The Rapidly Changing Face of Law Firm Recruitment
The ways that law firms recruit law students are undergoing a sea change. Prospective law school applicants and the law school admission professionals who interact with those prospects need to understand the many ways in which this important landscape is evolving.
NALP released its annual Perspectives on Law Student Recruiting report earlier this month, highlighting many of the historic shifts that are underway in law firm recruiting. According to their analyses of the available data, for the first time, law firms are no longer primarily utilizing on-campus interviewing (OCI) to recruit students.
As almost any lawyer of any age can attest to, law firm hiring processes remained basically unchanged from the 1960s until the early 2020s. Traditionally, law firms sent recruiters and lawyers to campus each fall to seek the next generation of associates, using short format on-campus screening interviews that were followed by longer format callback interviews that were most often conducted in a law firm’s offices. These interviews yielded offers to join the firms as summer associates, and then most often summer associates were extended offers to return to the firms as full-time associates after graduation. But then the COVID pandemic happened, and everything was turned upside down.
The timing of the recruitment process had already moved earlier and earlier, so that “fall” recruitment was happening during the summer, mostly because law firms were racing with one another to make first contact with the most sought-after candidates. And then the lockdown part of the pandemic broke the “on campus” part of OCI, and law firm recruitment began to happen almost entirely virtually, but still through law school organized and sanctioned programs even though the recruiting was not happening on campus. These two dynamics have been in play for years, but during the recruitment season that just ended, we saw the balance tip as NALP measurements showed that for the first time, the majority of offers for summer associate positions (56%) resulted from employers recruiting entirely outside of law school interview programs.
New technologies that allow students and employers to have direct contact with one another have obviated the need for centralized “on-campus” interview programs. Law students and law firms now can and do make direct contact with one another without ever involving a law school’s career services office. According to NALP executive director Nikia Gray , “We now know from the data that the market is coalescing around direct recruiting and other non-law school-based recruiting practices as being the preferred methods — or at least the most necessary — to compete for talent and OCI is taking a secondary or even tertiary role, used only to top off or round out summer associate classes as needed.” In fact, 91% of law firm offices now report using a direct application method for recruiting students. For the 2024 recruiting cycle, only 44% of summer associate offers came from law school recruiting programs of one sort or another.
The timeframe for recruiting has continued to move earlier, as well. While law firm recruiting used to take place in the fall, with third semester law students interviewing with law firms, Duke University School of Law recently announced that its next set of law firm interview dates will take place from May 19-22, 2025, essentially as soon as first-year students are done with their spring exams. Other law schools have followed suit, shifting their so-called OCI and early interview programs earlier and earlier. As the timing of recruiting has moved forward, the timing of offers and acceptances have also moved aggressively forward. According to the NALP report, 78% of all offers for summer programs were extended prior to August, as compared to only 45% of all offers in 2023. NALP reported that July 2024 was the most popular offer month, accounting for 45% of all offers, followed by June (30% of offers), and then August (20% of offers). Along with this acceleration, there has also been a confusing confluence of 1L and 2L summer recruitment, with many law firms now interviewing students for both 1L and 2L summer employment at the same time. NALP reports that 14.6% of all entry-level associate positions were filled by students who spent both their 1L and 2L summers with the same firm.
Law school career services offices play a critical role in educating law students about the job market and offer important skills training that prepares students for the recruitment cycle. The earlier, rapid pace of the current recruitment cycle, along with the decoupling of most recruiting away from law school-managed programs to free-market direct recruiting seriously compromises the ability of career services professionals to prepare students to compete in this market. I worry that these changes inevitably further advantage those students who arrive at law school with considerable advantage and hinder students who arrive with less advantage and advance preparation. Nonetheless, the market has moved, and law schools will need to do all they can to close those preparation gaps in the shorter timeline now afforded.
And despite the fact that law firms are enjoying considerable profitability at the moment (for instance, Law.com recently reported that the Kirkland firm notched revenue growth of 22% in 2024, reporting $8.8 billion in revenue and profits per equity partner of $9.2 million), NALP reports that associate recruiting volume was down last year, with lateral hiring taking priority over larger entry-level associate classes. The total number of summer associate offers in 2024 was down even further from the 11-year low measured in 2023, while the median number of summer associate offers per law firm office fell to just six in 2024, the lowest since NALP began tracking that figure in 1993. (Given these markers of a somewhat sluggish job market for law school graduates, one hopes that with surging application volumes
, law schools will not be tempted to admit a larger class for next fall.)
If you’re interested in learning more about these developments in the recruiting world, I will be part of a panel discussion at LSAC’s Annual Meeting in May, The Evolving Law Firm Recruitment Cycle: What You Need to Know (Thursday, May 29 from 10:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.), along with fellow panelists Bruce Elvin, the associate dean for the Career & Professional Development Center at Duke University School of Law, and Reginald McGahee, the Global Head of Diversity Recruiting for Reed Smith LLP. I hope to see you there!
James Leipold is a senior advisor with the Law School Admission Council. Prior to joining LSAC, he worked as the executive director of the National Association for Law Placement in Washington, D.C., for more than 18 years.