Specialist litigation firm Quinn Emanuel, whose London office has been prominent on the wave of big ticket litigation flowing through the capital, has come up with a new graduate recruitment strategy: parties.
According to firm chief John Quinn, Quinn Emanuel is going to “come to the law schools in the spring, invite all the first year students and have a fun, freewheeling ‘get to know you’ party with enough of our lawyers present so students can meet (and even talk for more than twenty minutes) to a real cross-section from all the offices (and not have to wear suits).”
Quinn, writing in his customary lower case style in an email to US blog Above the Law, added: “then we’ll follow up with direct submission of resumes. we think it will give more students a chance to get to know us over a longer period of time”
The bad news for law students on these shores is that Quinn Emanuel, which opened in London in 2008, doesn’t yet run a UK training contract programme. It does, however, hire newly qualified (NQ) solicitors – whom it pays a massive £97,500…
Perhaps the firm could link up with LawParties, the London company that runs “exclusive parties for London’s young lawyers” to pull a few NQs in? And while they’re at it, why not get DJ Barrister in to do the music?
When I contacted the firm’s London co-managing partner Richard East this morning to ask him whether he’d be holding any “freewheeling” recruitment parties, he told me: “The short answer is no. In London we’re just 20 lawyers, so we don’t do the mass recruiting that Quinn does in the US. But as an approach it’s very typical of the firm, because we’re looking for candidates to have a combination of things that don’t always come out through normal interviews.”
However, East added that the firm is currently hiring NQs in London to replace several recent departures. In Quinn Emanuel style, the firm has used less conventional avenues such as Twitter and LinkedIn to get its recruitment message out. East – who tweets at @rceast1 – says candidates should be prepared to meet both partners and associates during interview. “Because we’re quite small in London, it’s important we get the right fight.”
Quinn Emanuel has form for whacky graduate recruitment. In 2007, rather than do standard interviews, the firm took students on an all-expenses-paid weekend trip to a luxury resort in Utah.