Big Law Skips Ahead of On-Campus Recruiting in Talent Race (1)

Top law firms are rushing to target new recruits, often before students have finished their first year.

On-campus interviews, long the chief recruiting method for major firms and controlled by law schools and the National Association for Law Placement, now take a back seat to direct hiring by firms who want first crack at talent. The coveted summer associate roles are the most common path to Big Law careers, serving as a tryout for full-time positions after graduation.

“This direct hire process will likely be filling about 50% of our class, at least,” said Nicole Wanzer, director of attorney recruiting at Morrison Foerster. “Were we to wait for traditional OCI and lean only on traditional OCI, we feel like we would be missing out on some of the talent that’s getting picked up earlier in the process.”

The shift has had a snowball effect. Weil Gotshal & Manges has already opened applications for its 2025 summer program, allowing first-year law students to apply directly—a process dubbed “pre-OCI”. Other prominent players such as Jones Day, Milbank LLP, Paul Hastings, and Davis Polk & Wardwell open up their direct applications as early as mid-April for jobs that start the summer after the second year of school is completed. MoFo is launching its own advanced consideration application system for first-year students this year, which opens May 1.

The whirlwind means law firms are making hiring decisions based on smaller academic records and students now have even less time to make important career choices.

“You don’t give the law students as much time to figure out what law school is all about,” said Scott Ellis, who was hiring partner for Foley & Lardner’s Houston office for the past decade. “Right out of the box, you’re looking at them as new hires.”

‘Free Market System’

On-campus interviews have been a mainstay of law firm recruitment for decades. The process traditionally was structured by individual schools and NALP, which issued guidelines on how and when the firms could access candidates.

Although the process varied, many of the top schools used a lottery system that allowed students to sign up for interviews with firms during OCI. Firms were discouraged from making any contact before December 1 of the first year, and candidates had 28 days to weigh offers.

NALP loosened its guidelines in 2018, scrapping the Dec. 1 ban and the 28-day decision window. The group said firms and schools no longer benefited from a one-size-fits-all approach. The coronavirus pandemic shifted all on-campus interviews to virtual two years later.

Firms took the ball and ran.

“What we’re seeing is the free market system,” said Nikia Gray, NALP’s executive director.

Firms have now shifted recruiting to their own online platforms and encourage students to apply ahead of their schools’ OCI. Nearly half (47%) of law firms’ summer program hires last year came outside of OCI recruiting, according to NALP.

A majority of firms (53%) that recruited through OCI reported a more than 10% decline in the number of screening interviews they conducted last year compared to 2022, according to NALP.

The move has its benefits for firms interviewing hundreds of candidates across the country.

Virtual interviewing has streamlined the process and reduced expenses for Morrison Foerster, according to Wanzer. It’s also allowed more partners to get involved in recruiting.

“I can’t imagine a scenario where we ever go back to flying attorneys all over the country in a two-week period of time to interview candidates,” she said.

The firm is still hitting campuses though, with MoFo representatives participating in more than 75 events at law schools each year. Every student it sees on campus is put into its recruiting system.

“Now we can engage with these students earlier in a more productive and robust way,” she said.

Compressed Timeline

Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan has also expanded the amount and type of events it does on campuses. The litigation-focused firm is partnering with similarly focused law school groups, said Rebecca Fogler, Quinn’s national recruiting manager.

Alex Spiro, Elon Musk’s go-to lawyer and a partner at the firm, in March spoke with New York University’s mock trial group.

These kinds of events are meant to give students a “clear picture of both the personal and the professional side of the firm,” which can get lost in the haste of the new recruitment timeline, Fogler said.

Landing a job at the likes of Quinn Emanuel or MoFo can be lucrative for law students, who often graduate strapped with debt. Full-time associates make $225,000 to $435,000, based on seniority, plus bonuses that can clear six figures.

The new, compressed recruiting timeline gives those firms and their recruits mere weeks to make decisions, often without a full year of school transcripts available.

Morrison Foerster is considering adding new assessments or writing exercises to its interview process to help gauge applicants, Wanzer said.

“With the speed of the process, it’s definitely exacerbated the challenge to make sure that the talent you’re seeing—and, more so, the offers that you’re extending—are to people who are going to succeed,” she said.

Big Decision

For law students, the changes have made an already fraught process even more difficult.

Schools, which can provide valuable resume and interview assistance, are struggling to meet the new, often disjointed recruiting timeline, said Lauren Jackson, an associate dean in Howard University’s law student career services office. The law school sent 21% of its graduates to the 100 largest firms in the country last year, according to data compiled by Firm Prospects.

Howard has bumped up its first OCI session by a month, to begin in July. Firms at the same time are pushing students to decide quickly.

The majority of summer associate offers made outside of OCI last year were early offers, according to NALP. Nearly a quarter of those offers were made in June and half came in July.

Students responded within two weeks to more than 70% of the 10,500 summer associate offers made last year, NALP found. About 35% of those responses came within eight to 14 days.

Morrison & Foerster gives its candidates 14 days to accept summer offers. That allows it to manage recruiting numbers, Wazner said.

Quinn Emanuel takes a different approach. The firm allows students with pre-OCI offers to continue in the OCI process with other firms before deciding where they will spend their second-year summers. Forcing them to make decisions earlier puts students “at a disadvantage,” said Jennifer Barrett, co-managing partner of Quinn Emanuel’s New York office.

Firms are “putting pressure on students and making this process even more difficult” by making them decide on offers before the end of OCI, Barrett said.

Quinn Emanuel also saves a few spots in its first-year associates class for offers made to students in their final year of law school who didn’t spend the previous summer with the firm. Some students might want more of a litigation focus that was not available where they summered, Fogler said.

“We understand that sometimes people choose their 2L summer and it’s not always the best choice,” Fogler said.

“It’d be shortsighted to cut those people out of the process,” she said.