This fellow was a senior person in EY competition team. He verbally offered me a job and me do a lot of academic work. After the work was over, he ghosted me.
Firms want to report that they made offers to 100% of their interns (or summer associates as they call it) so that they can report the same to NALP, an industry body collecting grad rec data, and to entice students from the succeeding batch to apply to their firm as interns.
Not gonna happen in India. The market for legal services is so small (compared to the States) that Tier 1 firms have no need whatsoever to attract students, even from top institutions. Let's not even get into self-regulation within the legal profession lol.
So basically, during law school in the US (JD), the opportunities to intern are far less because of the tight schedule and workload. The firms which usually hire summer associates want the best and the brightest. So while fighting for talent, firms usually only give summer associate positions to those whose profile fit their firms and teams. And it is general practice that if you’ve reached a firm as summer associate, you will be offered an associate position if you don’t fuck up and team likes you.
If the firm doesn’t give a summer associate an offer, it is like a chill spreads through the law schools that X firm might not hire you after giving you a summer associate position and potentially wasting your time. So talent tends to avoid the firm. Hence the concept of cold offers. They’re giving you an offer to hold up their reputation but not really because they want you in the firm
This is a US-centric issue. It exists because American law firms try and maintain a 100% offer rate for their summer trainees - this is to make them more attractive to law students looking for where to intern (yes, this matters to people). These offers are a win-win - firm keeps its 100% offer rate while not actually having to hire the person they don't want, and person gets to leverage the offer for another job elsewhere.
Obviously this is not an issue here because Indian law firms don't have a public offer-acceptance rate. It's only an issue on LI because some bored law student saw a US Instagram feed and decided to post about it here.
I am interested in knowing why they extend such offers in the first place when they don't want the candidate to join? Talking about the US only considering I have no idea if similar kind of idiots exists here in the subcontinent too.
This practice is not prevalent in India because firms in India generally do not need to lure top candidates from joining them. The reason this happens in US firms is because they want to be able to say they have a track record of making offers 100% of the time so that quality law students pick their firm to work over the summer and eventually join.
The practice of "cold offers" seems to be quite a common practice amongst many US firms. Essentially, the firm extends a job offer, but implies that you must not accept it. Passive-aggressive communication of the highest order, indeed.
A crude way of doing this would be a partner explicitly telling you not to accept the offer. A more nuanced way would be to impose extremely onerous, or impossible, conditions to the offer. For example, a US firm might say to a non-citizen that a federal clerkship is a condition precedent. Since federal clerkship is only available to US citizens, this effectively blocks out that candidate from joining.
Is this practice prevalent in India? Have you been cold offered by an Indian law firm, or do you know someone who has?
https://thegirlsguidetolawschool.com/10/what-its-like-to-get-a-cold-offer/
Not gonna happen in India. The market for legal services is so small (compared to the States) that Tier 1 firms have no need whatsoever to attract students, even from top institutions. Let's not even get into self-regulation within the legal profession lol.
If the firm doesn’t give a summer associate an offer, it is like a chill spreads through the law schools that X firm might not hire you after giving you a summer associate position and potentially wasting your time. So talent tends to avoid the firm. Hence the concept of cold offers. They’re giving you an offer to hold up their reputation but not really because they want you in the firm
Obviously this is not an issue here because Indian law firms don't have a public offer-acceptance rate. It's only an issue on LI because some bored law student saw a US Instagram feed and decided to post about it here.
A crude way of doing this would be a partner explicitly telling you not to accept the offer. A more nuanced way would be to impose extremely onerous, or impossible, conditions to the offer. For example, a US firm might say to a non-citizen that a federal clerkship is a condition precedent. Since federal clerkship is only available to US citizens, this effectively blocks out that candidate from joining.
Is this practice prevalent in India? Have you been cold offered by an Indian law firm, or do you know someone who has?