Law Schools Adapt to Earlier Recruiting by Big Firms

Well, thank you so much for joining me.

I appreciate you being here.

Yeah, I'm happy to be here.

I'm happy to talk about the accelerated timeline that we're seeing for law firm recruiting.

Yeah.

I should clarify that what we're really talking about here is law firm recruiting.

We're not talking about other sectors of the legal employment landscape yet, although that remains to be seen.

And we're primarily talking about what is considered big law.

So we're not seeing this necessarily among all of our regional employers.

We're seeing it among larger law firms.

And so what we're seeing now is really basically that the timelines have been accelerated very advanced, right, for this recruiting.

And so our 1L students are coming into law school already thinking about what I'm going to do for my 1L summer.

And the recruiting window opens very early for them for 1L summer associate positions and 2L summer associate positions in some cases.

This is a big change.

So when I got here, I started here in 2018.

And until December of 2018, the National Association of Law Placement, now, which is the professional organization that governs law school recruiting, or at least governed until that point, law school recruiting, had guidelines in place that set forth timelines for when law firms could, or legal employers, I should say, could be recruiting students, when students could begin engaging with their school's career services offices.

There were some significant antitrust concerns that came from that.

And so around that time, the now kind of abandoned those rules and went to more of a reasonableness standard.

So students should be encouraged to focus on their schooling.

Law firms should be encouraged not to recruit people so early.

And that kind of held for maybe a couple of years.

Then what ended up really happening was around the time of COVID, law firms used to do almost all of their recruiting on campus.

And so that on-campus recruiting used to happen back in like maybe the, back in like the 70s and 80s, 90s, it would have happened like in September, October.

So you'd be in your second year of law school, second, it would be September, October, you'd be recruiting for May or June, just a few months from then.

In the 2000s, it moved up.