Yahoo Finance Choose the Right Law School For a Corporate Law Career
Brock Jacobi, a third-year student at the Law Center at Georgetown University knew from the start he wanted to specialize in corporate law. He chose his law school because of its academic quality, alumni network, and many business-related courses.
Jacobi enrolled in an affordable housing transactions law clinic, so he could master a vital skill for corporate lawyers -- drafting documents -- and thereby stand out in job interviews.
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The strategy worked: Jacobi eagerly accepted a full-time job offer from Schulte Roth & Zabel, the corporate law firm where he worked as a summer associate. Here are four signs that a law school prepares its graduates to thrive in corporate law firms.
1. Successful alumni: Jacobi advises prospective law students to identify schools with a history of getting graduates jobs in corporate law, because he says that if you attend a school with a strong reputation, there is less stress about grades.
He says one way to gain insight into how hard it is for a particular school's graduates to find corporate law jobs is to ask recent graduates who work in that sector how high their GPA was. If the GPA the graduates give is uniformly near-perfect, Jacobi says, that is a sign of trouble.
"You want to know, what if I am just an average student? Will I still get a job?" he says.
2. A good academic reputation: Experts say school prestige ought to be a consideration for prospective law students who dream of a corporate law career.
Lisa Bertrand, legal ethics coordinator with the Deane School of Law at Hofstra University and a former corporate attorney, puts it this way: "I always tell students, if you want to work for a big law firm, the easiest path is to get top grades from a top school and be perfectly poised and polished during the interview," she said in an email.
Bertrand says that going to a law school without name recognition doesn't preclude a corporate law career, but that it does make getting your foot in the door harder. Stellar academic performance is necessary in order to compete with graduates of more prestigious schools, she says.
S tudents who make law review and who earn exceptional grades at lesser-known schools , she says, can and often do make the cut for first-year associate positions.
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3. Strong curriculum: Peter Antonoplos, a corporate lawyer and managing partner at Antonoplos & Associates, says one indication that a school prioritizes corporate law is when the school's faculty includes both adjuncts who are prominent corporate attorneys and full-time professors who are experts in aspects of corporate law, such as mergers and acquisitions.
Another asset in a corporate law program is a variety of courses, so that the student will be prepared to help clients through diverse business dilemmas, whether the situation is an initial public offering or a bankruptcy.
"You don't want to pigeon-hole yourself in your education," says Antonoplos, "because you want to be able to adapt when you realize the market shifts."
4. Respectful attitude toward corporate lawyers: Experts say there is an important distinction between law schools with a culture that celebrates accomplishment in the corporate law sector versus schools with a culture that regards corporate work as mercenary.
Harrison Barnes, CEO of the legal recruiting firm BCG Attorney Search, says some schools focus so heavily on legal theory and public policy that they neglect private sector legal issues. He says the root of this discrepancy between law schools is that some schools have a cultural bias toward public interest law, which some law professors view as a higher calling than private sector law.
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"The better the law school sometimes, the less seriously they take law firm work, because they believe they are better than it," Barnes says.
One way to get a sense of a school's culture and the value it places on corporate law, Barnes says, is to visit the school and discuss your interest in corporate law with current students.
Barnes says the right law school for future corporate lawyers is one that trains them to happily serve the needs of business clients.
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