New Ears, New Town, New Job

Joe here. So I got a new job, and I like it.

            …okay, Emily says that’s not good enough. I guess I’ll go into a little more detail.

            I interviewed with Beard St. Clair Gaffney in Idaho Falls twice, beginning after my first summer internship in Boise, before the timing was finally right. After my cochlear implant surgery, and after I’d taken some time to adjust to the new hardware in my head, I needed to rejoin the realm of the gainfully employed. I looked in on Beard St. Clair early on in the process, but I saw from their website that they’d just hired a new associate, so I was sure that door was closed. I contacted them anyway. Turned out the new associate they hired came with a lateral hire, and they were still in the market for a new law school graduate, slightly used.

            The interview was neat. I’d already done the whole full-panel interview previously, so they decided to put Emily and me up in a nice hotel and take us to dinner with two of the partners and their spouses. We talked about the job, the community, and the attorneys’ families. We got to see how they interacted with each other, got a sense of their lifestyle, and got to interact in a comparably low-pressure atmosphere. They even took us over to the firm’s building and showed me which office would be mine.

            When they said I could wait until a few weeks after the baby was born to start work, and they’d help pay for our move, we were basically sold. Then they sweetened the deal when I started by getting me a company phone and letting me pick out my own office chair.  

            Flash forward to over eight months later, and I’m still really enjoying the job. I work primarily for one of the transactional attorneys, Greg Calder. I also get to assist many of the other attorneys on one project or another, from tax issues to commercial litigation. It’s a good group of people, spread across a couple of offices. We do social activities together fairly regularly. We’ve gone bowling, held a discgolf tournament, done service projects, and even embarked on a grueling all-day hike up what felt like an 89-degree incline.

            We wouldn’t trade away our experiences that brought us here, but we really feel like this is the home and the job we were heading toward.