No, there is definitely not the same pressure to get a summer position here. Prospective employers generally won’t hold a lack of summer experience against you, though Big Firms generally won’t even consider a student who hasn’t summered with them. Smaller places are much more open to the idea of hiring a recent grad whom they do not already know, and they don’t particularly care if he or she had any summer experience anywhere. I only had one place ask me why I had no summer experience; most never even brought it up.
You raise an interesting point about pay: here, summer law jobs and articling positions do not pay very well. It’s entirely possible to find a summer non-law job that pays more than a summer law job; and that fact also plays a role in what kind of summer job a student decides to pursue. Pay for articling students is generally better, but not nearly as good as it will become once the student is called to the bar. That makes sense, but because of the “one year of articling” requirement, it’s another year during which many students must continue to live like students instead of like professionals.
What Spoons said. I’ve been on a hiring committee for articling students, and working for a law firm in the summer is not a requirement. I was always more interested in the student’s overall work and life experience than whether they had worked for a law firm for the past couple of summers. One of our best hires was a guy who ran his own landscaping company before law school and during the summers when he was at law school.
Interesting. Seems to me the summer experiences+the pre-admission period adds up to almost the articling year. Hence, if you lack the summer experiences, you are notably deficient in the US system, but not in the Canadian system.
Indeed. It is not common to find a non-legal unskilled position that pays a better hourly wage than a legal summer position in the US… Possibly if you are a skilled laborer (welder, etc) and belong to a union. Or, as a bartender (if you are hot) but that requires a license.
In the case of unpaid public sector work, there is an inherent value in it; you need to lay a foundation, because they usually require “demonstrated commitment to the public sector” when hiring for fulltime positions.
Interesting. I’m wondering if the articling year may address this issue as well–many of the public sector opportunities that you listed simply do not exist up here (for example, the public defender’s office) or are only open to articling students (for example, clerking for a judge). Even working in a city’s legal department or for the Crown Prosecutor’s office (think “District Attorney”) is a job normally open only to articling students.
Those of us who do not seek (or land) such articling positions hear a lot from various pro bono non-profit organizations urging us to volunteer our time during our articling year. Note that whether you do or not, won’t affect your chances of passing the bar; but the word on the street is that it is a plus when firms are looking at hiring you as a full-time associate. We have a small free legal clinic in our city, and they have already approached me to volunteer. This happened just last week, and I plan to give them a call in the next few days. Who knows? It may allow me to keep in touch with a few areas of law that my current firm doesn’t deal with.
How on earth do you get it under the page limit when you have 25 minutes to deadline without taking parts out of the main (double spaced, 12 point) text and dumping them into footnotes (10 point, single spaced)?
With the difference that during the articling year, you are a student-at-law under the regulation and discipline of the Law Society, not just a person employed by the law firm.
