibilities that will test them now and help them when they eventually start at their firms. Infeld, for instance, is reviewing bond documents and feasibility information linked to real estate deals, he says. "The biggest thing has been my own lack of confidence," he says. "I'm learning so much that there are a lot of blind spots. But I am going to have a lot of independence here, and I will have to develop that confidence."
Goldman joined T-Mobile just as the company got wind of a possible dispute, says in-house lawyer Scanlan. The company asked Goldman to zero in on the key clauses at issue in a 100-page customer contract, sift through notes from customers, and create a history of the "relevant facts" at issue in the potential dispute. The process has even included discussions with T-Mobile's engineering team. "She has been great," Scanlan says of Goldman. "This is a scrappy place. We don't have our own secretaries, and everybody needs to understand very quickly what needs to be done."
Says Goldman: "The pace here has been so fast. It has been fantastic. I'm young, and inexperienced attorneys don't often get to to see the inner workings of a client's business and gain insight into the business pressures facing a company."
Will the corporate work provide better preparation for a law firm career than public interest work? While that may be debatable, what's certain is that the corporate deferred we spoke to were thrilled that what appeared six months ago to be a crisis has turned into something better.
"Our plans got upset," Infeld says. "And you're obviously upset at first. And angry, frustrated, and depressed. And then you just decide to make the best of a bad situation. I have to live within the moment now. If Orrick does hire me, that's great. If not, I'll be more prepared because of this job."
