Beach City

There are a lot of posts on this blog bemoaning the very slow start I had as a corporate associate of my firm's office in "Beach City".  It was a disappointment because I was truly interested in doing corporate work in the biotech and life sciences space, an area where our firm is strong in general, but where Beach City provided a small office opportunity to be involved in that practice.  And while the slow down in Beach City made perfect sense in light of the changes in the economy (at a macro and micro level), it was a significant shift that lots of big law management folks didn't seem to have anticipated.

To this day, I keep a close eye on the market in Beach City because it's a beautiful place to live with a really strong public high school located close to the office where I once worked.  I've harbored an interest in returning to Beach City (which would probably require a move to another firm), but have hesitated because, among other things, I've thought that Beach City, like Orange County, just isn't big enough to support the participation of a large number of big law players and the open junior corporate positions have been at firms that weren't strong competitors in the market.

Last week, some news broke that reinforced my assessment of the situation.  What really bummed me out is that the office in question had recruited pretty hard for a junior corporate associate as recently as nine months ago.  I (and every other junior corporate associate in the vicinity, I'm sure) received a lot of calls from recruiters for this position over the course of nearly a year.  For the sake of all involved, I hope they never hired for that position because it would be a nightmare to have just lateraled over before the office was shuttered.