Dear 2Ls,
The recruitment process is an adversarial process in which you will match wits with professionals who are trained at matching wits with students. Seemingly nice and friendly student directors are in fact cold-hearted agents of capitalism—they are only as nice as they have to be to get what they want.
Law is a business: each firm is a profit-making organization which has at its heart a singular goal: to make money. And you should be totally cool with that. Every rational actor acts in its own best interests and it is in the firms’ best interests to string as many candidates along as possible, to drop a candidate if she doesn’t seem interested, and to fire her the second she is no longer useful.
Students need to understand this in order to do recruitment properly: with a singular focus on getting what they want. Too often students get caught up in the mentality of “I don’t want to do that; that would screw over that firm that was so nice to me.” Bullshit. You should never think that.
A firm offers you front row hockey tickets so that you’ll skip your dinner at another firm? Take ‘em—if you planned on rejecting the other firm anyway. You shouldn’t be worried about the possibility that you might not accept an offer from the aggressive firm—going to a Leafs game during in-firm week would be sick! (This actually happened to someone last year—and he declined.)
A firm asks you whether you would accept if they give you an offer? Absolutely. The Law Society outlaws this kind of pressure, so if a firm tries to use it on you call their bluff—and don’t feel badly about rejecting those rule-breakers on Wednesday.
A firm’s your fourth choice? Tell them it’s between them and one other firm. At the end of the day, you want as many offers as you can get —and you might not get offers from your fave three firms.
Don’t be naïve. Firms are friendly, but they’re not your friends. The firm that hires you will work you and the firms you reject will forget about you quickly.
