Chapter 5: Raw Recruiting

From the law student's point of view, there were two objects to be gained by going through the weird dress-up game of recruitment.  The longer-term goal was to get a summer job, which with luck would translate into a permanent job after graduation, as we'll see in the next chapter. 

The immediate goal was to get a fly-back.

A fly-back was when the firm flew you to their main office.  The firm would buy you a plane ticket to Los Angeles, or New York, or wherever, put you up in a luxury hotel for a couple of nights, and schedule a whole day of activities for you.  The activities almost invariably consisted of some sort of sales pitch about the firm itself, a tour of its offices, lunch in a fancy restaurant with some junior associates, and a long, wearying string of interviews with partners.  Then, when you were good and bleary-eyed from repeating yourself, constantly distracted by the inability to remember whether you’d previously said the same thing to this particular person—or was it the last person?—you might have a fancy dinner with a table full of strangers followed by a taxi ride back to the luxury hotel. 

It was dreadful.

One Phoenix firm put me up in the Arizona Biltmore, the first time I'd ever slept in a hotel room larger than the average two-bedroom apartment.  I remember sitting in front of the floor-to-ceiling window, eating my room-service breakfast with the strangest feeling that I was living someone else's life, as if in some horror story my brain had been transplanted into an accident victim's body.  That sense of unreality—which wasn't altogether unpleasant, given the sunshine (a welcome break from November in Chicago) and the tasty food—was much more memorable than the firm, whose name I no longer recall.

It might have been at that firm, but maybe at another one, where a partner noticed from my résumé that I'd reviewed movies and asked me who I preferred, Gene Siskel or Roger Ebert.  They were the reviewers for the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times respectively, who were then doing a weekly half-hour TV show together.  I said I tended to agree more often with Siskel.  He immediately said, "I prefer Ebert."  So much for my job prospects at that firm.

In later years I had enough experience on the other side of the recruitment game to know that as soon as I left each interview, the partner would dictate a short memo giving his or her impression of me and recommending for or against extending an offer to me, before turning back to the serious business of billing clients. 

The luxurious meals and absurd hotel rooms felt a bit ridiculous for anyone used to the student life.  For all the money spent, it was hard not to think of them as particularly petty bribes.  The firms wanted to influence my career decision by spending a couple hundred dollars more than necessary.  What did it imply about the firms that they thought a room at the Biltmore  would make a difference to my career decisions?  What did it imply about my fellow students that it evidently worked?

The prestigious firms recruited only at the prestigious schools.  That made the students at those schools feel special, but over time I came to realize it equally made the firms feel special.  Fly-backs were a way for law students and law firms to confirm each other's desirability.  I started the process with the idea that I was the buyer, looking to obtain something of value for myself, but it quickly became apparent that the law firms thought of themselves in similar terms.  From their point of view, I was the seller.  The thing I had to offer wasn't myself; it was my status as a high-achieving student at a highly ranked law school.

For many students at Northwestern, the really big deal was to accrue the maximum number of fly-backs.  That was a status thing, too.  The more places you jetted off to, the more you proved how amazingly desirable you were.  Some people went on 25 or 30 fly-backs, visiting many firms they would never consider working for, in cities they considered backwaters, making a point of ordering the most expensive item on every menu.  And they made sure everyone back in Chicago knew it.  I couldn't keep myself from feeling a little bit of the envy they worked so hard to engender in us.