Chambers Associate – Get the Inside Story
Hi everyone!
Welcome back to the new series - Resource of the Week. As this is OCI (On Campus Interview) season and you all might be gearing up for sending out resumes and picking out your interview clothes, you should also consider learning more about the firms before you interview with them.
An interview is not only a way for a firm to interview you, but for you to interview the firm. Knowing a bit going into the interview can help you make your questions of the recruiter more effective and can help you determine if the firm will be a good fit for you and your expectations.
We covered Vault and Vault Law last week
This week we are covering Chambers Associate – This is for those of you interested in larger law firms.
Chambers Associate is a free website that can help you learn more about a firm’s culture as well as more about types of legal issues (practice areas) of the firm, depth of work, and how they assign work. You can also learn about compensation and how they handle billable hours, pro bono opportunities, and Diversity, equity and inclusion. Chambers conducts interviews of associates to get to the inside information that they use to analyze a firm.
They also publish an online handbook, Beginners Guide to Chambers Associate - https://www.chambers-associate.com/about/beginners-guide-to-chambers-research
Before logging on it’s good to consider these steps (as they suggest in the handbook).
STEP 1
What kind of lawyer do you want to be?
Select a few practice areas to focus on.
STEP 2
Narrow down your firms on the basics:
Location, Strength in your chosen practice areas, size, pay, hours, and other comparable data.
STEP 3
Get to know the firms:
Do more detailed research about each firm: where will you thrive?
STEP 4
Prepare:
Ready yourself for application and interview with rigorous research.
To start –
Navigate to https://www.chambers-associate.com/
SEARCH BY LOCATION
Let’s assume that you’re interested in IP firms in a large metro area such as Boston, Massachusetts.
You’re really interested in patents in the industry of pharmacy and other biotech. You’d like to be in a midsized firm.
Make sure “U.S. Edition” is selected – you can also search for firms in the UK
Let’s start with considering what firms are in the location are you looking at (in and around Boston). They have a nice search feature on the main page where you can search by firm or by location and practice area. You can also browse around this page and see the “Annual Legal Market Report” or go right to the “Associate Satisfaction Surveys”
I just searched initially for Massachusetts but then later refined by practice area to “Intellectual Property”
Here are my results. Note you can review one firm at a time, and you can “Compare Firms”
EXPLORING A FIRM’S PROFILE
Here’s Choate, Hall and Stewart’s profile which provides “the Inside View”, “Get Hired”, “Firm Profile”, “Firm Rankings” and “Media”.
Be sure to check all of the tabs – including the “Get Hired” tab
COMPARING FIRMS
Here’s the results when I chose to compare firms (remember the check boxes from the initial results screen.
SEARCH BY PRACTICE AREA
Practice area is a framework of subject areas (tax, civil rights litigation, securities, etc.) that law firms use to organize the types of work that their firms engage in. Chambers reviews 57 practice areas in categories they describe as – corporate and transactional; litigation and dispute resolution, intellectual property, tech and life sciences; finance, capital markets and bankruptcy; energy, environment and infrastructure; commercial and industrial; government, public interest and regulatory.
Start back at the home page (make sure you’re on the US Edition) but this time select “Practice Area”
You’ll be able to review the practice area overall or you can review the practice area as approached by the top firms.
You can learn in general about a practice area or about a particular firm’s approach to a practice area.
Here’s the intellectual property practice area generally.
Here’s a top firm’s approach to a practice area from interviews with lawyers of that firm. See below for Perkins Coie lawyers talking about their practice area of “Data Security”.
REVIEWING THE LEGAL MARKET BY REGION
As you’re exploring this site be sure to check out the surveys and rankings throughout. You can even check out the legal market by region – Here’s an example of the Boston area.
Additional rankings of law firms, lawyers, practice areas beyond the US and the UK can be found at Chambers and Partners.
Just a reminder the UNH Franklin Pierce Law School’s OCIs can be found at: https://law-unh.12twenty.com/jobPostings. Click on “OCI”
You can also search for firm jobs (also corporate and public interest jobs) outside the New Hampshire/Boston area by looking at other schools’ OCI rosters and go directly to that firm’s website – this can be found at the NALP Directory. https://www.nalpdirectory.com/
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