The Best and the Brightest
O’Melveny is looking for bright, personable practitioners from diverse backgrounds with creative ideas and a strong desire to learn and excel. If you think you might be right for O’Melveny, we offer a rewarding career, top-tier work, and a supportive team of lawyers and staff to help your talent flourish.
With a comprehensive, market-leading talent development strategy that has been fully embraced by our partnership, O’Melveny’s focus on professional growth and support continues long after our lawyers have joined us. At every stage of a lawyer’s career, we provide training, mentoring, career counseling, performance evaluations, flexible work options, and leadership development. Our comprehensive training program includes both legal and business skills courses, while our mentoring programs provide guidance to our junior and midlevel lawyers. Our lawyers also look to our team of Editors (including a Pulitzer Prize–winner) to help them further hone their writing skills. Recent investments in technology have streamlined the firm’s work assignment system to better ensure that all lawyers receive the types of advisor that enhance their professional development while expanding opportunities to work across departments and regions. Through our alumni network, OMMConnect, we provide ongoing support for every member of the O’Melveny community, whether they remain at the firm or move on to other endeavors.
With a long tradition of serving our government at the highest levels, we count among our colleagues former White House Counsel, a former Associate Solicitor General, former senior National Security officials, and other lawyers who have left their marks on the history books, including as members of special counsel Robert Muller’s team. Our alumni include Arthur B. Culvahouse, US Ambassador to Australia; Diana Shaw, Acting Inspector General of the State Department; Sri Srinivasan, a US Circuit Judge of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit; Mike Walsh, Deputy General Counsel of the US Department of Commerce; and Nora Manella, an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal.
Read more about careers at O’Melveny here.
Career Customization and Flexibility
O’Melveny recognizes that every lawyer’s trajectory is different, that there is no “one-size-fits-all” career plan. We facilitate opportunities for lawyers to customize their careers according to their own professional goals and personal needs.
O’Melveny has a long history of supporting flexibility through a progressive reduced workload program and numerous informal flexibility programs, including:
- Reduced Workload & Phase Back: Our Reduced Workload program enables lawyers to bill fewer hours by taking on fewer matters over the course of a year; Phase Back allows associates and counsel to return from leave, without any approvals required, on a reduced workload for six months.
- Remote Work: Remote Work allows lawyers to work from home or another offsite location during set hours or days.
- Flex Time: Flex Time allows our lawyers to choose a specified, nontraditional time for their workday to begin and end, subject to client demands.
- Bridges Sabbatical: A Bridges Sabbatical allows a lawyer to take an extended unpaid leave of up to two years to pursue personal or professional goals, while remaining an employee of the firm. O’Melveny covers the cost of the lawyer’s bar dues during the sabbatical, and also continues to invite the lawyer to O’Melveny events, meetings, and CLE events. Bridges participants have pursued a wide variety of personal interests and pursuits, including campaign support, graduate coursework, performing arts, and nonprofit work.
“I feel fortunate to be a part of a firm with such a rich array of flexibility options—for parents and non-parents alike,” said New York partner Tracie Ingrasin, who as a counsel worked with the firm to craft an integration plan for her return from maternity leave that included a reduced schedule and remote work one day each week. “The firm’s flexibility program enables me to be a successful lawyer and a nurturing and present parent.”
O’Melveny also offers backup child- and elder-care benefits, which one lawyer calls “the best offering you have for employees with children—and one that is critical to productivity and morale.” Other benefits include:
- Comprehensive employee assistance program services through CCA, Inc
- Transitional coaching for new parents who are learning to integrate their professional goals with their new family responsibilities
- Employee Networks for parents
- Mentors for lawyers participating in the Bridges sabbatical program
For our excellence in creating programs designed to retain and advance women into the leadership pipeline, Working Mother magazine named O’Melveny to its “Best Law Firms for Women” list for the eighth consecutive year.
Professional Development
O’Melveny takes a holistic approach to developing talent. At the core of our efforts is our work advisor program designed to ensure equity in the allocation of workloads among associates and counsel. The program highlights our commitment to efficiently serving our clients’ needs, promoting diversity of both assignments and team staffing, facilitating opportunities for associates and counsel to gain valuable on-the-job experience with the skills necessary for their practice, and reinforcing O’Melveny’s strategy of customized professional development. Work Advisors in each office collaborate with a firmwide staffing team to have one-on-one conversations with lawyers about their assignments, workloads, and skill goals. We continue to refine this program to reflect the evolving work assignment and professional development goals of our associates and counsel.
O’Melveny also conducts biannual upward reviews as part of our commitment to providing candid, confidential feedback and coaching to counsel and partners on their supervisory, practice management, and leadership skills. To gather this feedback, O’Melveny retains a consultant who conducts in-person interviews with lawyers and staff. Each associate and counsel in every one of our 15 offices, approximately 95% of our associate/counsel population, participated in the most recent process. To our knowledge, O’Melveny is the only firm that collects feedback for upward reviews through independent, in-person interviews on a global basis. We have found that in-person interviews, rather than online surveys, yield the most substantive feedback from associates and counsel, leading to constructive, individualized coaching for partners, counsel, and work coordinators. Upward reviews also provide valuable insight into associate and counsel perspectives on critical areas such as mentoring, diversity, training, work coordination, and communication.
Strong Ties to Alumni
O’Melveny’s alumni relations program is dedicated to cultivating a sense of community and continuity among our current and former lawyers, leading to networking, career opportunities, and business development. We strengthen our ties through regular newsletters, events, and online connections:
- Our lawyers, alumni, and clients regularly come together for events and programming on current issues. Social distancing hasn’t held our alumni community back from connecting—our “O’Melveny at hOMMe” alumni webinar series has hosted expert-led discussions on business, societal, and legal issues amid the pandemic.
- Our alumni are a great career resource to our current lawyers, sharing lessons learned in their career journey at our hosted panel discussions and offsite leadership academies and trainings.
- To highlight the importance of alumni relations to the firm’s strategic vision, we created an official Alumni Relations Partner role.
- Our online community—OMMConnect—is designed to encourage networking among alumni and current lawyers. Through OMMConnect, we send out regular newsletters and updates, sharing news about our community and flagging career opportunities for our members. In “Spotlights,” one of our most popular newsletter features, O’Melveny profiles fascinating current and former lawyers.
Ready to learn more? Contact:
Tina Metis
Director of Lawyer Recruiting
O’Melveny & Myers LLP
7 Times Square
Times Square Tower
New York, NY 10036
tmetis@omm.com
(212) 728-5741 (direct)
(212) 326-2061 (facsimile)
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