Summer Program to Incorporate Hall Passes and Watch Groups

Aspiring attorneys are under siege. Syracuse University Law School recently announced that bathroom breaks will be limited during exams because students are engaging in covert bathroom texting to get a better grade. At the same time, the war on first year associates is well underway with new attorneys being blamed for causing inflated salaries and generating client dissatisfaction. In the wake of these developments, summer associate programs across the country are facing major revisions and one firm, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP, has announced that it plans to take the oversight of its summer associates to the next level.

At a meeting this week, the firm informed all attorneys that summer associates would not be able to travel the halls during working hours without a hall pass approved and signed for by a partner. “I know this is a little unconventional, but this is simply another response to client demands,” explained firm chairman Fran Milone. “Clients want us to maximize the amount of free work we can generate from summer associates to compensate for the rates we are charging for our generally worthless crop of junior associates.” According to the announcement, Morgan Lewis summers can email a partner with a request to leave their office and if approved, should print out the partner’s return email and carry it with them. If a summer associate is found wandering the halls without a hall pass or with a hall pass that was issued more than 10 minutes ago, their eventual start date will be delayed an additional year.

Morgan Lewis also plans to organize “Floor Watch Groups” designed to ensure that summer associates are spending each hour of their day learning the craft of lawyering instead of wasting time on the phone, on the internet or in random, pointless conversations with other attorneys. The “Floor Watch Groups” are styled after the popular Neighborhood Watch programs implemented by many cities and towns. Attorneys will rotate shifts where they will be required to “stop by” the summer associate offices on their floors and report back anonymously to firm management if a summer is found violating the terms of their precarious and utterly temporary employment arrangement. The firm made sure to clarify that the Floor Watch Groups would not be monitoring any secretarial behavior.

“I think this marks another major shift in the practice of law as we know it,” explained legal analyst Martin Festerbilk. “While law students have been sought after and recruited heavily for years, now they are being viewed with much more skepticism. Then again, if students can’t be trusted to use the bathroom without cheating on exams, can they really be ready to take on the rigors of the grunt work that defines the first-year of Big Law practice? I say probably, but that doesn’t mean law firms won’t be monitoring them very closely.”