Mentoring,  Summer@Weil

With a Little Help from Your Friends

Like many summer associates, I wasn’t entirely sure what practice group I wanted to join when I began working at the Firm. I had decided to rotate six weeks in the Corporate Department and six weeks in Litigation, and it was my hope that at some point I’d be working on an assignment, the heavens would open, a light bulb would go off, and at last I would discover my calling. While I now know what group I would like to join, the process in which I narrowed down my choices happened in a way I was not expecting.

Don’t get me wrong, the work has been on the whole very interesting, and doing it has been an extremely important part of my experience. But when it comes to deciding what group to pick, for me, at least, I have found that I’ve gleaned the most value from my routine conversations with associates and partners over the course of the summer. In those conversations I’ve been able to ask practicing attorneys what they love about their work, what they dislike, what their lives are like, what excites them most, and, ultimately, what they’d do if they were me.

While I’m sure that such conversations are possible at other firms, I’m not sure that they’re as easy or frequent anywhere else. Weil truly goes the extra mile in ensuring that summer associates have ample opportunities to meet potential mentors, whether it be in the form of our summer siblings, other members of our affinity group, partners and associates that join us twice a week for lunch, or many other attorneys that show up for department social events. What’s more, the vast majority of Weil attorneys are eager to mentor, and I have been genuinely surprised by how many of them have been willing to counsel me much as they would a colleague, or, indeed, a friend. That, I think, makes Weil a special place to start your legal career.

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