Most people have all manner of insecurities. The socially inept nerd may know how people see them. The attorney with great looks and social skills may be lacking in intellect or credentials. The well-known and successful attorney may have some scandals in their background. The short attorney may be self-conscious about their height, the skinny attorney about their weight. You get the idea. Everyone has insecurities. We all want to be accepted, loved, and cared about; however, at the same time, the world is a tough place, and very few of us get this. Accordingly, we desperately look for people who we believe will support us, see the good in us, and make us feel like the people we perceive ourselves to be. We want people to see the best sides of ourselves.
You will succeed in interviews, get jobs, and do well in life when you come across as someone who will support your interviewers and not someone who is looking for support. People want to hire those they believe will support and protect them. Employers do not want to hire anyone they think will not help and defend them. Law firms want to hire candidates with whom they feel comfortable. They do not want to hire anyone who makes them feel uncomfortable. Your success and ability to do well in the practice of law and get positions will be due to how much it seems like you can support your interviewer.
The great hope of everyone interviewing you is that you will be their champion and help them look good. Partners want to hire partners who will work with them and collaborate with them as well. People want to have others on their side—getting tasks done for them, protecting their interests, and having their backs all the time. These sorts of people are challenging to find. More often, people are not loyal, are more out for themselves, and are against us. We never know who we can trust. Most employers that are interviewing you (and the people inside of them) desperately want to find people they can trust and who will have their backs. Unfortunately, these people are often next to impossible to find.
When I started my first legal job, I was less than a few months into it and asked to do an assignment for a notoriously difficult partner. A midlevel associate helped me with it. When I told her I did not understand the task, she launched into a mini diatribe about how difficult it was to work with the partner. She told me I needed to cover my back and write down and document everything because the partner I was working for could not be trusted.
At some point, she reached into her laptop bag and opened a document on her laptop. It listed all of the slights, imagined slights, and more she had received during her time at the firm. She had documented and written down everything wrong that had ever been said to her—every rumor, innuendo, and other things that happened to her in the firm. She was a Harvard Law school graduate, but at the same time, not considered to be good at her job. A few months after this, she left the firm after making a catastrophic error on an assignment.