Introduction
Law firms have always fought fiercely for top legal talent. But we’ve now moved from competitive to callous—a conclusion that all stakeholders seem to name and acknowledge unequivocally. Indeed, not a single school nor student seems to think this is a good process. Firms don’t like it, either, but they feel like they can’t sit on the sidelines while their rivals recruit this early.
When recruiting becomes ruthless, it’s gone too far.
Big Law recruiting, in its current frenzied form, is playing an outsized role in reshaping institutions and relationships—and disrupting both education and the profession. The payoff (if there is any) does not nearly justify the metastasizing harms. Firms are operating a costly, sweeping process that is inefficient and based on thin, or problematic, assessment criteria. This system breeds privilege and distorts the hiring market myopically, leaving students largely fueled by fear of missing out (FOMO), not functional decisionmaking metrics.
And students feel nothing short of gaslit as schools continue touting best practices in wellness and formative assessment.
We’ve been here before in the clerkship market, and we restored normalcy.
Absent systemic change, we will be here again. This problem calls for holistic action to mend the fraying market and restore the synergistic relationships between educators and employers to support students and ensure the profession’s vitality. We must preserve pedagogical best practices and promote hiring equities and efficiencies alike. We need only look to law school leadership, bar organizations, our students, and other market sectors to rein in runaway recruiting.
I. The Unraveling of the Big Law Hiring Market
Law firms competing to hire top talent is not new. But these market forces have escalated, disrupting students’ educational experience. No matter the economic mood, law firms’ pursuit of students “historically has remained fierce.”
Firms compete for law students just as they compete for clients: “[A]dversarial, often bare-knuckled, competition is in their very DNA.”
Differentiating between firms is difficult, so firms “signal” their quality to clients through their lawyers’ credentials.
Because firms’ futures hinge on their human capital, their longevity and viability depend on recruiting top-caliber associates.
So law firms hire 2L students for the summer and offer strong summer associates post-graduate employment.
These summer programs thus provide a pipeline, meaning “the summer associates of today are the partners of tomorrow.”
And to staff their complex, high-value cases and transactions, firms need “large standing armies” of outstanding associates at the ready.
Given that “a law firm is its people,”
it’s no wonder firms try to outmaneuver one another to secure the best students.
Before 2020, law firm recruiting had a “built-in” structural constraint on the timing of the selection process—“2Ls had to be back on campus.”
So law schools could set the rules of engagement. But once the COVID-19 pandemic hit, interviews became virtual, and law firms no longer needed to collaborate with the law schools.
By taking a direct-to-consumer approach to gathering applications through online portals and engaging with students through virtual interviews,
firms were able to control the process, blithely unaffected by the collateral consequences this timing shift causes for students, professors, staff, and other market sectors. Firms could interview students when they wanted. And they quickly perceived that they could then get an edge over their competitors.
Without any regulation or guidelines among employers and law schools, law firms have dramatically “shortened the recruiting runway.”
Firms now solicit applications from students during 1L Fall before they’ve ever taken an exam or earned a grade. In fact, the timeline for 2L associate hiring has bled into and, in some instances, leapfrogged 1L summer hiring. Unrestrained, firms jockey for position; early movers snap up seemingly attractive applicants.
Then other firms hire earlier still. The preemptive strikers set the time frame. This summer associate recruiting process has been characterized as a “devolution,”
a “classic collective action problem,”
a “feeding frenzy,”
“well and truly broken,”
even “insane”
or downright “bonkers.”
But Jami McKeon, former chairperson of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP, insists that firms “absolutely” must recruit students before their first exams because “[t]hat’s what the market is right now.”
In other words, firms are animated by a “self-created” perception of scarcity.
This dynamic process by which each firm recruits earlier and earlier to get an ostensible jump on its competitors is the hallmark of an unraveling market.
The summer associate market fits the definition of a stage-one market
: Hiring dates have gotten progressively earlier and have, by impinging on 1L Fall, moved to the earliest feasible hiring date.
Toward the end of stage one, hiring occurs so early that employers struggle to distinguish among the candidates.
At this point, various stakeholders propose ways to police the process.
And here we are. Everyone is frustrated and fatigued.
Law schools have a three-year institutional memory. Soon, no current students will know that recruiting does not have to be run this way—collapsing the mythical sequencing that law school will “scare you to death then work you to death” into one whopper of a 1L Fall. At this critical juncture, we propose immediate action to address the systemic nature of these harms holistically.
II. The Ripple Effects of Rushed Legal Recruiting
The benefits of this recruiting timeline—if there are any—surely do not exceed the costs. Everyone is suffering, including firms, law students, legal educators, and other legal sectors.
A. Firm-ly Inefficient
Without coordination or traditional assessment metrics, the hiring process is inefficient.
An efficient market demands participants’ ability to weigh alternatives.
The accelerated hiring timeline robs both students and law firms of this transparency. Firms hire students based on little information
and interview far more candidates than they hire.
Uncertainty abounds: Firms extend offers years in advance anticipating future need, students’ job qualifications are in flux, and students’ legal self-knowledge is nascent. As one Big Law partner rued, “It’s dispiriting.”
Students and firms make premature, half-baked decisions.
Mismatches metastasize when firms recruit newly matriculating students because “[t]here’s an information vacuum both ways.”
Firms are sourcing their human capital and investing in the firm’s future without the common denominator of a full 1L year allowing students modest space for academic growth and identity formation. Students hired based on a stellar showing in their first semester may reflect a cohort ready to perform well in traditional, common-law subjects. But this approach overlooks the fact that some of the most competitive students with the most well-rounded skillsets blossom later, as courses diversify and students grow.
In fact, Professor Asad Rahim proclaimed that a primary driver behind the proliferation of the 1L Langdellian model, where professors lead students in question-and-answer inquiry through the assigned course materials, was not its educational effectiveness but its sorting function.
Rahim reasoned that the competitive ethos enshrined in traditional pedagogy revealed to outsiders which students ascended from these classroom conditions.
So, without more knowledge, firms instead attempt to mitigate the information deficit by relying on summer programs to more rigorously vet students.
But the efficacy of this approach is “open to question,”
too. Rather than gauging students’ fitness as future associates, summer programs strongly emphasize social events and softer assignments.
Firms also incur heavy recruiting costs to yield their summer classes. The interview process is “highly redundant” because the same students garner multiple offers from firms.
And each attorney who devotes time to interviewing and fielding tedious, individualized networking queries is forgoing billable work, adding to the recruiting tab.
Signing students so far out comes with reputational risk as well. While it can take years for a firm to solidify its standing with clients, associates, and students, its reputation can quickly take a tumble.
If a firm overhires and then defers students, it can suffer backlash in the marketplace. Firms can go from being lauded to lambasted in mere months.
Delaying start dates and, even worse, laying off associates, can be a major PR misstep.
Plus, firms face steep replacement costs when associate attrition rates are high. Junior lawyers pose a losing financial proposition: The profit margins on new associates’ work are thin because they bill at lower rates and need greater oversight from more experienced attorneys.
But that’s just the beginning. Attrition multiplies—and magnifies—the costs of hiring law students.
Firms often do not recoup their initial investment because associates do not generate positive cashflow until the end of their third year.
And most Big Law firms see their associate ranks reduced after three years.
In fact, over the last decade, the top five revenue-generating firms
lost 43.96% of their associates on average by the three-year mark.
Since replacing a departing associate can range from $200,000 to $500,000,
firms instead allow for associate losses by recruiting aggressively and hiring larger cohorts of students.
Attrition comprises a “central component” of the firm’s business model,
augmenting firms’ original outlay.
What’s more, firms’ early hiring hinders their flexibility and hampers their ability to respond to market uncertainty.
Despite the hype that AI is poised to transform the delivery of legal services and dampen demand for junior lawyers,
firms are engaging in a land grab.
Sixty-three percent of Big Law firms report that AI will affect their personnel needs and alter their lawyer leverage models in the coming years.
But, even on the cusp of change, firms continue to cling to—and be confined by—the competition for 1L talent.
B. All Students Suffer
This timeline torments students. They are pressed to make data-less decisions that leave them choosing between attending class and networking.
They are assessed on inequitable or unfair criteria. And the wellness implications are stark.
1. FOMO-Driven Recruiting Is Neither Strategic nor Functional. Most glaringly, Big Law’s hustle to hire pulls droves of students out of the classroom in their first months of law school.
“Law schools aren’t mere credentialing factories.”
The average law school costs eighty-two thousand dollars annually,
and the first year particularly is packed with foundational knowledge and skills acquisition.
Big Law’s networking events now begin October of 1L Fall and are overwhelmingly conducted off campus.
Structurally, this leaves students having to miss late afternoon or evening classes to participate. But even if they can juggle nighttime networking, they may have to forgo either sleep or class preparation walking the time management tightrope. While no one event is problematic, the aggregate effects have hit students hard.
Students, understandably, go to these mixers because they are styled as a critical entry point. While many students are unable to articulate why they are attending, they have conveyed to us and their other professors a distinct, nearly universal sense that they will lose out on something (or even be viewed negatively) if they do not show up. But first-semester 1Ls inherently lack performance data to assess their viability both as marketable candidates and as students academically able to rebound from missing course content. Student absences can be especially acute in the Legal Research & Writing (LRW) classroom because peer review and assignment feedback often are delivered during class time.
So a private market monetizing teaching legal writing and analysis before law school has materialized, now distinctly positioned around job readiness.
Missing objective viability measures, such as GPAs, law review acceptance, and writing assignment feedback, students are left with nothing more than FOMO tempting them to join an overly saturated pool of candidates. Hardworking and well-intentioned students should not be put in this unfair position. Students should not have to choose between studying law and searching for the law job.
The existing approach also is profoundly opaque.
It is a “hurry up and wait environment” in which students do not even know what they might be waiting for. Their networking events might yield access to a summer job, perhaps a 2L job, or, potentially, nothing.
And, of course, students can misjudge firms in this environment. Firms can look the same to students; it’s genus Big Law. But firms can be quite different—different business models, cultures, practice strengths.
As legal journalist and former recruiter David Lat expressed, “The students don’t know what they don’t know.”
One Big Law partner echoed, “They don’t have as clear a sense of what they want to do . . . . [a]nd it’s more challenging for firms to plan for the future, when we have a group of individuals who are less certain about what they want to do in the law.”
If anything, more students will renege on their 2L plans after their 1L summers because they’ve changed their minds about practice area or location.
Committing at the midpoint of 1L year ensures inefficiency.
2. Privilege Prevails. Early hiring intensifies elitism, inequity, and inequality in the profession. It leaves employers either trying to access performance data before it’s final and comprehensive or making do without it.
But basing referral and selection decisions on performance during 1L Fall risks violating the spirit of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which prohibits disclosing confidential student information except for enumerated reasons
to give students privacy over their grades. Asking professors or upper-level students to identify top students taps into confidential—and incremental—information disingenuously.
Yet, handpicking top Big Law contenders without grades is riddled with bias, suggesting that the process might overly rely on commonalities between the candidate and the evaluator, such as shared undergraduate institutions,
similar social circles, or other subjective criteria. Pre-law school performance instead fills the information void, depriving students of the chance to succeed in law school and sending the implicit message that their (potentially) $250,000 investment in legal education is ancillary, not central, to becoming a lawyer.
There are real risks that this model “rewards proximity to privilege.”
This race to recruit prejudices first-generation students and students from historically underrepresented backgrounds because they likely lack contacts with Big Law or don’t realize the stakes until it’s too late.
It also risks leaving behind students who do not thrive in the narrow pedagogical performances of the first year
but excel in other areas like client counseling, courtroom advocacy, negotiation, and transactional drafting.
And it disadvantages schools that do not build out costly 0L curricular add-ons,
as well as students who need to earn money in the summer before law school. In sum, an accelerated recruiting arrangement advantages the already advantaged.
“Talent” is not preordained at 1L orientation. To adopt this mindset is myopic. Talent develops from students’ inquisitive growth mindsets, thoughtful feedback and adaptation to it, resilience and persistence, problem-solving, creativity, and self-reflection. The accelerated recruiting timeline bets against education itself and sends an exclusionary message that students score so-called “prestigious” jobs based on their pedigree or preexisting network alone.
3. Exacerbating an Existing Wellness Crisis. Asking students to apply for jobs as they adjust to law school amplifies an existing wellness crisis.
Law students do not arrive at law school distinctly depressed or unhappy relative to their non-law-school peers.
Yet they graduate “less intrinsically motivated, less hopeful, and less happy” than they arrived.
Students report feeling psychological distress as early as the first six months.
Indeed, in the first year, students “experience[] large reductions in positive affect, life satisfaction, and overall [subjective well-being], and large increases in negative affect, depression, and physical symptoms.”
The stress levels just rise through to graduation.
The “legal ‘success’ paradigm” undermines student wellness as it shifts students’ focus to external comparisons.
Students “lose self-confidence and self-esteem after beginning law school, and become insecure and isolated” as they become entrenched in pursuing “grades, external recognition, and money or position,” which are “inherently competitive goals, values, and motives [that] promote tension and insecurity and . . . minimize satisfaction and well-being in the lives of many law students and lawyers.”
This creates an unfulfilling cycle that “supplants the intrinsic drive for growth, actualization, intimacy, and community, thereby exacerbating the negative effects on well-being.”
Instead of looking for the right career path or extracurricular opportunities for them, students follow visible hierarchies, leaving them with little “internal satisfaction.”
These wellness concerns feed into the legal profession,
so educators and employers are both invested. Many law students are actually quite surprised by the strength of the community that they build with professors and classmates early on.
But students lose “hope of genuine social solidarity” when they compete in their classes.
Law students quickly internalize that “success is relative, not absolute,”
sowing tension as law schools strive to create community and professional identity while stacking students against each other.
Students sense that this model is often competition for competition’s sake because it does not fully reflect the legal profession.
Serving a client’s needs and solving their legal problems calls for collaboration and coordination. Practicing law is a team, not an individual, pursuit.
The current recruiting timetable creates even more undue pressure for first-year students who are acclimating. As NALP Director Nikia Gray agonized, “The level of stress that this has added to the whole law school experience, which is already stressful in itself, is unprecedented.”
Students now “jam[] their Thanksgiving, winter and spring breaks with BigLaw recruitment tasks, steepening an acute wellness crisis and creating inequities for those balancing travel, family caregiving, paid employment and health barriers.”
In this new recruiting era, “[g]rades became the goal for 1Ls over learning (explicitly so now while perhaps always implicitly so).”
Students with Big Law offers now “feel[] entitled to—and frankly desperate for—the grades that match the contingent offers.”
This is a flawed pivot for an already tenuous wellness picture.
C. Learning Languishes Along With Its Foundational Relationships
Rushed Big Law recruiting has played an outsized role in legal education and has left collateral destruction throughout it, too. Big Law morphs the law school mission from fostering equitable and inclusive learning environments supporting the pursuit of professional opportunities into perceptively gatekeeping those professional opportunities.
1. Backwards Timing. This timing is backwards. Big Law beginning its hiring before assessments upends education. Instead of students progressing from introductions to formative feedback to summative feedback to references and career support, students start with references and career support before receiving formative and summative feedback.
This timeline inverts the educational process and the illustrative work of references. First-year students must now solicit references before professors have evaluated them, distorting the student–professor relationship and the reference both.
Professors now face immense pressure for one-on-one time with students, but, anecdotally, that time has been less focused on academic adjustment and content mastery than on students positioning themselves for a future reference. Indeed, many students show up to their first office hours appointments toting their résumés. References should communicate the depth of the recommender’s relationship with the student and their observations of the student’s skills and qualifications in the classroom. But rather than students openly revealing vulnerabilities and knowledge gaps to further their learning and long-term success, the references themselves can become students’ goal. Besides impeding learning, this practice hollows out references, even as it increases students’ seeking of them.
These timing transpositions are more dire in the LRW classroom where professors are performing more—and earlier—formative assessment. LRW faculty typically give regular feedback.
Courses are carefully calibrated to progress from no-stakes to low-stakes to high-stakes assignments.
The LRW course structure is designed so that the students’ first writing assignment is worth less than later assignments to facilitate growth and development consistent with educational best practices.
Big Law’s hurried hiring timeline impairs the learning process.
This resequencing also converts formative, lower-stakes assessments into penultimate, seemingly career-altering condemnations. Students interested in Big Law might no longer absorb a delicate “needs work” comment because they see the feedback as fatal instead of foundational. They switch into panic mode instead of growth mode. And those with the means to do so might then expend exorbitant resources learning the material through tutors and private programs to get a leg up on their peers.
2. Transactional Education. The shift in recruiting has pedagogical problems, but, perhaps more notably, it has relational ones. Students may erroneously believe that faculty members are blockading their access to the highest-paid and most heavily sought job placements. This mindset is particularly problematic when applied to LRW faculty given the “academic caste” system.
Big Law’s recruiting timing perverts law schools’ educational mission.
Effective education depends on relationships: between faculty and students, among students, and between an institution and its students.
These relationships help students develop their professional identity, flourish in school, manage wellness, and launch successful and sustainable careers.
Big Law’s turbulent timetable transforms the professor–student dynamic from relationship-building to power-centered. Professors are improperly situated as gatekeepers instead of as champions of students’ academic success, which, in turn, propels professional success. The perceived value of which professors students encounter also changes; 1L professors who have Big Law connections now might have a professional advantage or incur greater demands, which warps the educational process. A strong professor might no longer be thought of as an educator, but a powerbroker. Office hours shift from a site for development, growth, and outreach to a site for networking.
Accelerated hiring also complicates the Teaching Assistant (TA) role. TAs serve as a steadying force, helping students with content and acclimation support. They are not intended to become references or job referrals. Rather, armed with recent experience, they are ambassadors, shepherding students toward knowledge mastery, skills acquisition, and classroom confidence. But Big Law hiring now includes an added twist—enlisting upper-level students to flag top students.
Upper-level students with Big Law offers are sometimes equipped with expense accounts to recruit promising prospects.
This dynamic conflates—and confuses—peer support and campus leadership roles.
Finally, students’ extracurricular choices may be affected. Students are less likely to vie for positions on law journals and moot court since these activities will no longer be perceived as résumé boosters.
Hasty firm hiring means students will lose the value of these experiences and exposures.
Educational relationships are vital to learning. To distort, invert, or co-opt these relationships harms everyone. Students need time to meet their classmates and their professors and to cultivate meaningful relationships before employers rely on those relationships to assess job readiness.
3. Mission–Profession Tension. Legal educators and practitioners must work together to better the profession. Law faculty wholeheartedly want to help train practice-ready students, trumpet their students’ strengths and abilities, and tweak their own pedagogies in conversation with employers about their needs and expectations. This is a reciprocal relationship that should deploy equitable practices that are fair, methodical, paced, thoughtful, and grounded in skills and knowledge, not gambles and guesses.
Instead, Big Law’s recruiting revision has forced legal educators to conform to its timeline in ways that impose mightily on everyone. Law faculty must—and do—adapt, but the costs are crushing. Big Law’s behavior strains a relationship that should be synergistic.
D. Repercussions Reverberate in Other Sectors and Harm the Ecosystem
This timeline creates cascading market consequences. Big Law already exerts a strong gravitational pull for students because participation is plug-and-play. And many law students flock to Big Law firms because they need the salary to service their high law school debts.
But, by rushing firm recruiting, students now must choose whether to forgo public-interest or public-sector work in their 2L summer (and, in some cases, their 1L summers, too)
before they’ve studied public-law subjects like constitutional law or taken statutory-law courses like tax or securities.
Worse still, some Big Law firms bestow bonuses on 1Ls they hired for employment as 2Ls.
On the surface, these salaries support public-interest work and skills development. But, in reality, these paychecks prevent students from working for a Big Law competitor.
Even with a partly altruistic motive, the consequences of compensating these students are “distorting the public interest sector by flooding it, temporarily and strategically, with students whose long-term trajectories point firmly toward corporate practice.”
This regime could also create complicated ethics checks that further sap the already stretched public interest system, especially given the complex political dance underway with Big Law firms and the Trump Administration.
And it leaves some public interest-focused students hustling for meager public interest stipends working alongside future Big Law attorneys earning ten times more for the same work. In fact, Big Law–sponsored public interest interns might make more for their eight-week foray than the full-time employees supervising and supporting them. This framework sends a problematic message to students that the public interest market is some sort of rumspringa instead of its own worthwhile professional sector. Or, perhaps even worse developmentally, students just blow off their 1L summer entirely, suggesting we’ve lost the plot on skills development and professional-identity formation altogether.
These phenomena hasten “public interest drift,” in which top students who embark on law school oriented toward public interest work might instead succumb to the siren song of a Big Law salary because they cannot risk lingering and languishing waiting for public interest jobs to post.
The shrinking supply of federal government legal jobs compounds the situation.
All in all, Big Law hiring undermines establishing meaningful relationships within education and reshapes the relationship between the academy and the profession.
III. We’ve Been Here Before: The Federal Clerkship Hiring Market
The current summer associate recruitment debacle has a historical analogue: the clerkship market.
Before the Law Clerk Hiring Plan regulated the hiring process, federal judges, law deans, and students lamented that the system was “cutthroat and unseemly,”
“undignified,”
“long . . . beset by temptation and greed,”
“akin to a frenzy of voracious piranhas,”
“anarchic . . . inefficient, expensive, disruptive, and demeaning.”
Indeed, describing the mid-1990s clerkship hiring scene, one future law dean lamented that it “fails to provide judges and applicants with adequate information about each other, fails to maximize the preferences of the participants, deprives student applicants of bargaining power, disrupts the law school educational process, . . . ‘punishes late bloomers,’ . . . is generally riddled with externalities,” and “allows judges to . . . perpetuate[] an ‘old-boy network.’”
Sound familiar?
“Between 1985 and 2002,” clerkship hiring “steadily accelerated,” encroaching on students’ 2L year.
Students’ academic focus was disrupted, and faculty recommenders were left endorsing students based on limited academic records.
But instead of waiting for students to burnish their credentials or expanding the pool of potential prospects, judges raced to extend early offers so that they could get, in their view, the pick of the law school litter.
Judges who felt that they “los[t] out” on clerks then pursued students earlier still, and so on.
“In short, it’s competition all the way down.”
So a coalition of federal appellate judges and law schools attempted to establish some ground rules for hiring. Only 3Ls and graduates could comprise clerkship candidates.
Judges abided by a universal date to review applications and conduct interviews.
Law schools embargoed releasing transcripts and letters of recommendation until the appointed application window.
The Association of American Law Schools agreed to police the 2002 Plan to prevent judges from “finagl[ing], cheat[ing], or . . . hedg[ing].”
But, a few years later, the 2002 Plan collapsed. The rise of the Online System for Clerkship Application and Review (OSCAR) platform hastened its demise.
Judges inevitably stopped complying.
The market unraveled, and chaos reigned once more.
After several false starts, amid growing discontent from judges, students, professors, and law school deans, the Law Clerk Hiring Plan was resurrected—and refashioned—in 2018.
The revived Plan centers on a single start date after students complete their 2L year.
Proponents touted the Plan’s ability to remedy the information shortage inherent in an unregulated hiring process. In fact, then-Judge Merrick B. Garland praised the Plan’s timeline, which alleviates “the pressure that clerkship applications would add to the already pressured first year” and allows students time to forge relationships with faculty, join journals, and participate in other law school pursuits.
What’s more, the Plan benefits first-generation professionals who lack “good information about the value of clerking or the process of applying.”
While the Plan is by no means a panacea,
the clerkship hiring market is now much more palatable for all participants.
IV. Strategies, Synergies, and Solutions
The threats to legal education and the legal profession are staggering.
Like the clerkship market, counteracting the entrenchment and longevity of the accelerated hiring issues demands cooperation from a constellation of constituents. All stakeholders must shape the solutions symbiotically to strengthen the ecosystem. We need systemic changes, not incremental ones. Many are easy and costless, yet they mitigate great harm.
A. Law Deans Safeguarding Pedagogy
Law school deans can—and should—play a vital collaborative role in retreating from early recruiting for the sake of their students. While law school deans may be leery of precipitating a probe or hitting the headlines, they can unite to offer altruistic, non-commercial, pedagogical, procompetitive justifications
for protecting foundational educational processes supporting professional-identity formation.
In fact, law school deans were instrumental in pushing back clerkship hiring and boycotting the U.S. News rankings. On the clerkship front, before the Law Clerk Hiring Plan was instituted in 2002, former Yale Law School Deans Guido Calabresi and Anthony Kronman spearheaded efforts to organize the academy to convince federal judges to endorse a later clerkship interview date.
Then in 2017, 111 law school deans ushered in the Plan’s renaissance by signing a letter urging judges to defer clerkship hiring until after students’ 2L year to give students more time to focus on their studies before plunging into the hiring process.
And the deans of Yale and Harvard empowered other law schools to drop out of U.S. News’s data collection, which resulted in revamped rankings.
By penning an open letter to firms,
law school deans can precipitate recruiting reform, thoughtfully justifying why the profession benefits from this restraint.
B. Bar Associations Protecting the Profession
Bar associations—formal and voluntary, national and local—have a powerful place in the recruiting picture as well. Legal education has a structurally myopic viewpoint on entering the profession. Big Law has its own protectionist interests. Both might be otherwise inclined to celebrate an incremental win pushing the Big Law hiring timeline back by mere months.
Bar associations provide the political infrastructure for protecting the profession with a 360-degree perspective.
Bar associations safeguard the profession’s integrity, independence, rigor, and ethics in their credentialing, educational, and advocacy work.
They are also a site where lawyers, as individuals, can advocate separately from the entities that employ them.
In fact, the American Bar Association passed a resolution in August 2026 spurring stakeholders to take action on these recruiting issues, a measure we wholly support:
RESOLVED, That the American Bar Association urges law schools, private legal employers, bar associations, and other stakeholders in the legal community to study the impact of accelerating law firm recruitment timelines on the quality of legal education, the well-being of law students, and the long-term health of the entry-level legal hiring market; and
FURTHER RESOLVED, That the American Bar Association urges law schools, private legal employers, bar associations, and other stakeholders in the legal community to consider, in their respective recruitment practices and policies, the educational, professional, and equitable interests of law students, including their need for adequate time to develop the analytical, ethical, and professional competencies that the first year of legal education is designed to foster.
Specialized voluntary bar associations, such as women’s bar associations and the National Bar Association, likewise, have spent decades paving equitable pathways into Big Law (and other sectors), seeking to diversify and strengthen the profession.
Specialty bar organizations, like the communications bar and trial lawyer associations, also advance lawyers within specific subject matters.
As caretakers of the profession and the legal practice platform more broadly, bar associations can fulfill their core mission by convening collaborators to create comprehensive change.
C. Students Leading Us Forward
Students can also capitalize on their collective power to call for a market correction.
Law firms go to great lengths to lure—and land—the best students.
Where law students hold “tremendous power to influence the practice of large law firms,” they should exercise it.
Previous generations of law students “have proven a driving force” in catalyzing change.
Indeed, law firms’ pro bono programs proliferated based on student pressure.
To promote transparency for students selecting firms, Yale Law School’s YLW+ and Stanford Law’s Building a Better Legal Profession compiled data and ranked firms based on gender composition, parental leave, and diversity; these metrics propelled more firms to formulate family-friendly policies.
In 2020, Harvard Law students protested a Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP recruiting dinner, calling out its representation of fossil fuel-industry interests to dissuade potential associates from joining the firm.
And, at the height of the #MeToo movement, a nonprofit organization campaigned to have law firms jettison mandatory arbitration clauses for employment disputes.
Students’ grassroots organizing can spur firms’ transformation.
Market forces have “sparked a crisis in the industry.”
But students are banding together to reform Big Law recruiting. On January 1, 2026, eighteen law schools’ student associations and governments
addressed a letter to the American Bar Association.
The letter bemoaned how the accelerated timelines have “begun to undermine legal education, student and staff well-being, and the recruitment market.”
Because the breakneck pace of recruitment “compromise[s] the quality of students’ legal education,”
the students sought an audience with the ABA
to fashion a recruiting system that prizes “legal education, professional development, and informed career decision-making.”
This is a critical opportunity for the ABA to listen to the voices of the future and lead the way forward.
Other student initiatives oppose Big Law outright or plug public-interest pathways. For example, a cohort of Harvard Law students devised a “You Are Not Alone” campaign publicly resisting Big Law recruitment, including student testimonials espousing the values, skills, and ethics driving their careers elsewhere.
Likewise, Georgetown Law students organized “Opting out of Big Law,” a sign-on initiative where students could anonymously pledge not to participate in the Big Law recruiting bonanza and reflect on their choice.
These efforts to modify the Big Law hiring model and build a community around alternatives offer a promising and uplifting start.
D. Let’s Look Beyond Law
It’s not just law firms that are jumping the recruiting gun. Investment banking firms, consulting shops, and tech companies have started wooing college students as early as freshman year.
Sociologist Amy Binder has coined this circumstance where campus culture herds students down particular prescribed paths “career funneling.”
Playing on students’ insecurities, corporate recruiters “tap into a fear of failure hard-wired into students who’ve spent their young lives chasing academic success.”
And, particularly for low-income and first-generation students, the prospect of paying off loans and financing family is too tantalizing to pass up.
So Class Action, a confederation of students, academics, and alumni, is developing a “national playbook” to curb recruiting creep and encourage non-corporate options like public service and education.
Here, too, the campus community is rising up and pushing back.
The medical residency matching model
has been gaining traction, too. In devising an alternative to the chaotic clerkship hiring process, several judges extolled a computerized match to “soften the harshness of the Mayday market”
and enable clerk selection to progress in a “more orderly and businesslike manner.”
Law students also have expressed enthusiasm for a recruiting process in the medical-match mold.
The mechanics of the medical match are straightforward: A centralized clearinghouse allocates spots based on fourth-year medical students’ and programs’ preferences.
Indeed, the medical match is designed to push decisions as late as possible so students strengthen their self-knowledge and programs have a sense of staffing needs.
And because all offers are tendered simultaneously, the match increases efficiency, eliminates confusion, and removes the pressure to commit early or revoke acceptances.
Matching minimizes disruption and maximizes options.
Business schools have hopped on the medical-matching bandwagon for investment-banking recruiting. Wharton, Columbia, NYU Stern, and Yale participate in an internship interview process that includes about twenty-five banks.
The banks follow a systematic schedule for pursuing students: They host on-campus dinners in October, hold one-on-one coffee chats in November, and conduct both first- and second-round interviews over a two-week period in late December and early January.
Each school creates its own algorithm aimed at aligning students’ and banks’ preferences.
At a designated time, the banks notify the schools who their picks are and how many openings they have for each school.
Students then rank all the banks with which they had second-round interviews; if their top pick or second choice coincides with the banks’ selections, then it’s a match.
The total number of offers each student can receive depends on the school: At NYU Stern, no one can obtain more than two, while at Columbia, it’s one.
The beauty of the matching process is that since the schools know how many slots each bank aspires to fill, the schools can manage a data-informed aftermarket.
So if banks don’t reach their desired yield, the schools can alert the banks to the students who ranked them highly but not in first or second place.
The banks can then contact those students.
Through this approach, the business schools and banks operate efficiently and expand their employment options.
The merits of a match are many. A centralized matching solution
would eliminate most incentives to interview early.
A standardized interview window of several weeks would lessen the likelihood that students would miss classes. By confining interviews to a discrete period, students and firms can more easily, and effectively, compare their options while the experience is fresh; the flow of information would increase. With more grades available, firms would have a more accurate appraisal of students’ academic acumen and legal writing chops.
Firms also could consult the attorneys with whom the students worked during the summer to gauge their capabilities in a practice setting. And a later time horizon would give students more breathing room to determine whether working for a particular firm—or any firm—is right for them.
To be sure, law firm buy-in is critical to the success of a centralized process.
While firms may be wary of running afoul of antitrust law, firms’ coordination may pass muster if it’s seen as having an educational rationale.
Firms also have a way of telegraphing their intentions—look at how they set compensation through conscious parallelism.
As Georgetown University Law Center Professor Tanina Rostain observed, “If a leading firm . . . was willing to wait, that might inspire other firms to follow, and something might change.”
All firms would benefit if they “could somehow lock arms.”
Conclusion
The solutions are simple; they cost us nothing. Let students complete their 1L year unencumbered by Big Law. Let students learn doctrine, acquire skills, develop a professional identity, and acclimate to law school. Let students cultivate meaningful educational relationships. Let students’ first summer job experiences inform their second. Students will know more, understand their strengths, and be more authentic and well-rounded. Everyone wins.
There’s a universal appetite for change, but there is not the unifying infrastructure to achieve it without intentionality. A market solution, exemplified by the medical matching model, would avoid these pedagogical pitfalls, prioritize all participants’ preferences, and bring much-needed order to the current recruiting chaos. Together, we can build a more durable and sustainable system, bridging education and practice. Our profession will be better for it.