Article on BIGLAW Recruiting

[sallyawp]

<p>These are some exerpts from a recent article on law firm recruiting from the American Lawyer. The article mainly describes the recruiting process at big law firms for students at top law schools.</p>

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Is This Any Way to Recruit Associates?

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It’s a scary prospect, meeting with partners at a big firm about a job. But, as one law student who landed a summer position at Latham & Watkins quickly realized, the pre-interview jitters were the hardest part. “I don’t think through the entire interview process I got one difficult question,” he says. In fact, the partners he met weren’t all that interested in his academic work or his future career: “Almost everyone I talked to did fantasy football and was really interested in talking about their inner-firm leagues,” he says. Partners might have been trying to make a connection with him by chatting about the trivial, but as the Latham summer puts it: “You don’t feel you are being seriously vetted for a position.” </p>

<p>Ask law firm recruits – particularly those from elite schools – about the recruiting experience, and the stories are fairly similar: Short interviews, shallow questions and a sheaf of boilerplate marketing materials. It’s not much better on the other side of the equation. To find qualified candidates, firms respond to cattle calls at top law schools. There, partners meet 20 students a day for 20 minutes at a time for several days in a row. On the basis of those meetings, students are called back for a series of 30-minute office interviews. If a student is from a good school, has an acceptable resume, and decent social skills, he or she is practically guaranteed an offer for a summer position within 24 hours of the office visit. And nine times out of 10, a summer job leads to an offer for a full-time associate position.

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Firms spend as much as $250,000 to recruit a single summer associate, according to Am Law 200 recruiting partners and legal consultants. That includes all of the lawyer time spent recruiting and the hard costs (dinners, plane tickets, beach towels with a firm logo). Despite the expense and effort, just 28 percent of students who are offered a job by a big firm (one with more than 250 lawyers) will accept, a survey of 300-plus law firms by the National Association for Law Placement shows. This is due in part to the large number of offers that each student receives. And after associates do join a firm following their summer stints, 40 percent of them will leave by the end of their third year and 62 percent by the end of their fourth. True, firms count on most associates eventually leaving in order to keep their partnership ranks trim and profits high. But, according to NALP figures, firms report that 51 percent of associate departures every year are unwanted.

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While a handful of U.S. law firms are experimenting with new approaches, the vast majority of Am Law 200 firms are sticking with a recruiting system that hasn’t changed much since the early 1970s.

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Am Law 200 firms send recruiters to ten to 30 law schools and at least a half-dozen job fairs. Students at top-tier schools will interview with an average of 25 to 30 firms each. Partners say that the process has intensified in recent years because many schools have shifted their recruitment weeks to August. In the past, on-campus interviewing was spread across September and October.

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In other words, it’s an associate’s market. As we reported last year, the number of lawyers working at Am Law 100 firms has tripled since 1986. Part of that growth has come from expansion in the associate ranks. According to The National Law Journal, a sibling publication, the number of associates in the 250 largest law firms has increased 76 percent over the last decade. During the same period, the number of law school graduates has gone up just 7 percent.

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Firms are responding to that crunch by reaching out to a wider array of law schools, doing more lateral recruiting, and fighting fiercely for graduates of the tier-one schools. Gihan Fernando, assistant dean of career services at Georgetown University Law Center, says that firms sent 10 percent more interviewers to campus in 2006 than in 2005 and anticipates a similar increase in 2007. Every additional interviewer allows a firm to meet 20 more students a day. And at top schools, there are enough firm-sponsored cocktail parties and luncheons to make a meal plan redundant. It’s so hectic that schools have started recommending that firms refrain from hosting purely promotional events. Wendy Siegel, director of recruitment at New York University School of Law, says that students are more likely to remember the food at Nobu, a chic Manhattan eatery, than the name of the firm who paid for it.

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The callback period can be just as frantic. Firms have to arrange for each of the 20 students who may come through the office on a given day to meet with three or four partners.

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Once firms make an offer, they move into hard-sell mode, hosting dinners, drinks, and trips to the ball game. Cahill Gordon & Reindel hiring partner Noah Newitz says that he and his colleagues try to keep in weekly e-mail contact with their top prospects during the post-offer period. Alston & Bird hiring partner Jonathan Lowe estimates that it took 6,000 hours of attorney time to recruit 57 summer associates for the firm’s Atlanta office this year.

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To limit the time they spend on follow-up, firms often make offers to students on the day of the callback in the hope that students will be flattered into an immediate response. “It’s an incredibly effective tool,” says the Latham & Watkins recruit. “After the callback, they send you out to a really nice restaurant. They got the wine, toasted me, and offered me the job. They wanted me to accept right away, and it was hard not to.” Within Latham, he says, lawyers get bragging rights if their recruit accepts at dinner.

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But the rush to hire has its perils – as the low acceptance and high attrition rates among associates show. One of the biggest mistakes firms make, say legal consultants, is to rely too heavily on academic credentials. Eva Wisnik, a law firm consultant who worked as a staff recruiter at Schulte Roth & Zabel and Cadwalader, says that in her experience, firms often look no deeper than the grade point and class rank. “Someone who was No. 2 in a class,” she says, “we would talk ourselves into hiring them. Oftentimes they wouldn’t do well.”

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That’s because academic performance is not necessarily a proxy for work performance.

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Firms use grades as a crutch because it gives them a false sense of limiting risk, says Jim Kennedy, a consultant who counsels law firms on interview techniques. Lawyers assume that if a student got the thumbs-up from a Stanford Law School professor, then she must be smart and able to succeed. They use the interview to see if they like her, rather than to probe whether she’s got the chops (and desire) to make it in a law firm. It’s known as the cross-country flight test: “They just try to see if this is someone I could sit next to for six hours,” says a Stanford student.

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But resistance to change is fierce, within both law schools and law firms. Four decades ago, a consortium of schools created voluntary guidelines, with a timetable, to make the recruiting process more predictable for students. “The reason it worked,” says Jim Leipold, executive director of NALP, “is that law schools can say, if you want to recruit on our campus, you must abide by these rules. They have that leverage.”</p>

<p>Changing those procedures so that their students will be more carefully vetted is not a priority for schools. For one thing, a school’s prestige relies in part on the number of graduates who land jobs at top firms. In addition, the basic orientation of law schools is to maximize the number of choices available to their students. NALP former deputy director Julie Hamre says that schools believe that students benefit from having many interviews and many offers to choose from. Even now, with students seeing more firms than they can track, schools are focused on keeping the interview counts high.

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Law firms are in no position to pressure schools to reconsider. School administrators set the on-campus schedule, so firms are wary of doing anything to strain that relationship. It is a real disadvantage to be booked at the end of recruitment week, because students are burned out and, with callbacks already in hand, more likely to cancel.

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Already, inefficiencies in entry-level recruiting are driving firms to hire more lateral associates, who are more expensive to hire and even less likely to stay at the firm in the long run. According to NALP, 56 percent of entry-level associates will leave a firm within four years; 73 percent of laterals leave in the same period. More expense and more turnover. No wonder partners just want to talk about fantasy football.

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[brassmonkey]

<p>Is the entire article available anywhere, or is it a subscription site?</p>

[sallyawp]

<p>It’s a subscription site.</p>

[brassmonkey]

<p>Bummer, thanks for the quotes though!</p>

[sallyawp]

<p>What else were you curious about from the article? I can certainly take another look at it for you, though I believe that the exerpts that I posted give a very good sense of the content of the article.</p>

[crimsonpham]

<p>basically getting into a top tier law school is a golden ticket? thanks for the very interesting article sallywp.</p>

[crimsonpham]

<p>this article mention tier-one schools, what schools are they?</p>

[Blaze991]

<p>Thanks sally. This sort of article is helpful for those college or law students who aspire to work in biglaw one day but who don’t really know much about the recruiting process.</p>

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Firms spend as much as $250,000 to recruit a single summer associate

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<p>Wow. Perhaps the key phrase in that quote is, “As much as.” </p>

<p>The average couldn’t be nearly that high, could it? </p>

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According to The National Law Journal, a sibling publication, the number of associates in the 250 largest law firms has increased 76 percent over the last decade. During the same period, the number of law school graduates has gone up just 7 percent.

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<p>Plus that 7 percent (unless I interpret it incorrectly) accounts for all law schools graduates, and biglaw doesn’t recruit all law schools. If Cooley decides to enroll 100 more students next year, they’ll probably produce more lawyers, but those lawyers are not increasing biglaw’s applicant pool. Biglaw recruits Top law schools. A more helpful number would be the increase of graduates from Top 14 law schools.</p>

[younghov1983]

<p>I think this article illustrates the difficulty law firms have in attracting the right personnel. The activities of a lawyer are different from one’s performance on the LSAT and law school exams. But there’s nothing else for law firms to look at .</p>

<p>god, are law school’s really providing a service for the legal community. if the best future lawyers are not graduating near the top of their class, maybe the whole idea of law school should be rethought.</p>

[unbelievablem]

<p>younghov – what do you mean by the “right personnel?”</p>

<p>the fact that associates leave the large firms in droves doesn’t mean that these are lawyers that weren’t good enough or not capable – often it means that these are lawyers who got tired of the demands of the large firm.</p>

<p>from the article –

They use the interview to see if they like her, rather than to probe whether she’s got the chops (and desire) to make it in a law firm.

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<p>having the “chops” to make it at a big firm is something VERY different than having the ability to be an excellent lawyer.</p>

<p>for many smart hard working law students, who have been academically successful their entire lives, getting the big firm job at the big name firm is often the next brass ring to grab for – the next indication that they are the “best.” and often they take those jobs either not realizing just how grueling the demands will actually be, or with the expectation that it will only be for a few years to build their resume and experience before moving on. </p>

<p>personally, i’m not sure what type of additional vetting the big firms could do to really avoid the problem. do you really think firms would ask interview questions such as “and if the big deal closing the end of November means take out at the firm rather than turkey with the family, are you all right with that?” or “will it bother you if vacation plans have to be canceled on a moments notice?” or “are you completely ready to sacrifice any personal activities to be always ready when we need you?” </p>

<p>if law firms really vetted to make sure they were getting the type of associates who would thrive and survive, my guess is they’d find it much harder to fill their offices. i also doubt they really want an entering class of all associates who will stick around for partnership. the firms are designed to get as much as they can out of their associates for the time they have them --knowing full well that for most of the associates that won’t be very long. </p>

<p>i graduated law school many years ago and this was true then as well – what may be changing is that the numbers are making the leveraging of associates harder for the firms – but the system of hiring an entering class of associates knowing full well that most wouldn’t be there when it came time to make partnership decisions has been around a long time – its the system created by the law firms all along – i can’t say i have any sympathy for them if they are now finding it more difficult to play by the rules they created. if anything, it seems to me that the relatively smaller number of top law school grads (as compared to jobs) is a good thing for the law student – giving them more choice – i only hope they use that to more carefully decide what is best for them.</p>

[jonri]

<p>Additionally, many young lawyers change their minds. One of the most common reasons is the impact the hours have on relationships. It can be easy to work 12/7 when you are young and single. It does make it hard to date though! And if you are already married, at some point you might want to have children. If you rarely see those children, it can get to you. And if it doesn’t get to you, it can get to your spouse. Ultimatums are pretty common-“-it’s me or the firm. Choose!”</p>

[younghov1983]

<p>great posts, unbelievablem and jonri.</p>

<p>I think what catches me off guard is how different the legal world functions from the business world.</p>

[unbelievablem]

<p>one more thing to realize – its been said before and is worth repeating – firms generally operate on the meritocracy of good work being rewarded with more work. so it actually often the attorneys who are doing the best in terms of their performance who end up being most heavily burdened – if they then decide they’ve had enough and leave, it says nothing about the quality of their performance, but much about the circumstances under which they were expected to provide it.</p>

[cartera45]

<p>I have been in recruiting for over 20 years and I have always had to do a lot of work on interviewing skills when associates are ready to leave their biglaw firms. Many have no idea how to interview because they never really went through that process out of law school - instead, they were recruited. The numbers can turn around though. There have been two hiring crashes since I have been in recruiting and, during these times, many summer associates did not get associate offers. Many firms rescinded offers and some firms disappeared practically overnight.</p>

[sallyawp]

<p>I agree completely with unbelieveablem and jonri. </p>

<p>I would also like to emphasize again that often the very best associates are the ones who have the most work and who never really seem to get any “down time”. I was repeatedly told by a mentor of mine at 3 am (in the office, of course) when I was a young associate at biglaw in NYC that the competent get punished. Looking around the office late at night and on weekends, it always seemed to be true. </p>

<p>That said, associates with little work to do, who were having difficulty finding billable hours to fill their time sheets, definitely feared (rightly so) for their jobs. These days, biglaw firms don’t tend to let associates who are not well regarded stick around, though these associates are usually given a few months of in office time to find another job, and everyone plays it off as if that associate merely chose to leave the firm for other opportunities like so many other associates. Few firms ever want to admit publically that they have laid off or fired associates, though it happens all of the time. </p>

<p>p.s. It is only really in the last 6-7 years that underperforming associates seem to get the boot so quickly and with such frequency. Before that, biglaw firms pretty much kept associates around until they left on their own. So remember – just because you get that biglaw job, there is no guarantee that you can keep it if you don’t get good work (tougher than it may seem) and do a good job on that work (which is where the hours can really pile on).</p>