Email is your “face” with respect to many partners and seniors, who hardly remember what you look like and could care less. You wouldn’t go to work with messy hair, a skanky outfit, your shirt out, or mismatched shoes, would you? Then make sure your emails are well put together, look good, are pleasing to the reader, and convey exactly what you want to convey.

A. Learn about transactional practice.

Very few law schools give you this opportunity. You may find it’s more to your temperament than litigation. I did. Next tip:

B. Learn how to observe people.

For example, some senior associates may be poisonous, others (especially older ones who may have had a career before becoming a lawyer) may be more empathetic and mentoring. Partners don’t have a monopoly on wisdom, and very few have people skills; even if they have those skills, they may save them for clients, not for their dealings with you.

In particular, anyone, at any level, who doesn’t “appreciate the learning curve” is a JERK, and should be avoided. That person is also a bad manager. I never gave a summer associate a mission-critical piece of work that required legal drafting or analysis (as distinguished from, say, helping me to assemble documents for a closing, which is also mission-critical). If he or she could understand the basics of a couple of simple agreements like, say, a nondisclosure agreement, real estate lease, sales rep agreement, or software license by the end of the summer, I counted it as a great step forward.

A small proviso to this:

(B1) The world is smaller than you think — don’t burn bridges.

The #1 jerk senior associate I dealt with during my summer in NYC (at a firm to which I didn’t go after graduation) wound up in the office next to mine at a different firm in Los Angeles 4 years later; we became friends.

Next, apropos of Deven’s advice about outside reading, generally I agree, but I’m strongly to the contrary about “even just fifteen minutes before sleep” and to some extent about evenings. My point is:

C. Maintain your outside interests.

It’s been 25 years since I graduated from law school, and I still find law interesting. One reason is that I didn’t burn out on it.

Not everyone is the same, but for what it’s worth these have been my personal policies since Day One in law practice:

(C1) DO NOT to read anything about law after 9:00 PM, unless actually working on a billable matter.

(C2) DO read something recreational, even if only for a few minutes, before going to sleep, no matter how late you get into bed (assuming your partner, if any, doesn’t have an even better idea).

As I may have mentioned in a now-ancient comment elsewhere on this blog, my preference is for books, not ephemera like newspapers or magazines, since finishing the book is a kind of accomplishment. As a 3d or 4th year associate I started keeping lists of books I’d finished each year, a practice I continue today. Even on the nights I came home at 04:00 AM, I made sure to read at least one paragraph of something fun and unrelated to law. That kept me sane and, ironically, also opened up a number of professional opportunities for me.

Finally, as for something big and overarching, certainly John C’s tip is a good one to put near the top of the list. I have another, though, that I think is even more fundamental:

#0/#α/#Ω. IF YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND, ASK.

One of the most important things in any job or intellectual activity is to know (i.e., be aware of) what you don’t know. Law students and other overachievers have a kind of allergy to admitting that they don’t know something. If you want to look really stupid later, then pretend now that you know something you don’t. To this day, if I don’t understand the basic logic of a deal, I am not afraid to look stupid and ask. In the worst case, you’ll learn something. In the best case, that “dumb question” will help discover some real flaws in logic that even senior people had glossed over, because of their own foolish mix of pride and sloth. And the best case happens more often than you think.

I unfortunately encountered this situation with a summer last week, and it involved me spending alomst 8 hours over the weekend getting her work done for her. I was not happy – not because she fell behind and couldn’t finish the work, but because she waited until the bitter end to tell us and then the work had to get done immediately.

Firms tell summer associates this rule all the time, and some of them still don’t seem to learn it. It never ceases to amaze.