The Summer Associate Recruiting Sweepstakes: Winners and Losers (continued)

Here’s an update to last week’s post about how various law firms fared in recruiting summer associates for this year. That post, including the comments, featured oodles of info about the expected summer class sizes at different Biglaw shops.
Now we bring you a few more data points. First, just a few short hours after our post went up, this email went around the New York office of Latham & Watkins:

As we move forward into 2008, the Recruiting Committee and the Recruiting Department would like to thank each of you for your support and participation in last year’s recruiting efforts. Your involvement in the summer program and our fall recruiting efforts was “priceless”. Thanks to your efforts, our summer program and fall hiring results were incredibly successful. The recruiting efforts resulted in 61 first years (not including judicial clerks, which we are currently in the midst of recruiting) starting next fall and a summer class of 80 summer associates (our largest to date!). Thank you all again and a very happy and healthy 2008 to each of you.

It’s nice when firms are so responsive to our inquiries.
In addition, a few tipsters emailed us unofficial information about how their firms did in the recruiting process. Check it out, after the jump.


Please note that these pieces of information, unlike the Latham & Watkins info, were received through informal channels. We have not confirmed them with the firms in question. Caveat lector.
1. Fish & Richardson (San Diego):

After announcing one week before the NALP deadline for 2L acceptances that it was instituting a pay cut, my office of Fish & Richardson didn’t get any more candidates to accept beyond those who had already accepted — we had several offers outstanding. But maybe the joke is on the people who declined because the pay cut has since been rescinded and now all those 2Ls are stuck at firms that aren’t as good at patent litigation and who aren’t nearly as enjoyable to work at.

2. Proskauer Rose

I just received an invitation to a hockey game vs. Skadden (yes, seriously) from the head of recruiting, and the recipient list is open. I’m assuming that it’s sent to the entire summer class. There are 98 recipients (excluding recipients who have “@proskauer.com email addresses”). Hope this helps.

As a quick addendum, I’m not sure whether this list was sent to all Proskauer summers in all offices or just NY, but if I had to guess, I’d say it is the former since, according to lawfirmaddict.com, Proskauer only had 50 in their NY office in ’06.

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Update:

The reason there were 91 recipients is that they included last years summers on the email as well. So I’m guessing that it was only to the NY office. However, on the plus side, Gary Bettman is coming to the game! Not like he has a professional sports league to drive into the ground or anything.

3. Skadden Arps (Chicago)

Skadden Chicago apparently gave out the same number of offers as last year, but had way too many people accept. Last years class was 29, this year’s class looks like (from the email addresses listed) to be 54. They traditionally give out offers to all summers, but what is going to happen now with the economy tanking and the recent layoffs of other large firms?

4. White & Case (New York)

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I have heard from a number of informal sources that White & Case’s class will be over 100 next summer. This increase is reputed to be in part due to an unexpectedly high yield. (I think last year, the summer class was about sixty.)

5. Wiley Rein (Washington, DC)
We mentioned in our original post that Wiley is oversubscribed. We didn’t know quite how oversubscribed:

Wiley Rein is so oversubscribed that they called their offerees who had not accepted yet and told them it’s probably best not to. They said that summers weren’t going to get a lot of personal attention and not everyone would get an offer at the end of the summer. They called me three times over the course of a week and a half. I have a friend who they called and told her it was going to be super-competitive over the summer just to get an offer and she was better off at another firm.

Earlier: The Summer Associate Recruiting Sweepstakes: Open Thread on Winners and Losers