Legal News

So Have Deferred Associates Been Happy With Their Time Away?

By Ashby Jones

Many moons ago, I was a summer associate at a big New York law firm.

The experience was everything you already know about New York summer-associate programs (not too much work, big lunches, forced participation at aggressively un-fun post-work events).

But one of the strangest and most unexpected components involved a two or three week outplacement externship thingy at a lower Manhattan public-interest organization. For three weeks, while collecting the law firm’s ample weekly salary, I drank coffee and read a book in a sweltering vending-machine room that doubled as a working space. At least four times a day, I asked the managing attorney for some work, and at least four times a day, she promised she’d get me some. Then, at around 4:15 on each day, she’d come in to buy some pop-tarts and tell me, oh by the way, that I could leave, that it would be too much trouble to spend an hour teaching me how to do something when she could bang it out in 15 minutes. So, of course, I would.

I was reminded of this today when reading this article in the New York Law Journal about some of the frustrations experienced by those deferred associates who’ve been placed for the year with some public-interest organizations.

According to the article, it sounds like many of the deferred associates are having good experiences. At the same time, some seemed to notice a divide between the full-time staff attorneys and those only slated to be there for a year or so.

“There was an early identification of the issue of how do you take people who’ve never really worked in a public interest environment and plop them down in the middle of a public interest organization,” said Lynn Kelly of the New York city bar, which last week released this report on the externship project.

Frankly, we can understand both sides of this. On the one hand, we wouldn’t be surprised to hear that training and supervision may have been a bit lacking. Training and supervision are expensive, of course, and public-interest organizations aren’t known for having a ton of extra cash (or man hours) to throw around — especially on lawyers who aren’t necessarily in the public-interest game for the long haul.

Said Kelly to the NYLJ: “Although it’s a terrific program in the sense that you get a free lawyer for the organizations, the costs involved in the supervision are real costs.”

That wasn’t the only problem with the whole deferral situation, however. Deferees weren’t always thrilled with the communications they had with their law firms. According to the report, deferred associates “have overwhelmingly complained” about firms’ inability to give more information about start dates.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 08, 2010 (boomark / email).