Hi
@Andrei Radu @Ram Sabaratnam @Amma Usman!
I was hoping to understand what might be the most optimal discussion point for why you choose this firm's levfin practice area. This is for the
Latham app, which I am unsure of what I should talk about.
Trawling through the forums, I know to talk about (a) client focus, (b) industry focus, or (c) market focus, but
Latham's levfin team is quite similar to other firms in all three of these markets. For example, they are similar to K&E, P,W, and Weil for their large-cap deals, but similar to DLA, HL, Macs for their mid-market work as well. They are similar in their market focus to Weil and CC as they target IBs, private credit, and PE sponsors, so that also makes them similar, and finally, all of these firms' London office works on multi-jurisdictional deals specifically in the EMEA region.
So it seems to be difficult to answer "why train at
Latham over its competitors?" if the firm is similar to others. I understand it is asking specifically why I would train at the firm, but it seems very difficult to clearly explain why
Latham does different work to its competitors when the levfin market seems to be highly commoditised.
Appreciate the help!
Hey
@svb risk management intern and thanks for the great question. Just to add to
@Amma Usman's excellent response, I think finding the 'unique' part of
Latham's leveraged finance practice that you can tie your motivation to is easier than you would think. Basically, I think you have already done the job yourself, but you just need to shift your perspective as to what makes a great 'Why the firm' answer.
As Amma pointed out, it is very rare to find out anything unique about a firm's practice at a broad level, so you need to find a more specific and niche subpart to tie your reasoning too. However, even that can be quite difficult to find. Intuitively, you have already attempted to do so, by going beyond ascertaining "practice area strength" and looking into three more specific parts of the practice: (a) client focus, (b) industry focus, and (c) market focus. You have done well to have identified where
Latham sits in the market in each, but you have found that none makes the firm truly unique, as there are rivals for each market segment even in these more niche categories. Nonetheless,
the information you have gathered, taken as a whole, does make Latham unique. While if you were to take any of (a) or (b) or (c) separately it would have not sufficed, if you explain that
what motivates you to train at Latham is that the lev fin team has (a) and (b) and (c), then it will - for none of the identified firms is great for both large-cap and mid-market deals and also has the same market focus as
Latham. Sure, you will need to use some extra word count to explain why you want all these three aspects in your ideal leveraged finance team (besides also explaining your general interest in the practice) but that should not be that difficult to achieve - you probably already have some motivation you can tie to each individual point.
Finally, I wanted to mention that this applies at a broader level for writing a great 'Why the firm' answer. For instance, say you did not want to spend so much word count on just a leveraged finance motivation. Say you went ahead with a simple '
Latham has exceptional expertise in high-end lev fin work' reason for why the firm. That would indeed not suffice for specificity, as this point would equally apply to firms like Kirkland, Paul, Weiss and Milbank. However, that does not mean this added no value. This reason excludes the vast majority of other firms. Now, if you can
supplement this first motivation with another one or two that excludes the few firms reason 1 equally applies to,
taken as a whole your 'Why the firm' reasoning will apply to no other as well as to
Latham. Examples of unique selling points of
Latham that differentiate it from rivals with very strong PE/lev fin practices include: strong contentious teams and a more full service London offering, an increasingly strong corporate M&A team, exceptional capital markets expertise, and arguably a more collaborative firm-wide culture.
The point to remember is that you should try to make use of reasons conjunctively rather than disjunctively. Think of 'why firm' reasons as 'firm selection criteria': your only job is to make sure no other firm scores as well in all of those criteria, not that no other firm scores as well in any specific criterion. 
