Confidentiality is King
Assume that nothing you do as a summer associate is public. Even the public stuff.
Happy Friday!
I hope you’ve enjoyed the first week of Standout Summer Associate (SSA). I won’t promise to publish every weekday going forward but it has been fun to start this new side project with a bang.
Before I dive into today’s topic, I am hoping you can do me two quick favors:
Can you share this newsletter with someone else (fellow summer associates, classmates from law school, or just on social media)? Just click this button ⬇︎
Can you reply to this message with one topic or question you want me to cover this summer? I really appreciate it!
Today’s topic is not complicated, but it is important: confidentiality!
Confidentiality is a keystone duty for all lawyers and has been for more than four centuries (a topic I’ve written about recently in the Washington Law Review). But the importance of confidentiality for summer associates and summer interns is actually broader and more important than the duty found in Rule 1.6 of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct. That is because as a temporary employee you often do not know the full extent to which a piece of information, or meeting, or strategy is secret. And even if you think you have a good sense of how secret something is, it is important to demonstrate discretion from day one. That is because in order for your supervisor to trust you and give you the best and most in-depth experiences, they need to count on your ability not to share what you’ve learned on purpose or by accident.
This means don’t talk about your cases with your roommates or your friends and please for the love of god don’t talk about cases on the back of an Amtrak train.
Perhaps counterintuitively this includes even public information. Why? Because in sharing about information that is public there is always a risk that you will share information (explicitly or implicitly; on purpose or by accident) that is not public too. Even something as mundane as when a project will be completed or who is working on it may seem like unimportant information to you but may be very valuable information to someone else.
As a result, therefore, a good rule of thumb is only talk about what you have explicitly been told you can talk about.
I understand this may make you less fun at cocktail parties (“Hey Sally, what are you working on this summer?”) and may make your parents or significant others feel like you are acting like a spy but maintaining discretion and building a reputation for discretion is an important part of your summer experience.
Oh and one more thing! Does this mean you can’t talk about your summer job or use a piece of writing you completed as a writing sample? Absolutely not. You can always talk about your experiences at a higher level of generality (e.g., “I worked on a motion to dismiss and learned X” instead of “I worked on a motion to dismiss for Client Y and learned X”) and you can always ask to use a piece of writing as a writing sample (often with party names redacted). But for now my recommendation is to err on the side of caution when it comes to keeping your work confidential.
Talk soon,
Jonah