What 'Leo the Late Bloomer' can teach hiring partners
Image courtesy of HarperCollins.
Law grads who lack the pedigree of a top-rated law school may still be destined to be great lawyers, according to the senior chairman of Sullivan & Cromwell.
H. Rodgin Cohen, who gave up his chairmanship and management duties in 2010, spoke with Bloomberg Big Law Business about his firm’s recruiting tactics in the first installment of a two-part article.
Sullivan & Cromwell recruits from about a dozen top law schools, but it also gets a lot of “write-ins”—people who express interest in working at the law firm in writing, Cohen said. Some of those people get hired and even rise to partnership.
Cohen used to ask the incoming associate class, “What law school do you think has the highest percentage of associates who became partners” at Sullivan & Cromwell? Though he’s not sure if it’s still true, the answer at the time was Ohio State.
“It tells you that there are some real gems who don’t go to what are considered to be the very best law schools,” Cohen told Bloomberg. “And, as I liked to say when my kids were growing up, one of the stories that I liked to read them was Leo the Late Bloomer, which was about a lion cub who becomes king of the jungle: People mature intellectually at different levels, at different times. People who go to college and don’t do well can go to law schools and do splendidly.”
