Lateral Writing Sample

Legal Employment/Careers Legal Employment
1

I’m applying for a job. The job posting specifically asks for a writing sample. I don’t have many writing samples to provide. Here are my options:

  1. Selected pages from a paper I wrote in my final year of law school about 2 years ago.
  2. An article I recently wrote for a monthly publication that my firm puts out.

As to the latter, the article has me down as a co-author, but I actually wrote it. The other author just made a few edits after the fact. I was thinking I could send them the pre-edited version so it better reflects my work.

What do you guys think?

2

What practice group? Neither of those seem very good to me

3

Well, as I’ve said, it’s these or nothing. Anything else would require my current employer’s permission because they are not public filings.

The practice of the target firm is bankruptcy.

4

Idk anything about bankruptcy but couldn’t you spend a couple hours and heavily redact something to make the client unidentifiable? Or just write something original?

5

The target firm is bankruptcy, but my current position is not.

I could easily provide something that doesn’t have the client’s name anywhere, but the arguments are pretty sensitive and a competitor could use them to siphon business from my current employer. It has happened before, and we have done it ourselves.

What do you mean by something original? A made-up brief or something?

6

Others may disagree, but I think it’s fine to use the article from the monthly publication - and not the pre-edit version. I used a couple of monthly publication articles that I was a “co-author” on for my lateral writing sample, with a brief explanation that everything always has a partner’s name on it, although I did the majority of the writing. The lateral firm didn’t have a problem with it - they understand how this type of thing works, and know that basically anything you’ve done as an associate is going to have been edited by someone, whether it’s a client piece or a marketing publication.

7

How common do you think this sort of thing is? I applied to a corp position that required a writing sample and was like wtf? People actually expect this? The vast majority of what I do is just reviewing and commenting on contracts/disclosures, and occasionally I’ll write a few paragraphs or a page to answer a semi-complicated legal issue. Full-on memos have been extremely rare.