Season 5: Episode 3: Kabir Hashmi
Litigation Associate at Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP in New York City
Kabir Hashmi
Litigation Associate at Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP in New York City
How to earn the top recommendation from your professor and become a litigator as a LLM?
When Kabir was searching for jobs during his LL.M. year, he knew that he wanted to be a litigator. Born and raised in Pakistan, trained in the UK, interned at the United Nations and New York State Attorney General's Office, he received top recommendations from his professors, which turns out to be critical in getting his foot in the door when applying for litigator positions.
How did he land his first job in the U.S.?
What’s his advice for securing professor’s endorsement for job opportunities?
What qualities are law firms looking for when hiring internationally trained lawyers?
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Where did you grow up? Why did you choose to study law?
I grew up in Pakistan, mostly, with some time spent in the UK. I moved around a bit within Pakistan, but I always knew I wanted to be a lawyer. It started in ninth grade when I first thought, okay, this is something I could do. It came from my desire to speak publicly. I thought I was a decent public speaker at the time, and I wanted to turn that into a career. The legal field turned out to be very different from what a ninth grader imagines, but I've enjoyed it nonetheless.
You have interned at the Office of the New York State Attorney General and the UN. Could you talk about how you leveraged the internship to secure your current position?
The UN internship was in 2015. That experience is partly why New York City became such an attractive option for me. I came to the U.S., worked at the UN's New York headquarters, and part of me always thought I’d like to return to New York.
The externship at the New York State Attorney General's Office was offered through Columbia, so I applied. It was a two-part application process. I filled out an initial application and then interviewed with the head of the Labor Department and two other attorneys. Once I cleared those interviews, I got the chance to be part of that externship. What it did was give me frontline experience and a real understanding of how American litigation works—what attorneys actually do. Of course, it was still different from what corporate attorneys do, but it gave me the foundational knowledge I needed.
I was able to leverage what I learned during that experience, like document review, understanding interrogatories, and preparing document requests. I got a firsthand look at those processes, which I then talked about during my subsequent job interviews.
Could you talk about your professional experience as a multilingual and internationally trained lawyer?
I started off in the UK, where I went to law school and qualified as a barrister right after. I began working in the legal profession early on. While training to become a barrister, I heard about a clerkship opportunity at the Pakistan Supreme Court and applied on a whim to see what would happen. To my surprise, I got an interview call. A few weeks later, I found out I was one of the selectees. That was a clear choice for me; I knew I wanted to do this. So, I moved back to Pakistan and spent two years working for a tremendous justice who I still consider my mentor. He really laid the foundations for the kind of lawyer I became—instilling the importance of hard work, good writing, critical thinking, having a judge's mindset when needed, and, most importantly, being detail-oriented.
English is the working language, which makes things much easier. Pakistan has adopted its legal system from Britain, so a lot of the concepts are similar. However, that doesn’t take away from the fact that once you step in, you need to learn the procedures and how the legal system works.
After working with him, I joined a law firm where I did trial work in Islamabad, and soon after, I lateraled to a much bigger firm, which you could consider like "BigLaw” in Pakistan. I worked on a lot of fascinating commercial and constitutional matters. All of these experiences over the past five to five-and-a-half years added up. When I started thinking about applying to law schools, they all played a crucial role in what I could represent and the story I was able to tell when I stepped into rooms with American attorneys.
And What languages do you speak? And could you tell us more about your current work as a litigator?
I'm fluent in Pakistan's national language, Urdu, and I can converse in Hindi due to the regional similarities between the two languages. I also have a basic understanding of Arabic, mostly from being taught the Quran while growing up. In terms of my current work, which unfortunately doesn’t involve much language use, I focus primarily on commercial litigation. I represent corporations in the U.S. in disputes with other corporations or individuals, dealing with issues like breach of contract, fraud, and torts. My work spans from arbitrations to trials and internal investigations. It’s a very domestically focused litigation practice in the U.S.
Does your international experience such as in Pakistan and in the UK can be transferred to the US market seamlessly. But if not, what adjustment do you have to make to work effectively as a litigator in a U.S. law firm?
I can answer that in two parts, and the answer could be both yes and no. When I moved from the UK to Pakistan, I found the transition slightly easier. A lot of litigation in the UK and Pakistan is done in a similar manner, often very quickly in court. However, what I found in the U.S. was that while the court is a significant part of litigation, much of it occurs outside of court, right before you get there. That was a big difference I noticed, but it was an adjustment I learned to make quickly.
The biggest difference, of course, is the amount of discovery allowed in the U.S. You have millions of documents in a particular case that you need to review and sort through to find the ones that are truly important. That was a real challenge—figuring out how to dive into the facts of a case. After two years in the U.S. system, I believe it’s better because you really get to understand what actually happened in a case, rather than relying on the law as a crutch to justify your arguments.
How much do you rely on AI to review the documents during discovery?
I think AI is definitely coming into our practice, slowly but surely. We don’t currently use an AI tool that completely sorts out documents for us. Right now, it’s in the initial stages. We feed the AI tool documents, and sometimes it gives us relevant ones, but sometimes it doesn’t. One of the vendors we work with uses an AI tool that we also utilize. The idea is to continue feeding that tool more documents manually at first, and then it starts giving you similar documents. I found it’s not as effective as it could be, but since it's still in the early stages, I’m sure it will become much more effective over time. For now, we’re still dividing everything into batches and clicking away at the documents to try to identify the really important ones.
How did you find your current job?
It’s really tough for foreign lawyers to find jobs in the U.S. but it’s not impossible. I arrived at a time when landing a litigation job felt like a pipe dream, and that’s what I was continually told during my time at Columbia—don’t pursue litigation. But I had a systematic approach to how I was going about it. I was comfortable going back to the UK or Pakistan if necessary, but I wanted to do litigation.
I started reaching out to people, connecting with them, and building my network. At the same time, I had a clear vision of where I wanted to go. Patterson, where I currently work, was my number one choice even before I arrived in the U.S. When you look for those opportunities, it narrows down to a few firms in New York City. Initially, things weren’t working out at Patterson. I had to really prove myself through networking, maintaining good grades, staying in touch with attorneys, and seeking help from professors.
Over the course of nine months, all of this helped me gradually see things develop. When I met people and talked about my desire to pursue litigation, they started considering me more seriously. I can't emphasize enough how three professors were extremely helpful to me, and I owe a lot of my success in the U.S. to them. Fred Magaziner, a former partner who still teaches at Columbia Law School, was tremendously supportive. Caline Mouawad, who doesn’t teach anymore but was a partner at Chaffetz Lindsey LLP, helped me immensely. She even got on the phone with me to discuss my interests. And then there was Tiffany Moller, who recommended me to Patterson. All these professors played a big part in my story.
What qualities do you think firms are looking for when hiring internationally trained lawyers?
Now that I’m on this side of the recruitment process, I’ve started to realize that, a lot of times, what firms are looking for in candidates is whether they’ve shown resilience and dedication in their legal field. That can be demonstrated by the type of work you’ve done, the grades you’ve gotten—basically, do they see you as a serious candidate who will fit in and have the foundational skills so they won’t need to train you too much to get started. That’s one thing.
The other thing is whether you’re the right fit. A lot of times, LLMs are hired outside the normal US recruitment cycle because there’s a gap in personnel, so firms start looking for candidates when a need arises. They'll get tons of applications from people who went to top schools with top grades. Then it comes down to whether you’re a good fit, and that can only happen if you’ve built relationships—meaningful ones, not just reaching out and asking for a job, but actually getting to know people and allowing them to know you. Once that happens, it can translate into something more substantive.
What did you do to get the kind of endorsement from your professors and get your foot in the door at the firms?
What I did was try to be good in the classes. I tried to actually take the subject matter seriously. What I often found during my LLM was no matter what class that people got into, oftentimes, they would treat it like another class that they had to take, which I thought was not the mindset that professors are looking for. I had taken courses that had interested me, and that meant when I was in those courses, I was doing the readings and I was really involved with the subject matter and in the classrooms I was a present student. That I think is the bare minimum that somebody can do. When it comes to getting the endorsement of the professors, I think that takes time to build relationships, and it won't happen if you're doing it not genuinely. Like, for example, every person that I mentioned, I'm friends with them to this day. I see them once or twice every year. When I met these people I could still have that admiration for the work that they've done and I wanted to learn from them and I did well in their classes and it was an actual relationship that had begun forming there.
So, I’d say don’t just treat your professors as a means to an endorsement—actually try to build real connections. They have a lot more to teach you than you might realize, beyond just the subject matter.
