Tools for Summer Associate Success
Bloomberg Law has tools for the litigation, transactional, and business intelligence assignments you will encounter as a summer associate.
Tools for Summer Associate Success
<a href="https://pro.bloomberglaw.com/" style="color:#0D9DDB;">Bloomberg Law</a> has tools for the litigation, transactional, and business intelligence assignments you will encounter as a summer associate.
Learn how to use Bloomberg Law to tackle your assignments and enrich your summer experience.
Table of Contents
<b><p style="line-height:1.9"><a target="_sel" href="#!/page/3" style="color:#0D9DDB;">Make the Most of This Opportunity</a>
<a target="_sel" href="#!/page/4" style="color:#0D9DDB;">How to Start Your Research</a>
<a target="_sel" href="#!/page/5" style="color:#0D9DDB;">Utilize Workflow Tools to Be Efficient</a>
<a target="_sel" href="#!/page/6" style="color:#0D9DDB;">Communicate Effectively</a>
<a target="_sel" href="#!/page/7" style="color:#0D9DDB;">Career Pathing</a></p>
</b>
Make the Most of This Opportunity
A summer associate position is the perfect opportunity to hone professional and social skills, as well as learn about unfamiliar practice areas.
Jumpstart Your Career Development
As a summer associate, you'll have an invaluable opportunity to develop competitive skills and strategize about your future legal career, creating the opportunity to focus on career development. Bloomberg Law provides a Lawyer Development page with resources to help you stand out in your summer position. The Lawyer Development Toolkit provides tips on networking best practices, managing and understanding clients, time management, project management, avoiding burnout, and more.
What areas of the law intrigue you? Whether you receive an assignment on an unfamiliar subject or are simply curious, it’s a good idea to explore varying practices and network with attorneys from different groups. Bloomberg Law provides curated Practice Centers, which help you quickly access primary and secondary sources as well as news and guidance on a practice area. These will help you understand specific, complex areas of the law, including Health, Labor & Employment, Privacy & Data Security, Securities, Tax, and more.
And to improve your resume, you can get a Bloomberg Law Certification, which includes coursework on legal research fundamentals.
How to Start Your Research
Where you <a href="https://www.bloomberglaw.com/product/blic/document/X3G7CJE4000000?utm_source=ANT&utm_medium=ANP" style="color:#0D9DDB;"> start your research</a> will depend on the task and how familiar you are with the subject matter.
How to Start Your Research
As a summer associate, you are likely researching an area of law that is new to you. First and foremost, ask good questions when you receive the assignment, including where your supervising attorney suggests starting.
Then take some time to check out the Bloomberg Law practice centers and read news, secondary sources, or other background resources to better understand the subject or client.
News
Try a news search to understand a subject and provide the context that gave rise to litigation or regulatory actions, or get to know a client and industry. Understanding the basic facts by reading a few articles may help orient you to your assignment subject.
You'll benefit from the collective knowledge of reporters who specialize in the topic as well as practicing attorneys who publish their own perspectives. It's also a habit you'll have to develop after law school: attorneys rely on news to alert them to important developments. We have more than 40 news channels on Bloomberg Law covering a wide range of practice areas and industries.
Secondary Sources
Secondary source materials are often a great place to get up to speed on the key background issues. They’ll explain the topic and regulatory environment, as well as significant case law, statutes, or areas of risk, depending on the subject. Bloomberg Law secondary sources are written by practitioners with deep knowledge of the subject. Bloomberg Law Portfolios offer best practices in plain language and include practice tools the author found useful in the real world.
Whether your assignment involves a discrete task like drafting a memo or reviewing an agreement, consult Bloomberg Law's expert-written Practical Guidance documents. They’ll provide sample forms, checklists, and overviews, arranged intuitively, on specific transactions, compliance issues, the litigation process, and other issues.
Know Your Client
Research and track the clients and cases you are assigned. Visit the client's company profile to get a sense of what they do, browse through their litigation history, review recent SEC filings, and set up a news alert to stay on top of developments involving the client and their industry.
Advanced Search
It's often helpful to cast a wide net when starting down a legal research path. Use broad search terms and connectors to get a handle on the possible universe of relevant resources. Then, refine those searches to get more specific.
Alternatively, you may find that you need to broaden your search to include persuasive authority outside your jurisdiction or need to incorporate secondary source material.
Embracing different research paths is part of the legal research journey as long as you stay focused on answering the question you were asked. To that end, an Advanced Search is useful for pinpointing the most relevant content collection(s) to search across.
Utilize Workflow Tools
You've learned in school to brief cases and the basics of legal research and writing. In practice, you need to be efficient as much as you need
to be accurate.
Utilize Workflow Tools
Gain experience with tools that speed up case law research, find example pleadings, spot litigation trends, and quickly analyze briefs can make your research more accurate and efficient. They can also provide a good way to double-check your research.
Knowing what technology is available to you and understanding how to optimize it can help set you apart from the pack. Below are a few typical summer associate tasks for which using a workflow tool on Bloomberg Law can help, all of which you'll find along with other useful guidance in our Core Litigation Skills Toolkit.
Knowing what technology is available to you and understanding how to optimize it can help set you apart from the pack.
Task #1
Say you need to find the elements of collateral estoppel in Maryland. You can start with a Points of Law search instead of a court opinion search, and quickly get to the right set of cases that discuss those elements.
You'll see how many cases cite that language and can view a Citation Map to understand the evolution of that argument – you'll see the strongest cases to cite for that point. You can also see Related Points of Law; other language that appears in cases together with the original point. This might indicate they are arguments worth exploring.
Task #2
If you need to draft a brief or motion before a particular judge, Dockets advanced search allows you to search by keyword, court, filing type, party names, judge, date, attorney or firm name, nature of suit, etc. By reviewing a filing that a judge has ruled on for a similar issue, you can save time on case law research and have a stronger argument in your own filing.
Task #3
You might be asked to read and summarize an opposition brief or want to quickly read a sample brief you found. Upload any brief to our Brief Analyzer tool and get an in-depth, argument-by-argument analysis alongside the full text.
The table of contents lets you navigate and focus on a portion of the brief.
The brief's citations are automatically turned into color-coded links. Court opinions appear in blue, statutes in pink, and rules/regulations in purple. Clicking on any link will take you directly to the cited document in a new browser tab. Points of Law identified in the brief are highlighted and linked as well.
The Suggested Content tab identifies opinions, briefs, Practical Guidance, books, and treatises that are relevant but were not cited.
As you work with technology, always be mindful of the risks and ethical considerations involved. These tools are meant to aid critical thinking, not replace it. That said, our attorneys and researchers rely on these workflow tools to enhance the quality and efficiency of their work.
Therefore, we do our best to integrate and link them in primary and secondary sources for you. And if litigation is not your assignment focus, here are other key tools to help with your workflow in commercial and transactional assignments:
Our attorneys and researchers rely on these workflow tools to enhance the quality and efficiency of their work.
Communicate Effectively
Effective communication is essential to a successful summer, and knowing your audience is critical. Ask about preferred communication methods and make sure you understand deliverables, expectations, and due dates.
Communicate Effectively
When you receive an assignment, don't be afraid to ask questions for clarification or ask how you should prioritize assignments if you're working on several. Once you've established your plan, Bloomberg Law can help translate your great research into great writing.
In email, texts, and other less formal methods of communication, be mindful of your tone, write concisely and clearly, and refrain from using texting abbreviations or slang.
For documents that you'll be filing with a court, in addition to Bluebooking citations, you'll want to consult your supervising attorney for any document examples they have, or find an example document on Bloomberg Law's Litigation Practical Guidance (sample forms) or in dockets. Be sure to check local court rules (see e.g., NY Court Rules) for drafting instructions via State Litigation resources.
For commercial and transactional documents, check drafting guides, sample clauses or agreements, and real-world examples extracted from SEC filings, which you can search and filter to make applicable to your transaction type or type of client.
Pay attention to Practice Tips in Practical Guidance, which provide procedural and substantive law explanations as well as insights into how to communicate well.
Whether it's litigation or transactional work, attach documents that you used to come to your decision in case your supervisor wants to review. Showcase the work you did (i.e., include controlling/persuasive cases you cited, or attach company profiles or deal documents you found through a due diligence search). You'll be able to save any documents you find during your research, add to a Workspace, or Download multiple documents into a zip file using your My Work History tab.
Don’t forget that tips on effective communication and succeeding in your internship will also appear in news articles, particularly those written by attorneys.
Career Pathing
Beyond building the skills and experience necessary to practice, your time as a summer associate should help you decide how and where you want to practice.
Career Pathing
Bloomberg Law has tools to help you on your career path – both during and after your summer associate position. Start with our Essential Career Toolkit, which provides tips for finding the right employer, preparing for the interview, and landing the offer.
Stay Ahead of Legal Industry Developments
As you start your job search, make sure you know what’s going on in the legal industry by following Bloomberg Law News.
Subscribe to our Business and Practice Newsletter to stay on top of legal industry trends, and select from a variety of other legal newsletters to get comprehensive, timely, and trustworthy coverage of key developments.
See our library of live and on-demand webinars to stay current on industry, legislative, and regulatory developments.
Get the Right Job
Understand whether a law firm is the right fit for you by using Litigation Analytics to find the type of litigation work handled by individual firms and which companies they represent.
Use Deal Analytics to identify law firms that represent public and private companies in M&A and IPO transactions.
Once you’ve identified the law firms that align with your practice area interests, check out Company Profiles for detailed background information on the law firms and the companies that they represent to impress your potential future employer. Prepare for the interview with tips from current practitioners on how to answer interview questions.
If you’re interested in a Judicial Clerkship after graduation, check out our Judicial Clerkship Resources. Search People Profiles to learn more about a specific judge, including their career history, news, and caseload. Use Judicial Analytics to get insights on any federal judge, including historical work and current cases, cited opinions, length of case, case outcomes, case type, and more.
Final Thoughts
We hope you’ll find this toolkit helpful as you kickoff your summer associateship. In addition to the firm resources atyour disposal, please remember we’re a partner for you this summer if you need help using Bloomberg Law. We hope you’ll take advantage of your access to Bloomberg Law, and if you have any questions, contact your account representative or our
24/7 Help Desk at
888.560.2529 | help@bloomberglaw.com.
Congrats and best of luck this summer!
