Big Law Recruiting Rush Puts More Pressure on Diverse Students

Big Law’s race to snatch up summer associates poses hurdles for diverse students.

Leading firms are now urging students to apply for coveted summer jobs before they finish their first year in law school, often as they’re juggling classes and preparing for finals. Several give candidates as little as two weeks to decide on offers that can chart the course of their careers.

The accelerated recruiting process gives students less time to adjust to the rigors of law school, let alone consider what they want to do after graduation. It forces firms to vet candidates based on just one semester of law school performance.

That’s particularly bad news for students who are the first in their families to attend law school, and who may be less prepared for what to expect in law school early on.

“The recruiting process is becoming less formalized and we see the disparate impact on those first-gen students,” said Nikia Gray, executive director at the National Association for Law Placement, a group of legal career professionals. “A lot of times, they’re kind of left in the dark about how law firms recruit and how they find their candidates.”

More than half (53%) of all Hispanic law students are the first in their families to attend law school, according to a survey by Indiana University. The share of first-generation students is also higher among Black (36%) and Asian (28%) students than their White counterparts (21%).

The new challenges for diverse students is one byproduct of Big Law’s accelerated competition to identify and lock down the best and brightest young lawyers as early as possible. It could end up backfiring and diminishing what gains they have made in diversifying junior talent, especially if firms don’t expand the pool of candidates.

“The playing field is not level,” said Dru Levasseur, director of DEI at the National LGBTQ+ Bar Association. “If we continue to just do what we have done in the past, we’re just going to get who was already in Big Law and we’re going to miss out on talent.”

High Stakes

Summer associate roles are the most common path to Big Law careers for attorneys in training. Firms until recently filled the jobs through on-campus interviews, a formalized process set by individual schools with some suggested guardrails from NALP, that can come with coaching assistance.

Now, OCI has turned into a secondary hiring hub as top firms fight to round up the best students earlier than ever through direct online applications for these high-demand positions. Students who don’t apply early online risk losing traction to those that do.

“Getting a top job at a top firm in OCI is the conveyor belt for the rest of your career,” said Kate Reder Sheikh, an associate recruiting partner at Major, Lindsey & Africa.

Elite firms pay summer associates more than $30,000 for the temporary jobs. They also stock incoming first-year classes—where salaries start at $225,000, before bonuses—with new graduates who previously worked as summer associates.

“There’s a structural disadvantage here in terms of the knowledge gap between people who know how to navigate the system and the people who don’t,” said a rising third-year student at the University of Chicago Law School. The first-generation law student said he applied to scores of law firms during his first year.

The disadvantage isn’t binary as in being aware or unaware of the new, pre-OCI process, he said. It’s more about knowing how to best approach firms and interact with their recruiters.

“Knowing how to phrase your emails so that you’re not coming off as very aggressive or not coming off as demanding, but rather you’re being inquisitive, and you want to learn more about situations,” is key, he said.

The student leaned heavily on classmates and his school’s career services office, he said. He also carefully studied his correspondence with firms.

“If I didn’t have the resources that I had,” the student said, “that would have completely put me off in the recruiting process.”

A first-generation University of Texas law student said he had one week to decide on a summer associate job with a Big Law firm, which he ultimately accepted. The student, who just completed his second year, turned to Reddit and law firm ranking service Vault as primary sources of information on potential employers.

“Students are trying to figure out what firms are better than others,” he said. “And the best quantifiable source that they have for that is the Vault rankings. So pretty much people were making decisions by ‘oh, Firm X is ranked Number Six and Firm Y is ranked Number Seven, so I’m going to number Number Six’.”

Early Pipeline Gains

Major law firms have largely failed to make good on promises to bolster diversity in their ranks after the police killing of George Floyd in May 2020 and the surge in social justice efforts that followed.

Still, firms have made some gains at the front of the pipeline.

The share of students of color in summer associate classes is up 12 percent since 2014, despite a slight dip last year, according to NALP. The increase was driven largely by a nearly 10-percent jump among women of color. Even though firms are now seeing some of the most diverse junior workforce, the progress isn’t translating to partner levels. Women and people of color are still significantly underrepresented in partnership ranks.

One popular tool for Big Law recruiters—diversity fellowships—has been watered down following the US Supreme Court’s ruling striking down affirmative action on college campuses last year. Multiple firms have changed the criteria for those programs in response to legal attacks from a conservative group, arguing that they discriminate against White men.

Students should lean on informal networks like affinity groups at their law schools to remain competitive, said Bryson Malcolm, a New York legal recruiter for Mosaic Search Partners. These “student organizations act as a proxy” for insider expertise legacy law students have coming into school.

“They’ve always been an important part of sharing information and passing down institutional knowledge,” said Malcolm, a 2020 first-gen Columbia Law grad.

‘Talent Is Everything’

Firms are starting earlier than ever “trying to attract talent because in our industry, talent is where it’s at,” said Scott Ellis, who was hiring partner for Foley & Lardner’s Houston office for the past decade. “Talent is everything.” While the firm has criteria it uses to weigh summer candidates, Ellis says the firm chooses to “look at the whole applicant as opposed to one data point.”

The race starts as early as April for first-year law students seeking summer associate jobs that start after their second year of school.

Several law schools have followed suit, moving up formal on-campus interviewing programs that had long served as the primary recruiting method for firms. Howard Law School bumped up its first OCI session to July, while Yale and Stanford moved theirs to June.

Advocates have for decades argued that law firms can improve diversity by loosening rigid recruiting standards that have little or no bearing on students’ likely success as lawyers. NALP’s Gray says firms often conflate a student’s school choice to their skill sets.

“Diverse students don’t always understand that it’s going to be 10 times harder as a diverse student to get into those Big Law jobs, especially when you are at a lower ranked school,” said Jennifer Dickey, an associate at data security law firm Mullen Coughlin and a 2023 Chicago-Kent College of Law grad.

Going directly to candidates, rather than waiting for OCI, gives firms an opportunity to cast a wider net.

“You want to make sure that the pool of candidates that you’re considering is as diverse as possible and that just isn’t possible if all of the law firms are going to the same handful of schools—which is what we’ve been seeing,” NALP’s Gray said.

It shouldn’t be too difficult for large law firms to widen their approach, said Lauren Jackson, an associate dean in Howard University’s law student career services office.

“There are six HBCU law schools existing,” Jackson said. “There’s got to be somebody in one of your regional offices that can find a student pipeline to build.”

Law firms saw their associate rosters become more diverse in 2020-2021, when spiking demand sparked a recruiting war that had many looking beyond traditional talent pools. That includes candidates from outside of the country’s top 14 law schools.

“There is a lot of value checking the top 10% of a school they haven’t been to before,” MLA’s Sheikh said.