Law interns find firm footing.

They've sipped and supped with partners at their homes. They've been feted at restaurants, wine tastings and museum tours. They've written their first briefs, chatted up well-heeled clients, and dug deeply into billion-dollar transactions.

Some even have traveled abroad and been paid well for doing it - as much as $2,800 a week, the going rate at the city's largest law firms.

But now the three-month mating dance between summer interns and dozens of Philadelphia law firms is coming to its poignant, if inescapable, conclusion. Soon, if they haven't already, the summer interns - or summers, as they call themselves - will say fond goodbyes, mentally file memories of a magical summer, and return to the grind of their third and final year of law school.

And the hope for both parties - young law students and law firms hungry for top talent in a booming legal economy - is that their summer fling will blossom into a long-term commitment.

"This has really been like an 11-week date," said Muhammad At-Tauhidi, a third-year Temple law school student working at Ballard, Spahr, Andrews & Ingersoll, a 456-lawyer firm based in Philadelphia.

For the law firms, there's a lot at stake in this professional dating game.

According to Altman Weil, the Newtown Square legal consulting firm, revenue at law firms nationwide is on an upward arc, with revenue per partner up 5.3 percent last year. At the largest firms, the numbers are even better, it said.

But to keep that trend in motion, law firms need a steady supply of new hires to staff the ever-burgeoning amount of work. Although young lawyers are paid well - annual salaries for first-year lawyers at Philadelphia's largest firms rose this year to $145,000 - firms make much of their money on associates, who put in long hours but aren't paid as much as partners earning hundreds of thousands of dollars more.

That makes competition for young lawyers very sharp, with intense pressure on firms to keep salaries for top summer associates high, and to continue to court them after they return to law school.

"We want to get the best law students in the country to work for us, and we have to be competitive," said Paul Lantieri, one of two lawyers at Ballard who coordinate the summer-associate program there. He said Ballard paid summer associates $2,788 a week because "that is the going rate."