Two years ago, I watched as my mother ironed my clothes on the frayed wooden floors of our home in Queens in preparation for my first day as a summer associate at a Biglaw firm. I hadn’t realized that the only professional suit I owned was badly wrinkled from my travels between Boston and New York. Frustrated with the slow pace and sloppiness of my handiwork, my mom–like any other impatient mom watching her daughter panic over clothes–took over. She used the floor in lieu of our lack of a proper ironing board, wielding the same iron that we’ve had since we immigrated to the United States 20 years ago. Her wizened hands smoothed out the creases in my blazer, and I wondered how much time had passed while I hadn’t even noticed that my mom had grown old in the years she waited for me to achieve my dream.
Continue readingbiglaw
Have You Heard of Plaintiff-Side Law?
In navigating career options, many law students find themselves torn between pursuing Biglaw or public interest. Within the public interest sector, it can seem as though you are constrained to only government or non-profit work. Though both settings can offer fulfilling opportunities for impactful work, public interest law is a broad field encompassing various avenues beyond government and non-profit contexts.
One such avenue is plaintiff-side law. To shed more light on this area of practice I sought insights from attorneys Christine Webber, Partner and co-chair of the Employment & Civil Rights practice group at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC in Washington, D.C., and Lauren Barnes, Partner at Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro in Boston, MA. Both Christine and Lauren have successful careers at their respective plaintiff-side firms and offered valuable perspectives on this field.
Continue reading“The Firm” Movie Review: “Off the Rails” Entertainment
When it comes to legal movies and TV shows, few of them get points for realism, and The Firm is no exception. While the film does capture some aspects of the associate lifestyle that may cause legally-trained viewers to point at their screen and whistle like Leonardo DiCaprio, the story goes somewhat off the rails by the third act – which is arguably where it becomes the most entertaining.
Spoilers ahead . . .
Continue readingOCI Don’t Know What I’m Doing
Toward the end of my first semester of law school, I began to hear whispers of ‘OCI’ and ‘biglaw.’ By the early part of my second semester, the whispers had grown to full-throated yelling. Big bad biglaw and the pressure cooker of 20-minute, all or nothing screener interviews. It sounded scary, at least to me. But then, I’d never heard of any of this before. Biglaw? OCI?
I lost track of it during the semester. I was focused on school, grades, and life in general. OCI was a long way away, and most importantly, it was after finals. And finals were the only thing I was allowing myself to be worried about. I learned fast in law school that you need to prioritize your worries. One worry at a time, and no cutting in line. I would worry about OCI when I started getting emails about it. Not before.
Then I started getting emails about it…
Continue readingAn Immigrant’s Experience in the Legal World
I want to make it clear that this article is not reflective of every single immigrant student’s story here at BC Law. Every experience is different, but I hope that my fellow immigrant first-gen students who read this article might relate to the internal conflict I feel as a student in law school. I also fully believe that one does not have to be an immigrant to relate to the sentiments here. I hope this can help other students feel heard and not alone.
Whether it’s the sentiment of feeling like I don’t quite belong, or the constant internal turmoil concerning my career path, a big portion of my experience as a law student has been shaped by my immigrant identity–and perhaps not in the healthiest way.
My mother works from 9AM to 7PM, 7 days a week in her small beauty supply store in Brooklyn. She moved here over 20 years ago when the “American Dream” was still a prevalent sentiment that encouraged immigrants to move and seek out better lives for their children, notwithstanding the fact that the “American Dream” is mostly a myth for people who are not on equal footing with those who were already born with qualities that are favored in this country. While she worries about affording the next rent payment on the store or ordering enough products to stock her shelves, my worries mostly lie with struggling to understand the Rule of Perpetuities.
Continue reading“But I Don’t Want to Work in Boston!”
Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am a Philadelphia girl. Born and raised in the City of Brotherly Love, I am a little obsessed with my hometown: the food (cheesesteaks! Wawa! water ice!), the accent (“youse” is a word, don’t question it), and of course, the sports teams (yeah, we threw snow balls at Santa Claus, so what?). My family is still Philly-based, and I knew when I was thinking about law school that I would ultimately want to practice close to home.
So when I started looking at BC, I faced something of a conundrum. The law school offered a ton of stuff geared towards my area of interest (juvenile rights and education law), which was hard to find, and my campus visit convinced that the people and professors had a lot to offer, too. But in case you didn’t know, Boston College is, in fact, in Boston. BOSTON. Like, home of the Patriots, Boston. (Sorry, not sorry, Rob.) And I was really worried that going to BC — or any law school outside of the Philly area — would make it difficult to come back after graduation. Continue reading
BigLaw Hiring Stats: Good News for BC
Yesterday, the National Law Journal published its annual list of the “Go-To Law Schools.” Unlike many other publications, NLJ uses only one piece of data to order its rankings – percentage of the graduating class heading to a job with one of the 250 largest law firms in the U.S.
BC moved up two spots in the 2015 rankings, from 23 to 21. The Class of 2014 sent 66 grads into first-year associate positions, 13 more than the Class of 2013.
Columns, sorted from left to right: Rank, School, Number of Associates at NLJ 250 Firms, 2014 Grads, Percent of Grads at NLJ 250 Firms
BC Law: Impact 