Law Schools

Law School Students Are Taking To The Street Over Biglaw Firms With Mandatory Arbitration Agreements

Students are amping up pressure on Biglaw firms that use mandatory arbitration agreements.

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If legal industry insiders thought they could just wait out the uproar over mandatory arbitration agreements as a condition of employment at Biglaw firms, well, they may have misjudged the situation. A group of Harvard Law student activists, organized as the Pipeline Parity Project (PPP), have kept the heat on Biglaw firm DLA Piper when they defended their use of mandatory arbitration agreements with social media pressure (#DumpDLA) and they launched #DumpVenable when Venable reversed course on their use of the agreements.

And now students at elite law schools are upping the stakes with more direct action. According to a PPP press release, students are stationed in front of Venable and DLA offices in Washington, D.C. and Boston handing out leaflets about mandatory arbitration agreements:

Lane Shadgett, 1L at Georgetown University Law Center, said that students felt they had no choice but to take this step: “Firms like Venable and DLA Piper need to know that we will continue to hold them accountable for their behavior. Today, by physically showing up at their offices, we are doing our part to make sure that both current employees and students who aspire to work there know about their use of forced arbitration, and how it deprives them of their rights.”

Additionally, students sent an open letter to the National Association for Law Placement (“NALP”) asking them to include questions in their directory of legal employers for on-campus recruitment to assist students in identifying which firms use mandatory arbitration agreements:

NALP is uniquely positioned to gather and distribute this information to law students. We hope that NALP will use its influence to collect and disseminate this information, which is critical to us as we make important decisions about our futures.

Specifically, we urge NALP to adopt the following questions:

1: Does your firm require any employees (including summer associates, first-year associates, paralegals, or other non-lawyer staff) to sign a mandatory arbitration contract, regarding certain or any types of disputes, as a condition of employment?

2: If yes, does this mandatory arbitration agreement include a non-disclosure or confidentiality agreement which encompasses workplace misconduct?

As the dominant organization in legal recruiting and career development, NALP’s leadership in this matter can affect meaningful change because it will empower students to make career choices that align more closely with their values. Thank you for your consideration and we look forward to hearing your thoughts on this issue.

For those who have been following the story closely, you’ll recall that last summer, a survey letter on behalf of all T14 law schools went out to every law firm recruiting on their campuses, asking that the firms disclose whether they require summer associates to sign mandatory arbitration agreements and nondisclosure agreements related to workplace misconduct, including but not limited to sexual harassment. Unfortunately, only about half of the firms actually responded to the inquiry. The hope is clearly that if the questions were asked as a part of NALP’s directory, more firms will be forthcoming.

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headshotKathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

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