First-Year Trial Rotation

Associates spend their first year working on two or three major cases, at least one of which is expected to go to trial that year. During this trial rotation, each first-year associate, under the direct tutelage of a partner:

• second chairs a trial;
• drafts and argues substantive motions in court;
• takes and defends depositions;
• hires and prepares experts;
• interviews informants and witnesses;
• runs fact investigations, both inside and outside formal discovery;
• evaluates potential cases; and
• pitches business.

The work necessary to accomplish all this is crushing. But an associate who survives the trial rotation has sound practical experience in each stage of major commercial litigation, from engagement to trial.

Years Two Through Six

Associates serve further rotations during their remaining years at the firm. The nature of these rotations is driven by the firm’s practice and the associate’s areas of interest. An associate’s rotations might include a year handling fundraising and acquisitions for our investment-fund clients, a year trying intellectual-property cases, a year prosecuting commercial class actions, or a year in our Latin America practice advising American companies investing abroad or foreign companies doing business here.

Rotations transform associates into lawyers who can credibly pitch and retain business and who can handle the most difficult legal matters independently. We encourage associates to develop clients and make names for themselves while at the firm. Associates regularly serve as the primary firm contact for clients and take the lead in pitching new business. A fifth- or sixth-year associate at Camara & Sibley has every skill necessary to build and maintain a practice like ours.

Partnership

The odds of making partner are slim. Every partner is an equal partner who shares equally in firm profits and firm governance. We elect new partners only when we are willing to admit them on these terms. The upside of this system is that an associate who makes partner really does make partner: there are no income or non-equity partners here. And there is no stigma to not making partner, since this is the expected outcome even for our most successful associates.

Associates who are not elected partner are expected to leave sometime during their sixth year. The skills that a sixth-year associate has mastered while at Camara & Sibley are rare and in high demand. Options for such associates include starting or joining a Camara & Sibley spinoff, partnership at our competitors or at regional firms around the country, joining one of our clients in in-house counsel or executive positions, or service in academia or government.

We do our best to place associates in excellent positions and, for those associates continuing in practice, encourage clients for whom the associate has worked to continue to engage that associate for further matters. Our liaisons also maintain an active network of alumni and coordinate reunions at the firm.

 

Work

Summer associates are treated just like associates. They work directly with partners on client matters and almost always have direct contact with the client, local counsel, and opposing counsel.

In 2009, summer associates:

Hiring Process

Our hiring process is much less formal than at other firms. We do on-campus interviews at Harvard, Stanford, Duke, Virginia, and Texas. Then we invite candidates back to the firm in Houston. A callback consists of two interviews of indeterminate length — anywhere from half an hour to a whole afternoon — followed by dinner with one or more partners. We prefer to meet candidates over a bottle or two of wine; the resulting conversation gives us a better sense of whether a candidate will fit in at the firm than would a stilted interrogation at the office.

We extend offers for post-graduate employment at the end of the summer. We do not typically extend offers to all of our summer associates; we extend an offer only when we expect that a summer associate would do well at the firm. If a summer associate does not receive an offer, we do our best to place that summer associate at a different firm and to furnish favorable recommendations for employment elsewhere; failure to receive an offer at the end of a summer here is not intended to be a major blow to your career.

We invite applications outside the ordinary hiring process. One of our favorite summer associates from 2009 came to us this way. To apply, send a resume, transcripts, references, and writing sample to CeCe Cohen.

 

Law Clerks

We regularly hire law clerks from the University of Houston Law Center and South Texas College of Law to work part-time during the school year. Law clerks do everything from document review and preparing trial exhibits to drafting pleadings and dispositive motions. Law clerks who can handle the work are treated like first-year associates.

Our law-clerk program is not intended to be a conduit to the summer program or to employment as an associate. But we have in the past made offers to exceptional law clerks to summer at the firm or join as associates.

 

Practice

We do not handle routine matters. Clients hire us when, because the stakes are so high, the business problem, so important, or the applicable law, so complex, they decide that they need the best lawyers possible.

We are one of the few firms that regularly tries commercial cases. A large part of our practice consists of substituting in as trial counsel at the last minute: in the past six months, we were engaged in one case three weeks before trial and in another, one month before the close of discovery, with 15 depositions left to take.

We avoid narrow specialization. The most obvious example of this is that every associate, even those who ultimately focus on transactional matters, tries several cases during his or her tenure at the firm. You will not find associates here who have focused their entire careers on the effect of a particular securities regulation or even the application of some specific statute. Because the matters we handle are never routine, we find that our clients are best served by excellent generalists who think creatively.

This kind of practice ensures that every matter is an opportunity to learn a new business and a new area of law. It means that the pressure is high, but ensures that winning will make a real difference to our clients — and, in many cases, set a precedent for an industry. It is not unusual to hear about our work in the blogosphere, in newspapers, or on television, publicity that we embrace and use to help advance our clients’ causes.

Environment

We do our best to make the environment in which we practice as comfortable as possible so that lawyers can focus on practicing law. We hire top-of-their-class recent graduates as analysts and liaisons, resulting in an ambitious, eager, hard-working, and technically competent staff that lawyers can call on for support 24 hours a day from anywhere in the world. Meals with partners at the best restaurants in town are always free, usually available, and often come with wine.

Our offices are not downtown, but in our own custom-designed four-story Tuscan building in Rice Village beside Rice University. We have a fun student population, excellent restaurants and bars in walking distance from the firm, the beautiful and shaded Rice outer loop on which to take an afternoon run, showers (and comfortable sleeping couches) on every floor, a walk-in wine cellar and cigar humidor, and a massive fourth-floor deck with a grill and sweeping 360-degree views of Houston.

Tenets

Ours is an old-fashioned partnership. Every partner shares equally in decision-making and profits. We will never have an “eat what you kill” compensation system or a second class of “income” or “non-equity” partners. We resolve disagreements by consensus at a weekly meeting. And, although very few associates can reasonably expect to be elected partner, we take seriously our obligation to train them, place them, and assist them in developing business of their own during their time with us.

We love the law and our practice. We live it and breathe it. We argue legal questions late at night. We think that law is critical, not only for business, but for just government and a free society. We take cases in which important legal questions will be decided — and we do so pro bono when a client can't pay. We mean it when we say that our practice is a profession, not a business.

There is no better place to have a life in the law.