Law Schools

What Are We Doing?

What will happen in the absence of a single NALP standard?

By Nicholas Alexiou on December 21, 2018 11:44 am

In last week’s column, I discussed the newly announced National Association for Law Placement’s (NALP) Principles for a Fair and Ethical Recruitment Process and then previewed the following week’s column, which was to be the first of a two part series on how 1Ls should deal with their first semester grades.  While I promise you that multipart series will be coming eventually, it is going to have to wait at least a week because I need to talk about these new principles a bit more. 

Not only have I had the opportunity, over the last week, to give a bit more thought to the new principles, but on Tuesday, NALP hosted a webinar to go over the changes and answer any questions.  If you are a NALP member and were unable to participate on Tuesday, I HIGHLY suggest you stop reading this column and immediately watch the webinar.  In fact, even if you are not a NALP member, but have any interest in legal recruiting, in true millennial fashion, borrow someone’s NALP login and watch.  Before going any further down this road, I want to say that I have the utmost respect for the two hosts of this webinar, NALP President Melissa Lennon and Executive Director James Leipold.  Indeed, I look forward to Jim’s presentations at each and every NALP event I attend.  That being said, as I missed the live version of the webinar, when I went back to listen Tuesday evening, I first read through the supplied PowerPoint.  My initial reaction?  It was as if I was, once again, watching Liz Lemon try to pitch Jack Donaghy on moving TGS to Miami.

Granted, the term synergy was not invoked, but I also doubt this will be the last webinar on the new principles.  The webinar issues did not solely lie with the content.  While I have no insider knowledge of how these new principles were adopted by the NALP Board of Directors — this is a confusion that, I believe, is shared by pretty much everyone who is not a current member of the Board — I have watched hostage videos in which the subjects possessed more enthusiasm for their script than what came across my laptop on Tuesday night.

The actual webinar expounded, a bit, on the terms highlighted in the PowerPoint.  A frequently stressed argument in favor of the new principles was that by doing away with the structured nature of the previous NALP guidelines, it will allow member institutions, both law schools and firms, to have more flexibility and innovate.  To my ear, this sounds like the oft repeated argument in favor of robust American federalism, which is that it allows states to “innovate,” or as a dissenting Justice Brandeis wrote in New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, “a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”  285 U.S. 262, 311 (1932) (Brandeis, J., dissenting).  The problem with this argument is that while there are examples of positive state innovation — progressives in Wisconsin were able to adopt a state income tax two years before the adoption of the Revenue Act of 1913 — as any non-white male who happened to live in large swaths of the U.S. during the era of Jim Crow could testify, much state “innovation” turns out to have deleterious consequences.  Yes, there might be a large number of new approaches to legal recruiting, but I am doubtful many of these are going to be objectively good for any party to the recruiting process, with students most likely to suffer.

In the absence of a single NALP standard, member institutions are strongly urged to update, or in many cases, establish for the first time, their own recruiting procedures and “commit [them] to writing and to communicate [them] appropriately.”  If you think that each law school and firm having their own recruiting procedure sounds remarkably confusing and cumbersome, that’s because it is.  In extraordinarily small legal markets, where there is one law school and maybe a small handful of sizeable law firms, all parties might be able to agree on a certain set of recruiting principles.  But at Vanderbilt, the smallest of the schools in the top-15 of  Above The Law Top Law Schools rankings, we have hundreds of legal employers recruiting our students as 1Ls and 2Ls, either on-campus, through a job fair, or via Symplicity.  The idea that all parties will be able to agree on a single set of recruiting principles seems . . . dubious.  And Nashville is a mid-sized legal market.  I have no Earthly idea how this open season will play out in New York City.  What did the NALP webinar suggest when a conflict arises between a law school’s practices and that of an employer?  Have a conversation!  Neat!  I look forward to having conversations with employers from now until the end of time, because the notion that a school can adopt a set of recruiting standards and not have a race to the bottom break out between law firms, whom law schools need at the end of the day to hire students, seems naive at best and negligent at worse.

The impact of the new principles trickles down in a myriad of ways.  For example, I have previously discussed the wonder that is the NALP Directory of Legal Employers which has served as a go to repository for law students seeking a range of information about law firms. 

But as the webinar made clear, much of the recruiting information contained in the Directory is no longer applicable and will undergo tremendous upheaval as employers and schools develop their own recruiting procedures and standards.  What is the response to keeping this vital resource accurate for student use?  “[V]olunteer work groups.”

The only reaction that seems appropriate is to channel Taylor Twellman 

What are we doing?  WHAT ARE WE DOING?

Nicholas Alexiou is the Director of LL.M. and Alumni Advising as well as the Associate Director of Career Services at Vanderbilt University Law School. He will, hopefully, respond to your emails at [email protected].