A Red Letter Day?

I watch with dread as the countdown above ticks inexorably towards zero: pupillage offer day. Tomorrow is a momentous day for all of us. Pupillage offers will bring elation for some, rejection will crush many, and - outside our narrow professional world - local elections will be decided. Depending on where you stand, it will either be a red-letter day or one you would sooner forget.

Antictipation, Judgment and Rejection

Like many of you, this is not my first dalliance with the Pupillage Gateway, and I know the sting of rejection. In truth, it hurts. To come within touching distance of professional victory only to lose it in an instant can feel crushing. Afterwards comes the inevitable scroll through LinkedIn: photographs of smiling future pupils, chambers announcements, celebrations that - however deserved - can leave you questioning yourself.

Whatever breakfast our inbox serves tomorrow morning, offer day falls on a day we can all celebrate: Victory in Europe Day. Forgive the slightly contrived comparison, but many of us have been fighting our own private professional campaign over these past months: applications drafted late into the night, interviews replayed endlessly in our heads, entire futures condensed into a handful of conversations and online forms. Our reward tomorrow is an end to uncertainty. For some, that end will mark the beginning of a long-awaited career. For others, a ceasefire before the next campaign begins seven months from now.

If you receive good news, celebrate it fully. You have earned it.

If you do not, allow yourself the disappointment. There is nothing irrational or melodramatic about grieving over something you cared deeply about. But do not mistake rejection for final judgment. The Bar is full of practitioners who arrived by indirect routes, on second or third attempts, after years spent wondering whether they were good enough to belong here at all. And to reach the stage where you are expecting an offer tomorrow, someone, somewhere, must have looked at your application and believed you could do the job.

Final Thoughts: Interim Relief

Much is said about treating the application process as part of the job. Interviews should be approached like appellate advocacy; written applications, like skeleton arguments. So perhaps a better way of looking at rejection is not as defeat, but as an interim injunction. Litigation will continue. Failure is not ultimate. But for now - applying the test in American Cyanamid v Ethicon - the court has decided to preserve the status quo. In other words: we’ll get them next time.