Biglaw, Job Searches, Law Schools

Uh-Oh! Hackers Screw Up Biglaw Callbacks At T14 Law School

Which law school experienced a hack that could've put students' careers in jeopardy?

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On-campus interviewing (OCI) has been going on for at least a week at law schools across the country. Law students are already receiving callback invitations for summer associate recruitment. If you’re a candidate with strong credentials from a strong law school, you could very well be rolling in callbacks by now. Lucky you!

Other law students, however, are having a rough go of things. Maybe that B- you got in Property is coming back to haunt you. Maybe your interviewing skills aren’t exactly up to par. Maybe you applied to too many firms that were simply out of your league. Maybe your school’s technology system was attacked by Chinese hackers and the administration decided to run a security update this past weekend, thereby denying email access to all students eagerly awaiting important callback news from firms.

The last scenario mentioned above is exactly what happened at one of the best law schools in the nation this past weekend, and law students are pissed that the school would put their career prospects in such a precarious position. Which law school could it be?

Pop those collars high, because it’s none other than UVA Law School. Here’s one of the tips we received over the weekend from one of the school’s aggrieved students:

I would email you from my UVa Law email address except our email system is down for the entire weekend because the university’s IT folks are responding to what is being described as a cyberattack by Chinese hackers.

This normally would be mildly unsettling, but the email shutdown happens to be scheduled right after the first week of on-campus interviews and second years are waiting to hear about callbacks — some more desperately than others.

In an email sent on Friday by Patrick D. Hogan, the University’s EVP and COO, students discovered that federal authorities notified the school about a cyberattack that occurred earlier this summer — one that was confirmed by UVA on June 11. It seems that those in charge at the University waited the entire summer to conduct a full-scale system security upgrade without first checking to see whether it would affect any critical programming, and without first notifying anyone else as to the date the upgrade would occur.

We reached out to the school for comment on why they waited so long to update their systems, and why it was done during one of the most important weekends of the year for law students, but we’ve not yet heard back. If and when we do, we will update this post.

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Thankfully, although members of the UVA Law career services team had just found out about the “significant electronic communication system outage” themselves, they were ready to protect their students from the “sophisticated attackers originating from China,” and were able to quickly think up a last-minute workaround for the problem.

Here’s a snippet from the late Friday email students received from career services:

We have written to the law firms who have been interviewing on Grounds to let them know of this issue, to inform them that you do not have access to your school email accounts and to urge them to use your phone number if they need to reach you this weekend. In the event that you are expecting a specific communication (like a callback schedule or travel confirmation) from firms or judges this weekend, we suggest providing the firm with an alternate email address. We do NOT recommend that you, as a matter of course, write to all firms with which you interviewed but from whom you have not heard to provide an alternate email address. As you can imagine, if everyone were to do this, the volume of email that the firms would receive would be considerable. We have told the firms that if they need to reach a particular student and they are having trouble, we will assist. As a result, please keep an eye out this weekend for voicemails and text messages.

This was great handiwork on career services’ part, but a source told us that “everybody flipped out for a little while before that was sorted out.” Come on, give them some credit — instead of accidentally sending around everyone’s GPAs and class ranks like they did last summer, they saved your callback emails from going into a black hole this weekend.

Thank goodness the day was saved for UVA Law students. Now Biglaw firms across the country will have their fill of preppy summer associates. Suck on that, hackers.

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(Flip through the following pages to see the full emails UVA Law students received concerning the hack and the career services fix for this weekend’s email outage.)

Earlier: Oops! Top Law School Email Screw-Up Reveals Grades, Ranks Of All Clerkship Applicants

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