The $1,100-a-Week Summer Job : L.A. Law Clerks Even Get a Free Lunch
Los Angeles’ biggest law firms are wining and dining their summer interns and paying them as much as $1,100 a week--even though they are still in school.
And those hefty wages don’t include such perks as free parking, baseball game tickets, private office with a window and nameplate, lavish parties, air fare to and from law school, and free health club memberships.
First- and second-year law students, often as young as 23 or 24, spend the summer following around practicing attorneys, helping them prepare some legal documents, and doing legal research.
But that’s not all. “We take two-hour lunches, we go out after work. . . . I saw Linda Ronstadt on opening night!” enthused Sheri D. Ungar, a second-year UC Berkeley law student who is working for Manatt, Phelps, Rothenberg & Phillips, a West Los Angeles firm with extensive entertainment industry accounts.
Law interns are richly rewarded not for the actual work they do over the summer but because they are among the nation’s most sought-after young legal minds. Their employers want them to come back for full-time jobs on graduation. The three biggest law firms in Los Angeles--Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, O’Melveny & Myers and Latham & Watkins--all say they make job offers to 90% or more of each year’s class of interns.
‘Kids in a Candy Store’
So lavish are the programs that an increasing number of students spend six weeks with one firm and the other half of the summer with another firm on the other side of the country. At O’Melveny & Myers, 49 of this year’s 87 “summer associates” are staying half the summer, up from 10 or 20 students just two or three years ago, said Kim M. Wardlaw, an O’Melveny partner who chairs her firm’s summer program. “The students are almost like kids in a candy store.”
Competition for the nation’s top law students has become so intense that even $1,100-a-week salaries sometimes are not enough. New York’s silk-stocking law firms are offering their interns $1,350 to $1,365 a week and fresh law graduates about $71,000 a year, according to a press release Friday by the National Law Journal, a weekly newspaper. But lower living costs and superior climate in California enable firms here to make inroads in hiring from top East Coast law schools.
“New York firms are feeling the pressure from the good West Coast firms like O’Melveny,” said Jane L. Scarborough, hiring attorney at Schulte, Roth & Zabel. The New York firm is unusual in encouraging its interns to spend a week of company time serving at such public interest groups as the National Coalition for the Homeless.
Pay has leaped this year in particular because of bidding wars for current law graduates and because the biggest law firms grow faster than the top law schools from which they recruit, said Michael D. McKee, a partner at Latham & Watkins and chairman of the firm’s recruiting committee. “Law school classes aren’t growing. It’s a very competitive market.”
Top Students in Short Supply
A survey by the National Assn. of Law Placement, which includes most of the nation’s largest law firms, found that 882 of its member firms are offering a total of 9,585 summer clerk positions this year.
But top-notch students are in short supply. At the nation’s top 20 law schools, only 847 students are in the top 20% of their class, said Paula S. Linden, co-chair of the association’s research committee.
Law firms maintain that the summers are not just a free lunch--though O’Melveny in fact allows interns to eat their noon meal free at the firm’s fancy dining room. “They are actually doing real work, producing memos,” Wardlaw said.
Clients are billed at a reduced rate for work by interns, she said.
Showing off the charms of Los Angeles to perhaps dubious out-of-town students is another major goal of the program. Southern California has already made an impression on Nellie Pappas, an O’Melveny intern who just finished her second year at University of Michigan’s law school. “I suspected I’d like living here, and it’s all come true,” she said.
Some of the perks are downright unusual. Manatt sent interns two years ago to a professional wrestling match, reported Ronald B. Turovsky, an associate who runs the summer program. “It was for their enjoyment and edification,” he said.
