Law Schools

What The Future May Hold For Legal Recruiting

Where do we stand with the loss of the NALP Recruiting Guidelines?

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Last week was Spring Break at Vanderbilt.  For students, this meant a time free of classes to relax, catch up on reading, or even an opportunity to do some pro bono work to help the financial health of Central Appalachia.  For those of us employed by the law school, perhaps the biggest change was the sudden abundance of parking spaces.

But with students not on campus, it meant that those of us in Career Services were not dealing with a daily deluge of student issues and questions.  Without a constant stream of incoming emails, I could take a step back — or for the purposes of this analogy, up — and think about legal recruiting from a 10,000-foot view.  I know what the world of recruiting looks like today, but what is it going to look like tomorrow?  Next year?  Five years from now?  I will not pretend to have a magic ball, but some trends seem clear.

As you may have heard once or twice in this space, the NALP Recruiting Guidelines, which had served as the foundation for the system of legal recruiting for decades, are no more.  Much like the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War or the War of 1812, the initial response to this lack of an overarching recruiting framework has been status quo ante, i.e., an attempt to leave things as they were when the NALP Guidelines governed.  But as is often the case, whether one is talking about matters of war and peace, or something on a much smaller scale, the tenuous status quo can only last for so long.  In a recent Law.com article, Karen Sloan reported on the slow pace of change in the summer associate recruiting process sans NALP Guidelines.  There were a number of quotes from folks in various Career Services Offices on how they are working to keep the old system in place, but the most important paragraphs, and one of only two quotes from someone at a law firm, when thinking about the future of legal recruiting were paragraphs 18 and 19 (emphasis mine):

Stephen Gill, a partner and chairman of talent management at Vinson & Elkins, said he ultimately expects schools and firms to settle into some widely accepted recruiting practices and doesn’t foresee a free-for-all. But he predicted that firms will begin outreach to first-year law students earlier now that the Dec. 1 rule no longer exists. An extended recruiting season could have its downsides, however.

The last thing the law firms want to do is make recruiting a 365-day event. That’s not in the best interest of the law students either because they need to focus on their studies,” Gill said. “But we’re not going to want to be at a competitive disadvantage if other law firms are pushing up recruiting. We would be in favor of the schools imposing some limitations on what firms can reach out.”

For all the hope of keeping the old system in place without the NALP Guidelines, these two paragraphs show how that is just untenable.  Mr. Gill may well be right and recruiting will not immediately descend into a “free-for-all,” but instead, we will likely see the gradual chipping away at the previous system.  First to go seems to be the prohibition on directly contacting 1Ls until December 1st.  Indeed, there are whispers that some employers are not only planning to contact members of the Class of 2022 before December 1st, but make summer employment offers before students receive their first semester grades.  With more and more law firms shifting into the robust recruitment of 1Ls, this could mean that law students are, in essence, lining up their post-graduation job before there is any actual evidence they excel at being a lawyer.  Without grades, firms will only have a student’s pre-law résumé as well as the brand name of law school to evaluate candidates.  As I have previously mentioned, this will likely harm students of color and those who lack a number of lawyers in their family.  It also would appear to be an odd choice for legal employers, since often times the students who seem like they would excel in law school based on their résumé flounder, while those who were the last to get in off the waitlist top the class.  Apparently, some of the firms planning to adopt this aggressive 1L hiring stance will rectify this potential situation by cutting loose associates after a year or two if they didn’t make the grade in law school.  Words cannot describe how bad of an idea this is.

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Another main avenue of future change is with regards to data.  The use of data and metrics by both law schools and law firms will only continue to grow as we move forward through the 21st century.  When talking about this concept, I often like to reference the Michael Lewis book Moneyball.  While many think Lewis was only writing about baseball, specifically the Oakland Athletics, he was actually describing a much broader attempt to use market inefficiencies to improve chances for success.  This does not mean that the analytics revolution that has gripped the sporting world for a while will necessarily be coming to legal employment — though if anyone wants to take a crack at a Wins Above Replacement formula for law students and/or attorneys, I am all for it and want to hear what you come up with — but it will be impossible for data not to playing a growing part in legal recruiting.  Indeed, many law schools and employers have started to embrace data, but I think we have only seen the tip of the iceberg.  For example, in the future I can envision each Career Services Office having an in-house statistician, perhaps a recently graduated applied mathematics or economics major from the law school’s affiliated university.  Not only could they track basic information such as historical GPAs of students who got a job with Firm X, but they could go much deeper.  Using regression analysis, they could see if employers value performance in a particular 1L class more than others.  These statisticians could also look at entry level law school metrics such as GPA and LSAT and see if they correlate with post-graduation employment.  This would not only benefit CSO, but the law school as a whole.

Legal employers could similarly create a new type of analytical framework.   They likely already know the GPA cutoffs they employ at various law schools when recruiting students, but do those cutoffs result in the best associates?  Who stays at a law firm long term as opposed to those who crash out after a year?  Knowing the answer to that can help employers craft a recruiting strategy which would allow them to grow their own partners, rather than relying on laterals.

It can be difficult to think too far into the future when scientists are warning us that global warming might result in the loss of clouds — I am not a scientist, but not having clouds seems . . . bad.  But for those of us in the world of legal recruiting, it is important to be aware of the ever-shifting landscape.  It is impossible to know exactly what the future will hold, but failing to anticipate, or even investigate shifts, will harm your students or your employer.

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 abovethelawcso@gmail.com.

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