August 1, 2013

...and the OCI Madness begins

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...and the OCI Madness beginsSpivey Consulting Group

A deranged student sent the following email to a close friend and CSO officer this morning.

Redacted:

I woke up this morning and was disappointed to see that I did not have any job offers from any of the firms I applied to last night. Some of them have had my application materials for nearly 12 hours now, so I went ahead and sent them all very angry and profane letters of retraction.

So here is his dilemma. How do you get all of the hiring partners to click on the user recalled email in their Outlook inbox rather than reading the profanity-laced email first. And it has to be 100% or his soon to be viral email in 3, 2, 1… will spread from firm to firm as a cocktail party joke. So, in sum, this poor student is blacklisted from the legal community except, if only…

His second paragraph in the email started with:

In all seriousness though,

It turns out the deranged student is, in actuality, an awesome student. Not only is he pretty hilarious (and thus likely already has 865 twitter followers, my goal that I will not stop mentioning obsessively until I get there), not only did he give me permission to blog this, but he is percipient beyond his years. Because LAW STUDENTS ACTUALLY DO JUST THIS. I mean, they do it in droves every year. I am not kidding, the OCI experience creates the awkwardest of stories every single year.

What is your point, Spivey? It’s simple. Every 12 hours that goes by after OCI submission deadlines, and every 12 hours that go by after On Campus Interviews, the desire to actually email firms is going to start building. And building. And then really really building. It will hit a crescendo where you will know it is the wrong thing to do, but you will do it anyway. I call this the Carlos Danger Effect.

Don’t do it. Email me (I’m not kidding), I will talk you down, I have done so hundreds of times. Better yet, draft and send me your stressful email, I’m happy to redact it/ blog it and we can all have a good laugh. Email ANYONE but the hiring partners, even if the email is a sweet “just checking in” or an even sweeter “here is a picture of my new puppy.” It never works, it is never a good idea. Send me your puppy picture and I will post it on my blog. But don’t go down this road. You don’t want to be that joke as the firms welcomes everyone back from August vacations (did you know big-law partners are gone all august? That’s pretty great, too)

Happy OCING!

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Mike Spivey

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