We know that the process to get those coveted Biglaw jobs is moving earlier and earlier in a law school career. The on-campus interview process — which placed initial interviews for summer associateships that beget post-graduation employment offers in the weeks before 2L year or the early part of the semester — is no longer the number one place for Biglaw firms to hire their soon-to-be associates. In an effort to have first dibs on the best and brightest, law schools are taking direct applications from 1Ls as early as April. To remain relevant, top law schools are pushing their OCI programs ever forward into the early part of the summer.
No one much seems to like this system, but firms and law schools are locked in a prisoner’s dilemma — no one wants to miss out on getting the best candidates/maximizing the opportunities for their students if they try to stick with a reasonable schedule.
Now, if you’ve not been paying attention to the Biglaw recruitment game for a minute, you might be wondering what happened to change the recruitment timetable that had worked well for so many years? Back in 2018, the National Association for Law Placement, perhaps inadvertently, created this shit show by ditching their rules which dictated how and when firms could contact candidates. When the rules are there are no rules, this is the mess you get.
But as Bloomberg Law reports, this system hurts diversity. Law students without lawyers in their family are disadvantaged by pushing the recruitment into 1L year. As Nikia Gray, executive director at the National Association for Law Placement, tells Bloomberg, “A lot of times, they’re kind of left in the dark about how law firms recruit and how they find their candidates.” And of course that makes sense — Basgiath War College was a lot easier for Violet to survive when she had her brother Brennan’s journal to explain what was going to happen the first year.
This has a carryover impact on diverse students — a recent survey by Indiana University revealed 53% of Hispanic law students are the first in their families to attend law school, 36% of Black law students are the first in their family, and 28% of Asian students; compare that with their White counterparts, at only 21% being the first in their family at law school.
A rising third-year student at the University of Chicago Law School told Bloomberg, “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.” They continued:
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.”
So it’s on Biglaw to figure out how to make sure this race to the bottom on timing doesn’t lead to a one-dimensional class of incoming associates. As Dru Levasseur, director of DEI at the National LGBTQ+ Bar Association, said, “The playing field is not level. 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.”
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon @Kathryn1@mastodon.social.
