Big Law’s Accelerated Recruiting Is a Lose-Lose-Lose Situation

In September 1997, a few weeks into my second year of law school, I began the on-campus interview, or OCI, process. My classmates and I obtained positions as summer associates in Big Law through this process, often returning to the firms after law school as full-time associates.

The OCI process that I experienced in the late 1990s had existed in that form for decades. And then came Covid-19—which completely upended the traditional process of in-person, on-campus screening interviews. During the pandemic, interviews went virtual, and students and firms started to engage with each other directly instead of having their contact mediated by schools.

In each successive year since the pandemic, recruiting has grown more decentralized and started taking place earlier. Today, most summer offers are obtained through direct application by students, not a school-organized process.

As for timing, the recruiting process for 2027 summer programs is already underway. Yes, you read that right: Some firms are interviewing first-year, first-semester law students, who haven’t yet taken their first final exams, for jobs set to start after the end of their 2L year.

The recruiting process has changed in other ways as well. Some firms are extending offers of employment for both the 1L and 2L summers—so-called jumbo offers. Other firms, including Davis Polk and Milbank, are hiring 2L summers—but will pay them $25,000 to do public-interest work in their 1L summer.

For Law Students, Academic Disruption and ‘Off the Charts’ Anxiety

“The timing of the whole process is unfortunate,” a 1L at Yale told me. “It has required us to devote time to researching firms, completing applications, and attending networking events, during an already busy semester where we’re supposed to be focusing on classes and learning the fundamentals of legal thinking.”

“The academic disruption this is causing is not sustainable,” said Lois Casaleggi, associate dean for career services at the University of Chicago Law School. “We should be letting first-year law students get their feet under them—by learning how to read cases, take cold calls, and study for exams. We need law students to become law students first.”

Casaleggi said, “The student anxiety is off the charts, which is entirely understandable.”

Accelerated recruiting could cause students to make poor career choices.

“Probably the most unfortunate part of this process is that we have to make decisions that shape our early careers based on little information about ourselves and our interests,” said the 1L at Yale. “By the time we accept an offer at a firm, none of us will have done a clinic, a legal internship, or even a semester of classes that we chose to take.”

“As recruiting has moved earlier, we’ve also seen an increase in firms expecting students to know what practice areas they want to work in,” said Casaleggi. “But most first-semester 1Ls don’t have fully formed ideas about what they might want to do in the law.”

Making students pick firms and practices this early is causing more students to select firms that might be great firms, but aren’t the right firms for them. And it’s causing firms to hire candidates who might be great candidates, but aren’t the right candidates for them.

“What we’re increasingly seeing is many more mismatches, on both sides of the aisle,” Casaleggi said.

Law Firms ‘Need to Be in the Game’—But Aren’t Happy About It

So law students and law schools are generally upset over the incredibly early recruiting process. What about the law firms?

In the last recruiting cycle, Cleary Gottlieb opened its portal to applications in May. This year, like many other firms, it opened its portal much earlier—in November.

“We made this move in response to the market,” explained Maureen Linch, a tax partner at Cleary Gottlieb and member of its global talent management committee. “If other firms are hiring at this time, we need to be in the game.”

But this isn’t the process that she would have designed or selected herself—and Linch candidly identified the drawbacks of interviewing so early.

“We have limited information about the candidates,” she said. “They don’t have work experience in the law, for the most part. They don’t have grades—which aren’t the only thing that matters, but they are a metric. They don’t have as clear a sense of what they want to do, compared to students farther along in law school, so it’s harder to find things to talk about during interviews.”

And recruiting this early isn’t just bad for a firm’s culture. It has also implications for something that partners have to care about: profitability.

“Because of the mismatch factor, firms are going to see much more associate attrition going forward, and this will hit their bottom line,” said Casaleggi. “Associates often don’t become truly profitable for firms until their third or fourth year, but a growing number of associates aren’t making it to their third or fourth year.”

Inadequate information about candidates and an increased risk of mismatch is what led Munger Tolles & Olson to revamp its summer program. In a nutshell, the new program reduces the rigidity of the “summer associate to full-time associate” path, replacing it with a more long-term view. I recently praised this as “an effort to stop the insanity and make the recruiting process more flexible and less pressured.”

“As a small firm, we’re very focused on the quality of our lawyers, making sure that everyone we bring in the door is someone that we’re comfortable having on a lean team and introducing to a client,” said Bryan Heckenlively, chair of the recruiting committee at Munger Tolles & Olson. “So it wasn’t going to be workable for us to hire people in January of their 1L year, with the expectation that they’ll become our full-time lawyers.”

What Is to Be Done?

“One natural approach would be for the law schools to get together and agree not to permit law firms to recruit on campus before the second year or some such thing,” said Chicago Law professor Eric Posner, an antitrust expert. “But such an agreement might violate the antitrust laws.”

In December 2018, the National Association of Law Placement revised its highly influential, widely followed timing guidelines, which covered everything from how early firms could contact students to how long offers of summer employment should remain open. As explained by Nikia Gray, NALP’s executive director, in a fascinating history of the evolution of recruiting, the update removed all specific timelines. Why? Antitrust concerns.

In a thought-provoking paper about the so-called unraveling of labor markets, including the markets for medical residents and judicial law clerks, Posner chronicled some interesting history. In 2002, three former residents filed a class action challenging the National Resident Matching Program, or NRMP, the elaborate system used for matching medical students with hospital residency programs. But after a fierce lobbying effort by medical schools and hospitals, Congress passed a law effectively granting the NRMP an antitrust exemption.

Might Congress enact a similar exemption for Big Law recruiting? Gray of NALP expressed doubt: “Congress’ view on antitrust has shifted since the medical-match program got that exception in the early 2000s. Aggressive antitrust enforcement is one of the few areas of bipartisan agreement.”

If coordination is unlawful, and the law won’t be changed, does any individual actor have the power to make a difference? The schools argue that the firms need to step up to the plate.

“If we tried to push back as an individual school, we’d put our students at a disadvantage,” said Georgetown Law professor Tanina Rostain, who studies the legal profession. “But if a leading firm like Cravath or Kirkland was willing to wait, that might inspire other firms to follow, and something might change.”

“Firms would have antitrust issues if they had a lateral agreement” about their recruiting conduct, said Professor David Wilkins of Harvard Law School, where he serves as director of the Center on the Legal Profession. “But firms have ways of telegraphing things to each other: look at how they set compensation through ‘conscious parallelism.’”

The firms, however, maintain that the schools are best situated to take a stand.

“The top law schools have far more market power than the firms,” said an office managing partner at a major firm. “All the firms are vying for their students. I’ve been surprised at the relative silence of law school deans on this subject. If Yale Law came out against early recruiting of its students, would any firm just skip out on hiring anyone from Yale? Of course not.”

Finally, here’s an intriguing development. Law students from 18 top law schools have drafted an open letter to the American Bar Association. Law student associations at nine law schools (as of this writing) have voted in favor of signing the letter, with the remaining nine still considering it.

The letter makes the case that accelerated recruiting timelines are “undermin[ing] legal education, student and staff well-being, and the recruitment market.” It then suggests possible courses of action the ABA might take—including “evaluating whether accreditation standards might better support the educational focus of the first year of law school.”

Could the ABA use its power as the only nationally recognized accreditor of US law schools to issue accreditation standards that might improve the current Big Law recruiting process? It’s an interesting idea, even if its timing isn’t great: The ABA’s accrediting role is facing scrutiny right now, from the Florida Attorney General, the Texas Supreme Court, and most recently, the Federal Trade Commission.

The orderly and organized OCI process that I went through in 1997 can’t be brought back—but hopefully the Big Law recruiting process will get better, not worse, going forward.

“We might not be able to go back to the past,” said Casaleggi of Chicago. “But we have to get somewhere different than where we are now—for the students’ sake.”

David Lat, a lawyer turned writer, publishes Original Jurisdiction. He founded Above the Law and Underneath Their Robes, and is author of the novel “Supreme Ambitions.”

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