© 2013 The Texas Lawbook.
By Natalie Posgate
Staff Writer for The Texas Lawbook
(July 9) – For decades, corporate general counsels used their outside law firms as recruiting pools for experienced lawyers. Businesses never hired straight out of law school.
But a handful of Texas law schools and general counsels are working to change that.
Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law, the University of Houston Law Center and South Texas College of Law have implemented internship, externship or recruiting programs designed to connect their students with corporate in-house counsels so they can explore their interests while making themselves more marketable in the still-tough legal economy.
Law schools at Waco-based Baylor University and Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth are aggressively inviting corporate legal departments to attend their job fairs. And Texas Tech University School of Law is set to unveil its new outreach to general counsels later this year.
Meanwhile, dozens of Texas corporations have started visiting law school campuses for interns and full-time employees.
And law schools say that students who have done clerkships with corporate legal departments are able to use that experience and the relationships they gained when interviewing for business law firms.
“We are seeing more grads go directly in-house and that may be a trend,” said Steve Yeager, who is SMU Dedman’s director of career services and the faculty supervisor of the law school’s new Corporate Counsel Externship Program being launched this fall.
“We want our students to have an in-depth and holistic understanding of the client and its expectations,” he said.
Yeager, a former GC at Dallas financial services firm Charity Capital, said SMU Dedman started the externship as the result of student feedback about in-house work and transactional work.
As part of the program, 30 law students primarily in their final year will meet weekly in a class led by securities law professor Marc I. Steinberg, chief legal officers, and in-house senior managing attorneys who will discuss ethical, substantive and practical issues facing GCs.
Steinberg, who serves as the director of the program, said the externships will help students “have an additional experience to list on their résumés and help them become more attractive for prospective employers.”
Thirty corporations, including Interstate Batteries, Lennox International, AT&T Corp., Baylor Health Care System, Hewlett-Packard Company and Denbury Resources Inc., have agreed to participate in the externship, allowing students to spend a significant time working side-by-side with lawyers in their legal departments to learn legal analysis and reasoning, contract drafting, problem solving, communication, teamwork and negotiation.
SMU Dedman administrators and GCs said the program will give the students an advance when they are first-year associates at law firms because they’ll better understand what qualities and services corporations want when hiring outside counsel.
“This program is going to give the law students an opportunity to see the dynamics of that buy-sell relationship,” said Lennox General Counsel John Torres. “The purchaser’s point-of-view is not just the seller’s point-of-view.”
Chris Willis, the general counsel at Dallas-based Interstate Batteries, said the externship program is a way for students to get a taste of the in-house environment – often a mystery until a lawyer moves to a corporation after several years at a firm.
Willis’ future extern, SMU rising third year Jeff Connor, said he was excited to learn more about the in-house corporate world – something he admitted he knows little about.
“When you’re working directly under a GC, you get to experience everything first-hand,” said Connor. “You get to see while in school something you [might] want to do before spending a lot of time getting there and realizing you don’t want to do it.”
“The in-house world is pretty unknown to law students,” Willis said. “It’s very different from outside practice and very different from law school.”Some schools are even creating niches within the recruiting opportunities.
Houston’s South Texas College of Law has created an academic internship program that places its students with non-profit organizations for academic credit, said Bruce McGovern, South Texas vice president and associate dean.
Government agencies, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and several hospitals, including Baylor, The Methodist Hospital System and MD Anderson Cancer Center, have signed up to participate in the program.
McGovern said South Texas also offers its students a transactional skills certificate program that often appeals to students aspiring to go in-house. The certificate program requires students to complete a studies program and a substantial writing project about a topic related to transactional law that general counsels will find relevant to in-house practice, he said. Finally, the required capstone class puts students in touch with an adjunct faculty member who works in-house.
Texas Tech School of Law will expand its fairly new Regional Externship Program by offering positions in corporate general counsel offices and opportunities in Austin and Houston over the next two years.
This past school year, the program allowed third-year students the opportunity to spend a full semester working for a government or legal services organization in Dallas or Forth Worth while gaining academic credit.
The University of Houston Law Center targets corporations that recruit first-year law students, an often-overlooked group, to intern at in-house legal departments during the summer following their first year.
Some corporations, such as GE Oil & Gas, recruit at UH Law Center and hire first-year interns – who often have limited opportunities – during their 1L summer.
“There aren’t that many slots for first-years, but it was a novel idea, and we decided to try it. It worked out really well,” said Victoria Lazar, GE’s associate general counsel for drilling and surface. “We’ve been really impressed with the quality of interns.”
Recent graduate Nick Floyd was one of them. Floyd, once a chemical engineer, said interning at GE’s in-house department after his first year made a big difference during his permanent job search.
“Having GE Oil & Gas on your résumé helps,” said Floyd, who accepted an offer to join the patent litigation practice group of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius in Houston after his May graduation. “I’m grateful for the opportunity because it did set me apart.”
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