I recently had a phone call with a first year law student who had been offered a summer job at a prestigious law firm, but the offer would expire in less than two weeks. She had requested an extension to a mid-summer deadline, but the firm insisted that she respond by mid-April, well before many other firms’ applications would even open. Rather than getting to enjoy the excitement of having a job, it struck me that this job offer was holding her hostage.
For most law students, their second-year summer internship will shape the start of their career. A 2L summer-associateship is the only way into “Big Law” for most applicants. Most only get one shot at the hiring process, although the differences between the firms can be obscure. As significant of a decision as it is for many law students, the choice to start at a Biglaw firm is made on very little information. Firms are hiring candidates they know little about beyond one semester’s grades and the law school they attend. Students plan out the most formative years of their careers before they can even choose their second-year classes. This is a stress-rich, information-poor environment where indispensable professional decisions are made in a paranoid frenzy.
Nobody wants this. How did we get this?
In previous years, Biglaw recruiting mostly occurred through in-person interviews in the summer after one’s first year of law school. This system, however, fell apart during the COVID-19 pandemic, when recruiting largely moved online. Firms could now race to hire the best candidates as early as possible,and candidates accepted those offers for fear of missing out. Campus career services offices initially tried to restrain this race to the bottom, but faced with the reality that they could not stop students from accepting prestigious job offers, most now explicitly support early hiring.
The primary disadvantages of this system are obvious for students. Candidates from prestigious law schools snap up positions on an ever-earlier timeline, so students outside those schools are dramatically less likely to secure a coveted Biglaw job. It unduly burdens first generation law students, for many of whom these firms are an indistinguishable tangle of white-shoe names. These disadvantages are compounded along axes of identity for candidates concerned about whether a law firm is a sufficiently inclusive environment. And, the process disadvantages students with diverse professional backgrounds:students who previously worked as paralegals or other legal professionals have better understanding of various firms and practice areas than those who did not.
There is a secondary disadvantage to students that is less obvious: as hiring timelines creep forward, the ancillary labor prior to hiring advances as well. For many students, their first semester is the heaviest course-load they will ever take. With timelines advancing to the earliest weeks of spring semester,students are now balancing their first set of finals with a seemingly-existential race to seek employment.The pressure this acceleration has put on first year law students is exorbitant. For law firms, this acceleration is surely just as frustrating and stressful. Law firms now must gamble on students with little information beyond their performance on a single semester of grades. Additionally, firms are confronted with a severe time-pressure to secure the “best” candidates before their rivals do. As a result, many firms now eschew first-round interviews and send candidates straight to a battery of questioning from numerous law firm associates and partners in order to accelerate the timeline: substantially more expensive in a field where the cost of a single labor-hour measures in thousands of dollars.
Biglaw has now shaped its entry-point in a manner that disserves all parties involved. It has been compelled to do so as a result of a sweeping failure to respond to a collective action problem. When in-person interviews were confined to campuses, structure could be imposed and an anti-competitive process could be formalized. Biglaw hiring was a cartel, but the regulation of this cartel afforded students and firms alike the necessary time and space to collect data on one another that would guarantee at least a better-informed hiring process. When the constraint of proximity was removed, schools discerned that they could have a competitive edge against their peers by creeping the timeline forward. When one school failed the prisoner’s dilemma, the rest followed. Firms responded, and entered their own race to sweep up desirable candidates before their peers could. Law students—often under six figures of debt,and counting on Biglaw to relieve this burden—were forced to scramble to keep up. Now that the cartel has been broken, hiring norms have whipped dramatically towards compressed hiring timelines that serve no rational basis other than to respond to an industry-wide pressure to remain competitive against peer institutions.
This is purely artificial. There are ample law firms, and ample students more than adequate to fill the roles at those firms. There is a glut; and yet for fear that we may starve, we feast upon one-another.