Cravath’s $80K Deferral Offer Not Enticing Enough for Some Yale Law Grads
New associates headed for Cravath, Swaine & Moore this year were offered a sweet deferral deal: Take the year off in exchange for $80,000 along with benefits and student loan payments.
Apparently the optional offer wasn’t enticing enough for at least some Yale law graduates, according to alum Elizabeth Wurtzel in an opinion column in the Wall Street Journal.
Wurtzel says she was told that none of the Yale grads headed for Cravath accepted the no-strings-attached offer of $80,000 “to surf and sunbathe, or go forth and save the world.” She was unable to get confirmation, she says, but she is sure that at least some graduates declined.
“This is cause for worry,” Wurtzel writes. “If even one person said no to $80,000 for bubkes, I’d question the sanity and intelligence of that sole holdout. Cravath recruits the best and the brightest kids from the most highly ranked law schools—and given $80,000 and a dream, all many of them could do was report to work on Monday.”
Wurtzel wonders if those who turned down the offer “don’t have enough vision to know what to do with $80,000 worth of free time.”
Wurtzel is one of Yale’s more high-profile law grads. She wrote about her struggle with addiction and depression in the book Prozac Nation.
