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Originally Posted by Unregistered
Out of curiosity, if you’re a local Uni student who has not interacted with HK/British/American lawyers as much unless you studied a year abroad for exchange, do you feel like you could confidently impress these partners in a lateral interview? In elite US firms like Latham, Milbank, Skadden, Kirkland, Sidley etc, you have to meet at the very minimum 4 partners and most likely the managing partner/chair of the London office, and cultural fit with the team is quite important to these partners.
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It really depends on the type of person you are and whether you can absorb knowledge from the work you do.
Do the B4 do top notch corporate work? Yes. No one can dispute this. From my experience working with them, the B4 partners are on top of things and know their job very well.
But this subject mater expertise rarely trickles down to the junior associates. You see a lot of them able to do their work very efficiently when the deal follows a conventional pathway, but the moment things get a little haywire or some loose bolt flies at them they get very panicked, cant bring out good ideas and have to check everything with their partners.
The ones that have solid legal knowledge, good client management and can handle things on the fly - we usually comment internally that they wont be there long, and we are usually right. Those are the ones that make the jump to a US/UK firm 1 or 2 PQE in, and those are the ones that do well in the interview. But they are 1 out of 10 associates in the B4.