Biglaw

With Historic Offer And Acceptance Rates, COVID Was No Match For Biglaw Summer Associate Programs

Some exciting news for would-be Biglaw associates during the pandemic!

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This is how we celebrate offers in 2020…

For the past few years, law student recruitment for summer associate programs has been incredibly successful, harkening back to a time when law students quickly accepted the offers that Biglaw firms handed out like candy. The 2020 recruitment cycle, however, was just a tad different in that law firms and law students were dealing with a deadly virus that threatened to completely destroy the typical summer associate experience — and it did, it a way. Some programs were canceled entirely, and others were pushed into the virtual space, but they all had the same thing in common: offer rates were plentiful, and like the vaccine, they offered hope for the future.

According to the latest recruiting figures from the National Association of Law Placement (NALP), offer rates from Biglaw summer programs were just shy of last year’s historic highs. Despite all of the challenges that were created by the coronavirus crisis, not only did Biglaw’s aggregate offer rate for summer 2020 programs (including those that were held and those that were canceled) hover at nearly 97 percent, slightly below last year’s historic high of nearly 98 percent, but the acceptance rate for those offers reached an historic high of 87.8 percent. What’s even more exciting is that this historic acceptance rate is significantly higher than acceptance rates measured before the recession, which tended to hover between 73 to 77 percent.

Here’s what James Leipold, NALP’s executive director, had to say:

The high-level takeaway is: Not withstanding how difficult this summer was in putting these virtual summer programs on at the last moment—the outcomes were very strong. … Offers and acceptance rates both remained at historic highs. The summer class size was down, but those decisions were made before the pandemic, and that was part of a three or four years of pulling back that we’ve seen over time with firms trimming back their summer classes. There was none of the interruption we saw in 2009 when nobody got offers, and all these students had to graduate without jobs.

Here are some interesting facts about the unprecedented summer programs of 2020:

  • For programs that were actually held, more than 86 percent were entirely virtual, while 8 percent were a hybrid model of some in-person and some virtual programming. Only 6 percent of summer programs were held entirely in-person. The average 2020 summer program length was 5.6 weeks, whereas in 2019, summer programs averaged 9.7 weeks.
  • Law students didn’t seem to mind that their first experiences at their firms were virtual. At 97 percent, offer rates for summer programs that were held were a bit higher than those that were canceled (93.3 percent). Relatedly, acceptance rates were higher for summer programs that were held (88 percent) than those that were canceled (85.6 percent).
  • At 11, the average summer program class size decreased from 13 in 2019, and it had previously been flat at 14 from 2016 to 2018. At the biggest of Biglaw firms (700+ lawyers), these class sizes have continuously fallen since 2016 (from 22 in 2016 to 20 in 2017 and so on until we reach 14 in 2020).

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Congratulations to all law students who went through the entry-level recruitment cycle in 2020, as things seem to have worked out marvelously for them, no matter how much the pandemic tried to derail their plans. Let’s be thankful that a new generation of associates wasn’t lost thanks thanks to COVID.

NALP Finds Offer and Acceptance Rates Remain High, Despite Virtual, Shorter Summer Programs [NALP]
The Pandemic Hasn’t Curtailed Big Law’s Appetite for New Associates [Law.com]

Staci ZaretskyStaci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

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