For fear of outing, I’ll keep this anon. I’ll be heading to Cooley in their Reston, VA office. It’s too late at this point, but one thing concerns me:
What’s the exit ops as far as their office is concerned? It’s a Cali firm, so I’m afraid the quality of work might take a hit.
My buddy interviewed out there for tech trans a couple of years ago. At least with tech transactions work, he told me that the work there is mostly with big companies (vendor side) and generally not with startups.
He said the exit opportunities were decent. A lot of them go inhouse.
If what you’re worried about is that the Reston office, specifically, won’t have good work because all of the interesting work will be in Cali, I would say that Cooley does appear to have a decent amount of cross-office collaboration. It highly depends on what group you’re in/who you work with/what your strengths are, but I have definitely heard of people getting work from multiple officer with a little initiative (i.e., by reaching out to partners in other offices themselves to ask for more work/to see if those partners want help on anything).
A few people go on to biglaw firms/in-house/clerkships.