Big Law Recruiting Push Negatively Affects Students, Survey Says

Big Law’s aggressive recruiting of first-year law students is distracting them from their studies and hurting their mental health, the head of a legal professional group said, citing survey results.

More than half of law students of the over 3,000 surveyed said the early recruiting negatively affected their first-year experience, the National Association for Law Placement found. Among those that wanted to land a Big Law job, 67.3% reported a negative impact, the group said.

“The report confirms a lot of what our colleagues over at the schools have been saying for some years now,” said Nikia Gray, NALP executive director. “This early recruiting process is not helpful for students.”

The survey is the first to document the effect on students of law firms’ trend since 2024 of moving up the calendar for recruiting coveted summer associate positions. The firms abandoned the traditional process of on-campus interviews in favor of direct applications in an effort to gain an edge on rivals in competing for top talent.

“If you have the name recognition of a Millbank, Kirkland, Davis Polk or Skadden, you can just go out and make the numbers and make the offers and scoop up the students from these elite schools,” said Adam Oliver, founder of Firm Prospects, which advises firms on the legal talent market. “The prestige factor is there and it’s tough to turn that down.”

Still, some firms, including Cooley, Susman Godfrey and Munger Tolles & Olson, have backed away from the aggressive hiring approach, noting that it wasn’t ideal for their future hires. “We decided that the changes weren’t working for Susman Godfrey,” Hunter Vance, co-chair of the firm’s employment committee, said in March.

The aggressive recruiting is hurting Big Law’s ability to recruit first-generation lawyers, NALP found. Such students reported that they were unaware of the recruitment timelines.

“They are learning about this process much later,” Gray said of the first-generation students. “They’re not as ready to engage with the process when it begins because of that, all of which is a real equity issue,” Gray said.

Pressure Cooker

It isn’t just law students chasing a summer job with a Big Law that are feeling the angst from aggressive recruiting, NALP found. Over 41% of students not considering a Big Law job said pushy recruiting was negatively affecting their experience as well, the group said.

“It does a massive disservice to everyone involved to pressure students,” one of the survey respondents told NALP. The students have too little experience and knowledge about the field “to spend time, money and energy thinking about what Big Law firm they want to work at during their first semester of school,” this person said.

Still, elite law firms are seeing the benefit of accelerated recruiting. Among the 50 largest firms based on revenue, there was an uptick in hiring from top law schools, Oliver said. In 2024, with the nation’s top 25 law firms adding 2,739 entry level hires, according to data provided by Firm Prospects.

“The Milbanks of the world are trying to take advantage of all this cash they have, whether it’s going after the elite students or the elite mid-levels,” he said.

Despite the fact that direct applications mean that any law student from any school can apply to a law firm job, a Firm Prospects study in May found that graduates from lower-tier law schools saw a significant drop in hiring by Big Law firms.

“It’s actually resulting in a narrowing of opportunities where these bigger firms are more heavily relying on law school pedigree in their hiring process,” Gray said. “For those firms it’s going to become a very homogeneous pipeline.”