For law firms, a successful graduate recruitment campaign starts with selecting the right summer clerks. Justin Whealing looks at how two firms entice students to work through their holidays.

It is a time to check each other out.

The annual summer clerkship programs, which law firms run between November and February for law students who have just finished or will be shortly finishing their studies, give soon-to-be law graduates a taste of life in a commercial law firm.

The law firm, of course, is also checking out if the students are made of the right corporate law firm stuff.

“For us, the selection process is about identifying candidates who we think have the greatest success building a relationship with us,” says Rolf Moses, the director of people and development at Norton Rose. “We want to try and feed as many people through a successful clerkship as we can to then feed into a graduate employment role.”

Moses says that the most important part of his job is “to help other people become successful, and a subset of that is to help attract, retain and develop talent”.

Moses also uses the word “honesty” to describe how the firm seeks to communicate to summer clerks about “what it is like to work in a global law firm”.

“You just have to make it very clear to people what your brand is and who it is you are; that is important for us,” he says. “It is clearly important for our clients that we are one firm across the world and that means with the best clients you need to have the best people who also have the same values.”

Of course, he would say that, wouldn’t he?

While Moses unsurprisingly is giving his take on how Norton Rose “honestly” sells all the bells and whistles of working in a large corporate law firm, honesty also requires the flip-side of that story be told.

Namely, that to have a long and successful career you will need to work long hours, tread a competitive path towards partnership, deal with demanding work and clients and internal pressures such as billable hours’ targets.

“People need to understand what the role requires and we are pretty straight with people about what the challenges will be,” says Moses, who accentuates the benefits that can flow to the whole (i.e. the firm) by championing the individual.

Moses subscribes to the mantra that “hard work follows” if you provide a workplace where people “can cultivate great skills and want to learn more about the world they live in, they are dedicated to providing an excellent client service and an excellent product”.

You’ve got a friend

For summer clerks at a variety of law firms, including Norton Rose, the “honesty” spiel might come from lawyers within the firm who act as a “buddy” for summer clerks.

This year, around 180 summer clerks will get their first taste of what life is like at Freehills as part of that firm’s clerkship programs.

More than 2000 university students applied for a summer clerk’s position at one of the firm’s four offices. All the firm’s summer clerks are assigned a “buddy” who can freely share their experiences with the clerks.

The firm’s people and development resourcing manager, Alissa Anderson, says conversations with buddies give clerks “a very accurate picture of what it is like to work in a large commercial law firm”.

“We don’t script our buddies; we tell them very specifically to talk about their experience at the firm and be as open as they can,” she says.

Of course, an issue that is bedevilling the profession is the high rate of depression among law students and lawyers.
Acknowledging this is now something that law firms across the board do during any induction program for summer clerks.

“At Norton Rose we have 17 staff trained as mental health first aiders,” says Moses. “We have resilience programs as part of our training and development, have a buddy system and mentoring, and have partners that are briefed to understand resilience and mental health issues.”

Long hot summer

One of those strange law firm quirks is that, for most national law firms, the Sydney summer clerkship program is typically longer than that of other cities.

That is certainly the case at Freehills, where the summer clerkship program is 10 weeks in Sydney, yet only a few weeks in Perth, Brisbane and Melbourne. Often the length of time for a program is structured in accordance with various state and territory law society guidelines.

Norton Rose is conspicuously different in its approach. The firm offers a 10-week program across all its offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Perth and Brisbane, a change that was only ushered in recently.

“For the last 20 years, Sydney has run a 10-to-12-week clerkship, which is very intense,” says Moses. “What we did a year or so ago was look at that model and we looked at all the models that operated across the various states and all these customs.

“Rather than be dictated to by these various customs we thought ‘what will be the best model that will work for us?’ and we thought it was a 10-week one.”

Norton Rose offers five-week placements in two practice groups for its clerks, with Freehills employing a similar five-week rotation policy over two practice groups for its summer clerks in Sydney.

Lines of communication

Despite the dawn of the digital age, it is old-fashioned flesh pressing at university and law society careers fairs that forms the backbone of a law firm’s PR strategy with universities.

“Typically we engage with our candidates on campus, and what we really try to do is give people a sense of what it is like to work at Freehills by allowing them to meet our people in a very relaxed environment,” says Anderson.

The war for university talent, like many areas of practice, is intense among Australia’s law firms.

It is fascinating to look at who sponsors the various university law societies. ‘Premium sponsors’ at the University of New South Wales are made up of 12 firms, including Ashurst, Corrs Chambers Westgarth, Freehills and Gadens.
Norton Rose is a few rungs down as a co-sponsor, with firms without offices in Australia, like Davis Polk, a major sponsor.

“It is important to have relationships with the universities,” says Moses. “Like all law firms, we provide support and sponsorhip and get access to students so we can explain what we are about.”

While law firms might still be doing the hard sell face to face, university students are typically spending more and more time interacting via social media

Students also expect orgasnisations they work in to allow access to social media and to employ its use as part of firm-wide communications.

The time is rapidly approaching when firms looking for the best young talent will have to use social media in a more coordinated manner.

Firms such as King & Wood Mallesons and Clayton Utz already heavily use Facebook for their graduate recruitment campaigns.

“You need access [to law students] and social media is a good way to gain access,” says Moses.