“ When you’re thinking about fi rms that do high- quality, interesting work, the differences among them are probably much more pronounced than you might guess from the outside.”


36


J. Steven Baughman Partner, Intellectual Property ROPES & GRAY LLP


Ropes & Gray has 1,100 attorneys located in 11 offi ces in New York, Washington, D.C., Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, London, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo and Seoul, and practices in areas including private equity, M&A, life sciences, healthcare, fi nance, investment management, hedge funds, tax, intellectual property, litigation and securities litigation.


When you’re thinking about fi rms that do high-quality, interesting work, the diff erences among them are probably much more pronounced than you might guess from the outside. When you consider that, in this line of work, there will


O


inevitably be times when you are working very hard and as part of groups of people to meet deadlines from judges, clients or agencies, how your team functions—and how people think about and treat each other, and what they value—can really make a huge diff erence, both in the immediate experience and in what you learn from it. It impacts how your life is, day to day, and what kind of a


DIVERSITY & THE BAR® JULY/AUGUST 2014


NE OF THE THINGS I DID NOT APPRECIATE AS much as a law student as I do now is that law fi rms—like people—really are very diff er- ent from one another, and in ways that can profoundly shape your experience as a lawyer.


lawyer you develop into in the long run. Finding out what those diff erences are, of course, can


be a challenge as a law student or new lawyer. Friends and classmates who have experience at a particular fi rm can be invaluable, but, short of that, a careful look at some of the less obvious aspects of law fi rm life—how the people inter- viewing you interact with their coworkers, what the people you meet are willing to talk about and what interests them, how the people you aren’t interviewing with interact with each other as you walk down the hall—can also provide some clues. It’s worth thinking hard about what matters to you and


what might be your best fi t when considering an employer: T e choices out there really are meaningfully distinct from one another, and fi nding the right match for you can make all the diff erence.


MCCA.COM


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48