The OCI Dance – A Success?

It has been almost a year since I participated in on-campus recruiting, OCI, as a rising 2L. I recall the month of August being very stressful. After submitting my OCI bid list on simplicity, I crossed my fingers and prayed to the OCI gods to give me as many screener interviews as possible.

While I was pretty happy with the number of screeners I was able to lock down, what followed was a litany of 20-minute interviews. During each interview, I would sit for twenty minutes, give the same elevator pitch that I had prepared and rehearsed the night before, and listen while the interviewer described his/her firm using the same phrases as the interviewer prior—great firm culture, collegial environment, and substantive work assignments.

How was I to tell these firms apart? It was advice from an older and wiser friend at my law school—he, after all, had already gone through OCI!—that helped guide me through the process. He told me to do two things. First, to ask myself during each interview whether the person sitting across the table is someone that I could look up to and aspire to be like one day. Second, to pay close attention to the people who either will be joining or are at that firm from my law school. Are these the kind of people that I would not mind spending late nights with?

Needless to say, I was blown away by my screener interviewer from Weil. And while I already loved my law school community and the people in it, I soon learned that the Weil ones are especially great. OCI is stressful. Each person’s experience is different, so it is likely that every person you talk to will tell you something different. It is only my second week at Weil as a summer associate, and it would be silly of me to attempt to share my nonexistent insight of the firm’s culture and people. At the very least, however, based on my experience at the firm so far, I can confidently say that my OCI dance was a success. Just to give a brief example, a partner in the BFR department, knowing that I did not have any prior background in bankruptcy, told me this week that he would be happy to sit down with me to go over any concepts that I did not understand. I am very pleased with my decision to choose Weil and am looking forward to the next ten weeks.