The 1L summer job search generates more anxiety per unit of actual consequence than anything else in law school. I want to take some of the air out of that, and then tell you what to actually do.

Here’s the thing nobody says clearly enough: your 1L summer job is not the job that determines your career. The 2L summer is. That’s the one that turns into a full time offer at most firms. The 1L summer is a building block, and a useful one, but it is not the whole tower.

What the 1L Summer Is Actually For

Three things, roughly in order of importance.

It gives you something to talk about at OCI. Six months from now you’ll be sitting across from an interviewer answering questions about what you’ve done. Having a real answer, with real specifics, is worth a lot. It doesn’t have to be a fancy answer. It has to be a specific one.

It tells you something about what you like. A lot of people arrive at law school with a fairly abstract idea of what lawyers do all day. A summer doing it is the fastest way to find out whether you were right. Some of the most useful 1L summers I’ve seen were the ones where somebody figured out what they didn’t want.

It builds the beginning of a network. The attorneys you work with this summer are people who will remember you, take your call, and in some cases make an introduction two years from now.

Notice what’s not on that list: it is not a prerequisite for biglaw. Plenty of people who spend their 1L summer at a government office, a judge’s chambers, or a small firm end up at large firms after OCI. Nobody at OCI is going to hold it against you.

Where 1Ls Actually End Up

This is where the expectations gap does the most damage. Firms hire far fewer 1Ls than 2Ls, and many large firms don’t run a 1L program at all. The ones that do are often running formal diversity fellowships or small 1L programs with limited seats. So if your plan is “get a biglaw 1L summer,” understand that you’re competing for a much smaller number of spots than you will be next year.

The realistic landscape looks more like this. Judicial internships, which are excellent and which almost everyone underrates. Government offices at the federal, state, and local level. Public interest organizations, some of which have funding through your school. Small and mid-size firms, which often hire 1Ls informally and give you more responsibility than a big firm would. In-house legal departments. And research work for a professor, which is not glamorous but is genuinely valuable if you want to write on.

Any of those gives you something real to say next fall.

The 1L summer that helps you most is the one where you did real work you can describe in detail. Not the one with the best name on the letterhead.

The Timeline

Most schools have a policy that you cannot apply or interview for 1L summer positions before December 1. Check your own school’s rules, because they vary and they matter. Your career services office will tell you exactly what applies to you.

What that means practically is that the fall is preparation and the winter is execution. Before December 1: get your resume in order, figure out what you’re targeting, and start building a list. After December 1: apply, and keep applying. A lot of 1L hiring happens in January and February, and some of it happens later than that. If you’re reading this in March without a job, you are not out of time.

What to Do Between Now and Then

Grades come first. I’m putting this first because it’s true and because everything else on this list is worth less than a good 1L transcript. Your 1L grades drive 2L recruiting more than any other single factor. If you have to choose between an extra hour on your outline and an extra hour on your job search in November, choose the outline. The job search will still be there in December.

Get your resume looked at by an actual person. Your career services office does this for free and they’re good at it. A one page law school resume is a specific format and most people get it wrong the first time.

Build the list. Same approach I’d tell a rising 2L. A spreadsheet with names, organizations, and one specific detail about each. Judges in your city. Government offices doing work you find interesting. Alumni from your school at places you’d want to be.

Start the outreach. Not applications, which have to wait. Conversations. An email to an alum asking about their path is not a job application and it is not governed by the December 1 rule. Those conversations are how a lot of 1L jobs actually happen, and they’re the single most underused tool available to you.

If You Don’t Get What You Wanted

Some people are going to read all of this, do everything right, and still end up in a 1L summer that wasn’t the plan. That happens, and it happens to good candidates, and it is genuinely survivable.

What matters then is what you do with it. Take the work seriously. Ask for more of it. Get to know the attorneys you’re working with well enough that they’d write you a reference. Come out of it with two or three specific things you can describe in an interview. A candidate who did unglamorous work with obvious care reads better at OCI than a candidate who coasted through a brand name.

I’ve watched people talk their way into callbacks on the strength of a summer at a county prosecutor’s office, because they could describe exactly what they did and why it interested them. Specificity beats prestige more often than people expect.

Nobody at OCI is going to ask why you didn’t have a biglaw job as a 1L. They’re going to ask what you did with the summer you had.

The Short Version

Protect your grades. Get your resume fixed. Build a list and start talking to people now. Apply broadly after December 1 and don’t stop in January. And keep the whole thing in proportion, because this is the summer that helps, not the summer that decides.

Related reading

• Rising 2L: Get Ahead of the Game
• The Networking Email That Gets a Response
• Should You Go Biglaw? An Honest Answer

Working through your 1L job search? Book a free 15-minute consultation and we’ll figure out your targets together.

If you want help building your list or getting your resume into shape, the first 15 minutes are free. More here. For a complete walkthrough of biglaw interviews, from OCI through lateral, my book Biglaw Interview Advice is on Amazon.