State Supreme Courts Can Resolve Early Legal Recruiting Mess

A first-year law student will sit in the library this November preparing for exams, after having ceded study time applying to law firms for a job two summers away. She will miss classes for interviews in January, then accept an offer that will shape the rest of her career. She will have barely completed a semester of law school and may not yet have a single grade. She has no law firm experience and no lawyers in her family to guide her. She doesn’t yet know what type of law she’d like to practice, having completed only four courses. Yet she has no real choice, because the offer won’t wait.

This is the new normal in law firm hiring. Despite chatter about artificial intelligence eliminating legal jobs, large firms have been recruiting first-year students on increasingly aggressive and compressed timelines, abandoning the longtime practice of hiring during students’ second year. Law firms now hire people for summer jobs 18 months in advance; in practice, they are hiring first-semester 1Ls for full-time jobs that won’t start for almost three years.

State supreme courts can help fix this situation. They should amend their rules of professional responsibility to reverse this trend and its harmful effects.

The consequences of early recruiting are real. It can push students to prioritize legal recruiting over foundational first-year classes during an already challenging time. A study released earlier this month by the Law School Admission Council and the National Association for Law Placement found that 72.6% of first-year students said this new timeline negatively affected their law school experience.

Early recruiting can also force students entering law school without established networks or legal experience to make high-stakes career decisions with limited information and under time pressure. The lack of grades or faculty reviews favors those who come to law school with existing connections and knowledge, potentially shutting out underprivileged, first-generation, and other students whose experience and backgrounds don’t include familiarity and exposure to the law firm markets. And the shortened timeline can discourage students from seriously considering public interest or government career opportunities.

The early recruiting process can also lead to law firms making hires with little information about students, increasing the risk of mismatched hiring decisions, greater rates of reneging, dissatisfaction, and earlier attrition. And it means that the point of law school—learning to think and act like a lawyer—gets lost in the shuffle.

The core problem is that this pace of hiring is unprofessional. The legal profession has long insisted that it isn’t just another market. Lawyers are officers of the court. Law schools aren’t mere credentialing factories. The legal profession depends on norms and values: how lawyers are trained, how they enter their roles, and how they make decisions. A hiring process that prioritizes speed over exploration undermines those principles.

Students, schools, and firms recognize how disruptive the early recruiting process is. In January, student associations and governments from 18 law schools shared their concerns in a joint letter to the American Bar Association. But collective action problems and concerns about antitrust liability have thus far precluded efforts to address early recruiting’s downsides.

It is possible—and imperative—to rein in law firms’ accelerated hiring process. State supreme courts can do this through a modest amendment to their rules of professional responsibility. State courts have the power to oversee the admission, discipline, and ethical obligations of lawyers practicing within their jurisdiction. Early recruiting practices implicate the conduct of attorneys involved in those practices, as well as the integrity of the legal profession. By leveraging their existing disciplinary systems to investigate and punish rule violations, state courts can ensure that attorneys and their firms abide by the rules.

We propose that state supreme courts amend their rules of professional conduct to impose a uniform “hold open” date for offers until Oct. 1 of students’ 2L year for 2L summer positions. These new rules could make it a violation for members of a state’s bar to participate in interviews or other recruiting activities if any offer resulting from that activity doesn’t comply with the “hold open” date, or if any reward or incentive is offered to a student to accept an offer before the date. These are minimally restrictive measures with outsized potential benefits, and they provide the simplest and most realistic reform strategy to prevent harmful early recruiting.

Such an approach is legal. Unlike firms or schools agreeing together, court action is immune from federal antitrust laws. As the US Supreme Court stated in Bates v. State Bar of Arizona, because a court is “the ultimate body wielding the State’s power over the practice of law” and its rules are “the affirmative command” of the court, any restraints in a court’s rules are “compelled by direction of the State acting as a sovereign.”

A uniform Oct. 1 “hold open” date would effectively neutralize the incentive for premature recruitment without banning it altogether. It would allow students and firms to find the right fit, benefiting both. It would allow students more time to learn about different firms and practice areas, gain foundational legal knowledge in the classroom and practical experience during a post-first-year summer experience, and meaningfully weigh competing offers.

Likewise, a “hold open” date could allow firms to better assess whether a student has the traits and demonstrated ability they seek. And it would prevent the current race to the bottom, where firms try to move even earlier than their competitors in hopes of getting the top students—but at the cost of no longer having any idea who the top students are.

To be sure, legal recruiting occurs on a national level while state professional responsibility rules bind only lawyers in that jurisdiction. But adoption of the proposed rule by even a few key jurisdictions where Big Law lawyers and the students they hire are concentrated (such as California, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York) would likely be enough to put much-needed brakes on accelerated recruiting.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law, Bloomberg Tax, and Bloomberg Government, or its owners.

Author Information

Jeanne C. Fromer is vice dean and professor of intellectual property law at NYU School of Law.

Mark A. Lemley is a professor of law at Stanford Law School.

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