Law Firms Big and Small Get Ready to Evaluate Summer Associates

This month, firms across Texas are welcoming summer associates. It's a matching game where firms of all sizes and law students try to impress and assess in just a few weeks' time. Integral to firms' success in this matching process is evaluating students' work products, social interactions and legal skills.

"I can tell you what each of them is working on right now and how much time is needed for their projects," says Jerry Young about the two summer associates who began May 16 at Houston-based Coats Rose Yale Ryman & Lee. Young is a director in Houston and chairman of the 80-lawyer firm's clerkship hiring committee.

The firm will have seven summer associates at its Texas offices for a minimum of six weeks each. They will start on different dates throughout the summer and rotate through various practice groups, he says.

The class size is typical for Coats Rose, which hires six to 10 summer associates each year. Because the firm is midsize, regional and has lower billing rates than many of its competitors, it did not see decreased business during the recent recession or a need to reduce its class size, Young says.

By summer's end, the firm will have a file for each summer associate that includes a resume, law school rank and grade point average; copies of the work product produced during the summer; and an evaluation questionnaire completed by each of the lawyers with whom the summer associate worked. The firm's management committee reviews the files and decides whether to make a full-time associate offer to each summer associate, Young says. Summer associates entering their third year of law school this fall who receive a full-time associate offer will start at the firm after graduation in 2012.

The questionnaire completed by each lawyer that worked with a summer associate includes information about the quality of the student's work, timeliness and how the summer associate interacted with firm lawyers, Young says.

The four summer associates with Davis, Cedillo & Mendoza, a 16-lawyer litigation boutique in San Antonio, will learn how to organize and prioritize their work projects during their six-week stints at the firm, says associate Alex Nava, a summer associate mentor.

No one person is responsible for overseeing the summer associate program, he says. "Everybody has to pitch in."

The firm typically has four summer associates, and they work in the firm's library, where lawyers can walk in and ask them to take on a project.

Nava says he emphasizes to summer associates that when they get an assignment they need to ask when the product is needed and tell the assigning lawyer what other projects they are working on.

"Folks that come here are overachievers, and they want to work hard and do a good job," he says. "You have to deal with that issue [balancing deadlines] on a daily basis."

When a summer associate handles a project for a lawyer, that lawyer fills out an evaluation form ranking on a scale of one to 10 the summer associate's skills, such as writing, research, timeliness of response, ability to adequately address issues, initiative and personality.

The firm's lawyers meet in a conference room to discuss the students and rank them. Founding shareholder J. Russell Davis determines how many full-time associate offers the firm will make. For example, if two jobs are available the students who ranked Nos. 1 and 2 will receive the job offers, Nava says.

At 131-lawyer Cox Smith Matthews in San Antonio, lawyers who assign work projects to summer associates complete evaluations while the co-chairmen of the firm's summer associate recruiting committee gather additional information from other lawyers at the firm.

Eight summer associates will work for six weeks beginning June 27, says Rodrigo Figueroa, a shareholder in San Antonio and co-chairman of the firm's summer associate recruiting committee.

The firm also had eight summer associates in 2010.

The students spend three weeks each in two departments, says Figueroa.

Each attorney who gives a summer associate a work project also completes a written evaluation form for that associate, he says. In addition to the written evaluations, Figueroa and fellow recruiting committee co-chairman Reagan Winslow gather impressions and opinions from other lawyers at the firm who interacted with the summer associates during one of the firm's informal social events.

"There's not a specific form for this type of feedback; it's more their impressions of the summer associates," he says.

Figueroa and Winslow, along with the firm's recruiting coordinator Anna Friesenhahn, will put together the information gathered about each summer associate for a presentation to the recruiting committee. The trio collaborates with the recruiting committee to develop hiring recommendations for the firm's management committee, he says.

"Our ultimate goal is to bring in people that will make a career with Cox Smith," he says.

At Houston-based Vinson & Elkins, which has 518 lawyers in Texas and 755 firmwide, firm lawyers complete evaluation forms for summer associates, which eventually are summarized by a recruiting committee member for an office recruiting committee.

The 90 summer associates in the firm's Texas offices will spend 10 weeks with the firm beginning May 23, says Tom Leatherbury of Dallas, chairman of the firm's talent management committee.

The class is larger than the 82 summer associate in 2010. 

"I think that the economy has picked up and the demand for legal services is stronger than it was across the board," Leatherbury says. He says he does not expect the summer associate class at V&E or other large firms to resume to their pre-recession sizes. "I think the firms are still pretty cautious about how many summer associates they hire," he says.

Leatherbury says lawyers who give the students work assignments or who have social contact with them have an opportunity to evaluate the summer associates. "Obviously, the work evaluations are the most critical," he says.

The firm's evaluation forms ask lawyers to rank summer associates in categories such as written expression, oral expression and teamwork and asks whether the student has the drive and ability to succeed as a lawyer at V&E, he says.

A member of the firm's recruiting committee synthesizes the evaluations for each summer associate and presents the summary to the recruiting committee in the office that will make the full-time job offers, he says.