Employed!

It looks like this lawyering thing just might stick. I have accepted an offer from Latham & Watkins to join their D.C. office this fall. Very exciting. They're California's leading firm, and ranked in the top 10 nationally. The D.C. office is very well regarded, with a lineup of terrific litigators and, uh, now, me! They're known as perhaps the best-managed law firm in the country, despite recent hiring lapses.

It's a global firm, with about 1,800 lawyers worldwide, over 200 of them in Washington. They have offices in Barcelona, Brussels, Chicago, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Milan, Moscow, Munich, New Jersey, New York, Northern Virginia, Orange County, Paris, San Diego, San Francisco, Shanghai, Silicon Valley, Singapore, and Tokyo, as well as Washington, D.C. Milan!

The firm's biggest office is New York, with over 300 lawyers, then Los Angeles, with a few less, I believe. Only four in Milan. I wonder what they do, and if I can learn to do it also?

"So, can I accept a job offer during the clerkship?" I asked my colleague P., who is wise in these ways. "Sure!" she replied.

Terrific! Big law firms toss new lawyers surprisingly large amounts of money when they sign up – especially those coming from clerkships – and it'd be nice to pay off a few bills while we're here.

"You can accept the offer, but you can't take any bonuses until the clerkship is over," she elaborated. Damn.

It turns out there are a few loopholes – I can accept "reimbursements," which are technically not bonuses, but which look a lot like them to me. The firm will very kindly pay for the bar-prep class I already took, and the Maryland bar dues I've already paid. Those weren't cheap.

Jen's been hassling me to see "The Firm," the 1993 Tom Cruise movie about an extraordinarily generous but eventually quite sinister law firm. Ha ha ha.