The Harvard Law Record has permitted the author to publish anonymously due to credible risks to their safety in the current political climate.
Long before I enrolled in law school, I opened my notes app and titled a new document, “Future law jobs?” I jotted down a list of the organizations that most inspired me with their creative and impactful advocacy for underserved communities. While clearing old files to free up storage, I recently rediscovered that note and felt like I had unearthed a forgotten treasure. The organization at the top of the list is where I now have the fortune of starting my legal career.
Things almost turned out very differently. As a 1L, I participated in the Early Interview Program (EIP). Taking place over the first summer of law school, EIP is the process through which large corporate law firms—colloquially known as “Big Law”—hire associates from HLS. (Many other law schools refer to this process as On-Campus Interviews or OCI.)
I came to law school to work in public interest law, so I told very few people I signed up for EIP and told even fewer that I quit in the middle of the process. Reflecting on that decision, I’ll share my experience with EIP in two parts: three reasons I’m grateful I left and three things I wish I had known before signing up.
The purpose of this article is not to make a sweeping argument about the morality of working in Big Law for everyone. Many pieces explore that idea already. I also cannot claim to speak to the personal and financial circumstances that shape each person’s decision, only mine. And countless law students will continue to enter Big Law regardless of this article. In light of that reality, I find it worthwhile to try to imagine Big Law as a site where acts of dissent, resistance, and solidarity remain possible. We should encourage our firm-bound friends to always find ways to bring their values into their work, act with the same integrity as their words, and stand up when their principles are disrespected.
EIP was the wrong choice for me. But as a 1L, bombarded by Office of Career Services (OCS) emails to register and surrounded by peers diving into the Big Law applicant pool, I felt I would be an outlier if I failed to do the same. As HLS continues to engulf us with success stories of the Big Law hiring process, I hope to give a countervailing perspective on EIP—why I quit and what advice I wish I had followed instead in 1L.
I’m grateful I left EIP because . . .
- My experience made clear that I did not belong at a Big Law firm.
To step back for a moment, I signed up for EIP despite wanting to do public interest work because I worried about my finances and feared that I might disservice my career by turning down the chance to learn skills at a well-resourced firm. I also planned to use the “April 1 policy,” which allows students to hold an EIP job offer open until the next spring while participating in the public interest hiring cycle. I reasoned that EIP provided a safety net and I wouldn’t necessarily have to accept any offers in the end.
Still, I wanted to ensure that my search for a Big Law job was driven by my values. I followed two pieces of advice to make that happen. First, I refused to apply to any firm that scored below an A on the Climate Change Scorecard, was listed by the Law Firm Transparency Project, or had a “controversies” section on its Wikipedia page. If I were applying in summer 2025, then I would have also avoided any firm that capitulated to Trump.
Second, on the advice of a friend who wanted to enter the same area of public interest law as me and signed up for EIP as well, I indicated when applying that I wanted to work in firms’ administrative law, regulatory, or transactional practices—anything but litigation. “You would be helping companies understand and comply with the law,” they assured me, “not fighting to make workers or consumers lose a zero-sum lawsuit.”
As you might imagine, the final list of firms that I applied to was a tiny fraction of those participating. Most of my open application slots or “bids” remained unused. I entered the EIP interview process hopeful that the firms I had selected would at least share my core convictions, even if the work had little to do with my longer-term career goals. Then the interviews began.
During my first screening interview, an associate questioned: “You seem to have a public interest-focused resume. Would you really be comfortable working for the other side?” Their bluntness surprised me. If they were referring to my 1L summer job—the only legal experience on my resume at the time—the answer was no. Having worked at a nonprofit focusing on constitutional and human rights litigation, I did not want to work for the institutions responsible for violating those rights. I don’t recall exactly what I said next, but it was probably unconvincing. (I did not get the offer.)
In a screening interview with a different firm, I spoke with an administrative law and regulatory attorney who worked in the firm’s healthcare department. It started off well; we realized we shared a number of hobbies. Then I asked if they could tell me about their work. They explained that the Biden administration had announced a forthcoming plan to renegotiate various drug prices, aiming to lower costs paid by older and disabled Americans. On behalf of pharmaceutical companies, the attorney’s job was to preemptively lead outreach efforts to dissuade government officials from selecting additional drugs for renegotiation.
For the drugs that were chosen, the attorney would represent manufacturers in negotiations and identify any legal pathways for multiple companies to collectively insist on higher prices in their individual bargaining sessions. Ending with a chuckle, they quipped that their work might have been partly “why drug prices are so high in this country.”
In another interview, I was paired with an attorney who worked in their firm’s litigation practice, defending against lawsuits brought by workers and unions. Because we didn’t share common career goals, we discussed their work only briefly. We spoke much more about how they helped run their firm’s affinity group for queer lawyers and how much I would enjoy the sense of community at their galas or cocktail hours. But it felt wrong to hear stories of gay Ivy League graduates throwing themselves extravagant parties, paid for in part by their day jobs helping corporate executives fight working class people (often queer and racialized) in court.
I thought this sense of disorientation was partially my fault. If only I had researched more thoroughly or created a Price Gouging and Union Busting Scorecard to accompany the Climate Change Scorecard, then I might have screened out these firms before applying. However, I could already count the firms I had applied to on one hand.
Near the end of most of my interviews, I tried asking each attorney about the part of their job they enjoyed the most. Repeatedly, I heard about impactful and fulfilling pro bono work. So then I started asking about how much pro bono work they were allowed to do. For one attorney who cited pro bono work as the highlight of their career, they told me that they were working on one big pro bono project over the past two years. The project involved helping a nonprofit set up a legally complicated trust, so it needed time-consuming paperwork and approvals. It would likely need to continue for several more years before the attorney could take on another.
The hardest part about the interview process was scripting my answer to a basic question: “What made you come to law school?” I came up with some generic answer about how I love the inherent challenge of navigating complex systems and found learning the law to be a fascinating way to understand the structures of the world around us. But it was a lie. I don’t enjoy studying the law in class very much. I came to law school because there are systemic injustices I want to change and communities I want to serve—reasons I spoke about when asked “why law school” in my personal statement and admissions interview.
After several more interviews I didn’t feel that I could continue. I became stressed that each new lawyer I met could tell that I wasn’t fully there, that I was wasting both of our summer afternoons on a Zoom call leading to a dead end. Although most individual attorneys I spoke with were friendly and warm, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the values we likely shared as people would stay behind once they stepped into the office. So, with dozens of unfilled interview slots available in my schedule, I stopped sending out new applications.
- EIP takes its toll.
As a 1L, I had no idea how taxing the EIP process would be over the summer. While it wasn’t the primary reason I left, I want to devote some attention to the format of EIP itself.
In the summer I applied to firms, the hiring process involved several steps. If a firm was interested in your application, you would first receive an invitation for a 20-minute screening interview with one associate. If you passed the screening, then the firm would call you back for a full interview. Full interviews were two continuous hours: four back-to-back Zoom calls led by a partner or associate with no break in between. Since each call took place with a fresh interviewer, the process could feel like having the same conversation four times in a row. All of this happens for just one firm, and EIP allows students to bid to up to 25 firms at a time. In fact, OCS recommends that students without an offer in hand already “should use all 25 bids.”
Two-hour interviews could take place as early as the start of July and in the middle of the work day. Students therefore needed to either schedule their 1L summer jobs to end after just eight weeks or ask for time off in the middle of summer. I had already agreed to work until mid-August, so my summer employer was thankfully gracious and understanding in allowing me the latter option. I caught up on finishing my work assignments in the evenings as needed.
I still had it relatively easy. If you were within a reasonable distance to a firm’s office, you could also be invited to lunch or evening events to socialize with attorneys outside of formal interviews. I was spared, but friends in big cities who worked public interest jobs during the day—no dress code required—became ready to don full formal attire at a moment’s notice if asked to mingle at a recruiting event. The choice was to either give up even more hours of the day to the EIP process or risk appearing unenthusiastic, jeopardizing all the effort already spent trying to secure a job offer.
That summer, the process of bidding for firms on the EIP portal took place in stages as well. Having an initial stage, at the time called “EIP Preview,” allowed me to stagger my applications and send out just a few at first. I could also leave the program before proceeding to later stages once I decided it wasn’t for me. EIP Preview was recently eliminated following substantial concerns about its impact on students’ mental health right after 1L exams, with the promise of a more streamlined process. But instead of moving everything backward in time to create more breathing room, the once “later” stages have been accelerated to the start of summer for 1Ls to stress about earlier and earlier. Little has changed in practice. EIP, then and now, can come at great cost to your well-being during your first summer of legal work.
Admittedly, the public interest job search is not painless either. It lacks the centralization, uniform timelines, and seemingly endless resources that characterize law firm hiring. Even so, if I had to do it all again, I’d choose the public interest hiring process over EIP every time.
- Leaving EIP empowered me in my personal life.
The third reason is the one I’m most grateful for, though it was the least apparent to me at the time. Leaving EIP gave me more freedom to speak and act on my conscience. Pursuing a public interest career allowed me to advocate for issues I care about outside of work, without fear of being surveilled, silenced, or sanctioned by my employer.
It should come as no surprise that joining a corporate work environment is somewhat constraining. Serving multinational businesses as clients always demands maintaining a veneer of respectability. However, it has become clear that many Big Law firms have drawn a line for the permissible views of their employees that precludes meaningful support for human rights, peace, and justice.
In November 2023, Melat Kiros—then an associate at Sidley Austin—published an article pleading for more empathy and nuance in discussions of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. “There is no justification for the attacks on Israel on October 7th, just as there is no justification for the disproportionate and collective punishment being waged on the Palestinian people by the Israeli government in retaliation,” she wrote. “When we fail to ask what could drive people to such horrific violence, we fail in our duty to one another to prevent the conditions that allowed it from ever happening again.” She concluded, “Perhaps it is naive to believe that the people in Palestine and Israel might one day live together as neighbors, in peace, without fear of persecution, under a new government, but it is not hopeless, and, most importantly, it is not anti-Semitic.” One day later, Sidley fired her.
Jinan Chehade, a recent graduate set to begin as a new associate, was fired by Foley & Lardner less than a day before her start date. Unbeknownst to her, the firm had been tracking her social media posts describing “Israel’s longtime violent occupation and colonization of Palestine, and the Palestinian struggle for freedom.” Before her termination, two partners demanded a meeting where they interrogated both her affiliation with Students for Justice in Palestine (having graduated the year before, she was neither a member nor had any role in the group’s activities) and her father’s employment at a local mosque. Foley’s diversity and inclusion director, who had once assured Chehade that the firm would never make judgments based on her Muslim or Arab heritage, stopped replying to her emails.
Law students drew the ire of Big Law as well. After several student groups signed a statement aiming to provide historical context for Israel’s occupation of Gaza, firms like Davis Polk jumped to rescind job offers from students. Davis Polk later revealed that it had not even verified whether the students whose careers it threatened were personally involved in signing the statement that it found disagreeable. It sufficed that the students’ resumes or LinkedIn profiles had listed them as affiliated with those groups, including ethnicity- or faith-based affinity organizations. In a blatant display of the Palestine exception to free speech, Skadden rescinded a student’s offer after they were doxxed at a demonstration for peace in Gaza, but took no action upon receiving complaints that a Skadden lawyer described protestors displaying the Palestinian flag as “apes.”
Some Big Law firms sought a more proactive approach. Sullivan & Cromwell announced that it hired a background check company to monitor “news reports and footage from protests.” It would then identify whether job applicants “were involved with a protest where others”—not necessarily the applicants themselves—used “problematic language” to voice disapproval of the Israeli government. The move was widely condemned. Legal professionals criticized the firm’s denial of due process for vocal human rights defenders, despite its “complacency with hiring lawyers who engage in hate speech or violence against Arabs or other races.” But the policy was never walked back.
In fact, no firm has publicly apologized or expressed regret since summarily blacklisting or dismissing Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim advocates and their allies. In the same time, Israel’s ongoing genocide and Nakba in Gaza has killed more than 60,000 and injured more than 100,000 Palestinians. As local health infrastructure has collapsed after relentless bombing by the Israeli military, these counts are underreported. Medical researchers have estimated true death tolls ranging from 41% to 400% higher than official numbers. In addition to targeting Palestinian children with snipers, Israel has assassinated journalists, emergency responders, and aid workers. No food has entered Gaza in the last three months due to Israel’s blockade of humanitarian relief. Water shortages, forced starvation, and preventable disease characterize daily life for infants born in Gaza. Now, Israel has unveiled plans to seize the entire Gaza Strip and occupy it indefinitely.
These actions serve no strategic or justifiable purpose. When combined with numerous statements made by Israeli officials and soldiers on the ground, admitting that their intent is to destroy the people of Gaza, these acts are hallmarks of genocide. Nonetheless, Israel continues to brazenly disregard the international rule of law by ramping up its genocidal assault. And large global law firms rank among its closest allies, punishing attorneys and clients alike who dare criticize the Israeli government or recognize humanity in the people of Gaza.
The crackdown on pro-Palestine speech served as a canary in the coal mine, unmasking a shameful era of corporate spinelessness revealed in full form by the Trump administration. As Trump issued executive orders to limit contracts with and revoke security clearance from Big Law firms that had once represented interests fighting his agenda, firms tripped over one another to fall in line. Firms abandoned work for immigrants facing deportation and cut programs to equalize opportunity in one of America’s most exclusionary and least diverse professions. The saving graces of Big Law that these firms’ lawyers could previously tout during EIP evaporated.
Some firms have always been darlings of the authoritarian right, with Jones Day serving as the go-to counsel for the Trump campaign, Gibson Dunn for big pharma and oil, and Morgan Lewis for union-busting. Trump’s recent orders simply revealed how easy it is to chip away at the facade that all other Big Law firms are neutral players committed to preserving the rule of law, no matter the client.
Nine of the highest-grossing firms—Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, Skadden, Simpson Thacher, Paul Weiss, Milbank, Wilkie, Cadwalader, and A & O Shearman—even pledged nearly $1 billion in pro bono work to Trump and his allies. The deal served as an ugly reminder that for these firms, pro bono work doesn’t mean good work. It means free work. And free work seeking to rip away Indigenous children from their communities or justify police brutality is worse than doing no work at all.
Big Law firms often boast having the resources and talent to provide the best legal training for new attorneys. Yet all the resources and talent in the world weren’t enough to defend against blatantly unconstitutional orders that many smaller firms continue to fight together. When more than 500 firms signed a recent brief opposing the Trump administration’s attack on the rule of law, only 11 out of the Vault 100 firms joined. The rest stayed silent or scrambled to negotiate a backdoor deal of their own. Perhaps the cowardice seen across much of Big Law should never have shocked us. Giant firms have always prioritized turning a quick profit from a wealthy, elite clientele above moral concerns. And their indifference toward living, breathing people opposing genocide over the past year unsurprisingly correlates with their present failure to uphold the rule of law.
But cowardice is still shameful even when it’s expected, especially when firms that rolled over for Trump spent years lauding themselves for their diversity initiatives and their workplace culture of “respect for all employees” down to their “youngest associates.” In actuality, associates who raised concerns internally with partners’ decisions to capitulate to Trump were silenced and ignored, leading them to resign as the last remaining option to signal discontent.
We should applaud the integrity of the many lawyers who have chosen to resign as their firms kneel down to fascism. However, sacrificing employment is a difficult choice that countless others will likely find out of reach.
I am grateful that, since leaving EIP, I have never once feared that I might have to confront that choice as well. I have never worried that my ability to earn an income, pay rent, and receive health insurance would depend on my willingness to look past injustice. I never stressed that protesting against genocide in Gaza would get my offer letters shredded by public interest groups—often staffed by lawyers who openly and proudly voice their opposition to genocide as well. I never saw the wave of firms appearing in headlines about Big Law bowing to Trump and dreaded that my future employer might be next. By withdrawing from Big Law recruitment, that risk never even became a possibility. Though it wasn’t fully apparent until after I left, quitting EIP gave me more freedom to speak and act according to my principles. Now, I am grateful to start my career by learning from public interest advocates who believe practicing law means nothing without a substantive commitment to justice.
If I could talk to myself before EIP, I would say . . .
- You will find a job.
Pursuing a public interest career is possible. EIP may be the earliest window to find a job, but it is not the only one. In fact, Big Law firms rely on unusually early recruitment cycles, which most other employers lack the capacity to match, to stoke unnecessary fear and siphon students away from following their public interest dreams.
There is no shortage of worthy opportunities for students who stay on a public interest path. A month after I left EIP, I joined the Virtual Public Interest Interview Program, one of several job fairs supported by the Office of Public Interest Advising (OPIA). After just one 20-minute call, I received a 2L summer offer from an incredible organization advocating for marginalized people across the United States. Both PSJD and the National Plaintiffs’ Law Association host programs for students to find public interest opportunities as well.
Recall EIP’s April 1 policy from earlier, allowing students to hold an EIP offer open until the following spring while exploring public interest options. If I had used that policy, I have no doubt that the security of a job in my back pocket would have hindered my search for a role that truly brought me fulfillment. Law school remains busy during 2L, and finding an alternate job would have slipped below other priorities as upper-year classes and clinics took off.
In addition, I learned from friends who continued with EIP that the April 1 policy is more illusory than it seems. An April 1 offer deadline is not automatic; you must proactively request it and explain your situation. And though OCS requires firms to agree to honor the policy, friends shared that firms asked them to accept offers within as little as two weeks, creating a sense of urgency that made it uncomfortable to counter with a ten-month extension until the next spring. Friends also shared that lawyers at their firm spoke with derision and incredulity about the idea that a summer associate might sacrifice their time at the firm to work in public interest for even half of the summer.
Beyond the summer, a postgraduate career in public interest is achievable as well. Various public defender offices, legal aid providers, and plaintiff-side firms will hire students directly out of law school for full-time positions. For other roles, public interest fellowships provide a gateway for students to serve communities they care about while working at their dream organizations. Since many of these fellowships are funded by HLS itself, they are already paid for and require nothing but your passion and dedication.
Although many of us arrived here to gain a world-class education and learn alongside exceptional peers, many of us also came with closely held values and the belief that HLS could open doors to servicing them. If we can graduate with degrees from HLS but still can’t pursue opportunities to work on the issues we’re passionate about, then why did we come here?
- Your career path is financially viable.
Pursuing a financially stable and supportive public interest career is possible. Working at plaintiff-side and private public interest firms to represent workers, consumers, and victims of corporate wrongdoing can pay high salaries that rival Big Law wages. Government jobs, such as at state attorneys general offices, typically come with transparent and generous salary schedules. And working for nonprofits and other public interest employers opens up loan repayment options through the Low Income Protection Plan (LIPP) and Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF). Many of us who will receive LIPP—one of the most well-funded loan repayment programs in the country—will pay as little as $0 on our loans after graduation. Public interest careers are wide-ranging, but HLS helps to make them all more financially attainable.
However, I am cognizant of the many privileges I enjoy that others do not. I have not experienced housing or food insecurity. I have never been estranged from my family. Because I attended a public college and now receive significant financial aid from the law school, my six-figure debt is just below that of the average HLS graduate. I know that these factors will distinguish my circumstances from those of other students. I cannot say for certain that every decision makes equal financial sense for every student as a starting point.
What I can say is that our attendance at HLS is proof that we have the drive and ingenuity to make these careers happen. Determination, commitment, and creativity are qualities that I have observed in spades across every student I have been lucky enough to know at HLS, and they are the exact same traits needed to build a public interest career.
The law school can help us do that. Advisors at OPIA and Student Financial Services (SFS) are among the most hardworking and caring people at HLS. Every time I had a question about the public interest hiring process or fellowships, the OPIA team was ready to provide support. When one of my parents was laid off and unable to find work during my 1L year, SFS staff were immediately responsive and helpful with financial planning in the face of my family’s heightened precarity. LIPP and PSLF offer unparalleled opportunities for HLS students to transform our passions into postgraduate careers. While these programs are imperfect and the law school must do more to meaningfully support public interest work, these careers are within our grasp. So are the tools for collective action and organizing, which are essential for improving these programs and addressing systemic barriers to entering public interest work.
In fairness, financial uncertainty is probably not the future that any of us eagerly awaited when we enrolled at HLS. But economic hardship is the baseline existence for countless underserved people who many of us wrote about in our personal statements or know personally from our communities back home. What makes our lives and comfort worth more than theirs? How can we begin to empathize with them if we are unwilling to face adversity ourselves?
- You are not alone.
You are not an outlier if you want to pursue public interest work. Every year, an entire community of HLS students opts out of EIP, leaves EIP, or declines to accept a job through EIP. Every single one of those students is rooting for the next generation of public interest lawyers to succeed.
At each step and setback of law school, countless public interest students and practicing lawyers offered immeasurable time to encourage, support, and reassure me that if I stayed on this path, everything would eventually work out. Current students celebrated each others’ wins, alumni responded warmly to cold emails, and work supervisors took time out of busy schedules to give thoughtful career and personal guidance.
I deeply love the public interest legal community that welcomed me with open arms. I hope that one day you choose to join it.