Biglaw’s Accelerated Recruiting Is A Lose-Lose-Lose Situation

Recruiting 1Ls in their first semester is bad for law students, law schools, and law firms—but figuring out a solution to this collective-action problem isn’t easy.

(Image generated with ChatGPT.)

This is a deep dive into an interesting and important subject, based on extensive original reporting, so it’s longer than a usual OJ post. But I believe it’s one of the better things I’ve written, and I hope you’ll find it worthwhile. If you don’t have time to tackle it now, maybe save it for later, to read when you have some downtime over the next few weeks (perhaps on a plane or train, if you’re traveling).

Because of the holidays, I may be publishing less than usual between now and January 5, but hopefully this will help tide you over. And if you like this piece, please share it—by forwarding (if you received it by email), posting on social media, or both.

Portions of this article originally appeared on Bloomberg Law, part of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc. (800-372-1033), and are reproduced here with permission.

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In September 1997, a few weeks into my second year of law school, I began the process of on-campus interviewing (OCI). Also called fall recruiting—because back then, it took place in the fall, at least at Yale—this was how my classmates and I obtained positions as summer associates at large law firms (aka Biglaw).

Initial screening interviews took place at a hotel near the law school. If the screener went well, you’d be invited back to the firm’s offices for a callback. If the callback interviews went well, you’d receive an offer of summer employment.

My job search concluded in early December, when I accepted an offer at Wachtell Lipton. While December was on the later side, it was not insanely so; back then, hunts for summer jobs often extended into October or November.

After graduation, I returned to my firm as a full-time associate, as most summer associates do. Positions as “summers” are the most common path into prestigious, high-paying careers in Biglaw, which is one reason why these summer jobs are so coveted—especially by debt-laden law students. In turn, full-time Biglaw jobs play a significant role in shaping young lawyers’ careers, whether they remain at their firms or move on to other opportunities.

Filling their summer classes with top talent is critical for law firms as well. Large law firms hire the vast majority of their entry-level lawyers through their summer programs—so the summer associates of today are the partners of tomorrow.

With their two-hour lunches, Beyoncé concerts, and occasional scandals, Biglaw summer programs might seem unserious. But the process of recruiting for these programs is seriously important, for both law students and law firms.

And the current recruiting process—in which students are applying for jobs in the first semester of their first year, mere weeks after starting law school—is seriously problematic.

“It feels predatory,” said Nancy Menagh, a 3L at Fordham Law who serves as a teaching assistant and advises several 1Ls going through the process. “Are the firms just looking for bodies? Are the schools just diploma factories?”

“It cheapens the process—and has the overall effect of cheapening the profession.”

The ‘Analog Era’ of Recruiting

The OCI process that I experienced in the late 1990s had existed in that form for decades. It was run by the law schools, and numerous aspects of it were regulated by guidelines issued by the National Association for Law Placement or NALP.

NALP is a voluntary association of over 3,000 legal career professionals who advise law students, lawyers, and law firms. It’s not a regulatory body, and it has no supervisory role over firms or schools. But the NALP Timing Guidelines were widely followed for many years, and until a major revision in December 2018, they covered everything from how early firms could contact students (not before December 1 of the 1L year) to how long offers of summer employment should remain open (28 days).

“Throughout this time, OCI was the main vehicle for firms to recruit students for their summer programs,” wrote Nikia Gray, NALP’s executive director, in a fascinating history of how recruiting has evolved. “Firms had to go through the law schools if they wanted access to enough students to fill their slots. This was an expensive, time-consuming process, with firms flying lawyers nationwide to interview students face-to-face. We might call this the Analog Era of recruiting—and it lasted for decades.”

“It was a routinized process, with a certain artificiality to it,” said Lois Casaleggi, associate dean for career services at the University of Chicago Law School. “And it worked for many years.”

Then came Covid—which completely upended the traditional process of in-person screening and callback interviews.

“After Covid, schools got rid of ‘on-campus’ recruiting and moved to virtual interviews,” explained Professor David Wilkins of Harvard Law School, where he serves as director of the Center on the Legal Profession. “On-campus recruiting had a built-in constraint on timing: the 2Ls had to be back on campus. But once recruiting moved to Zoom, this was no longer true. Firms started interviewing candidates in the summer before 2L year, and we were off to the races.”

A Process Transformed

Since Covid, recruiting has grown more decentralized and moved up in time—and today, Biglaw’s approach to hiring law students looks completely different from what I experienced. OCI and other school-run programs have largely fallen by the wayside, replaced by direct applications: students submit their materials and interview with firms on their own, with no involvement from schools.

For 2024 summer programs, 56 percent of offers resulted from recruiting outside of law school interview programs, according to NALP. And the recruiting process, instead of taking place during the fall, was largely over by Labor Day: 78 percent of offers were made before August 2023—before the start of the candidates’ 2L year.

We don’t have complete data yet on 2025 summer programs, which NALP expects to publish in the first quarter of 2026. But we do know the process began even earlier, with firms accepting applications from candidates as early as April or May 2024—before the issuance of grades from the spring semester of the students’ 1L year.

The trends of direct application and earlier hiring have only intensified for 2027 summer programs—for which the recruiting process is already underway. Yes, that’s right: some firms are interviewing first-year, first-semester law students, who have not yet taken their first final exams—let alone received their first set of grades—for positions that will start not next summer, but the summer after that.

According to Reuters, applications submitted by 1Ls to firms through the popular Flo Recruit online platform jumped from 841 in November 2024 to 12,082 in November 2025—an increase of 1,300 percent. And firms conducted 6,700 interviews last month on Flo Recruit—five times as many as in November 2024.

And firms are engaged in this mad scramble for talent against the backdrop of dramatic technological change that’s transforming the practice of law, with unknown implications for Biglaw firms and their personnel needs. According to the 2026 Citi Hildebrandt Client Advisory, 63 percent of large firms expect AI to affect their lawyer leverage models within the next decade—up from 43 percent in the prior year.

“Some 1L students are interviewing right now, during law school exams, not just for 1L summer jobs but 2L summer jobs,” said Wilkins of Harvard Law. “But in two years, ChatGPT may be doing many of these entry-level jobs—and more.”

So firms are interviewing first-semester law students—but are they making offers? According to Bloomberg Law, some (unidentified) firms are making offers to first-semester law students. But I couldn’t confirm this with any of my sources; based on my reporting, it appears that most firms are holding off on extending offers until first-semester grades arrive—at least for now.

“One big question mark is what firms are willing to do before they have any grades,” said Casaleggi of Chicago Law. “Right now we’re seeing a divide. Some firms are already interviewing students, but saying that they’ll hold off on offers until grades are in. Other firms have said that they won’t start interviewing until they have grades.”

The recruiting process has changed in other ways as well since my time. When I was in law school, it was rare for firms to hire summer associates for their first summer. Today, it’s more common for firms to hire 1L summer associates, and some firms are even extending offers of employment for both the 1L and 2L summers—so-called “jumbo” offers, which sometimes come with “loyalty” bonuses of up to $25,000. (A firm is less likely to lose a candidate to a rival if the candidate spends both the 1L and 2L summers with that firm.)

Other firms, including Davis Polk and Milbank, are hiring 2L summers—and will pay them $25,000 to do public-interest work in their 1L summer (i.e., not work at other firms). It’s a sign of how aggressively firms are pursuing what they perceive to be the “best” talent, at all levels—from first-semester law students to $20 million partners.

For Law Students, Academic Disruption and ‘Off the Charts’ Anxiety

The first year of law school is a notoriously trying time for students. It has always been academically demanding and psychologically challenging, as reflected in cultural touchstones from One L to The Paper Chase to Legally Blonde (the latter two admittedly fictional, but reflecting certain realities of being a 1L).

And now, on top of memorizing Latin legal terms and mastering the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, first-semester law students are expected to be finding jobs—and not just any jobs, but ones that often play an outsized role in launching legal careers.

“My take, which many of my classmates share, is that the timing of the whole process is unfortunate,” a 1L at Yale told me. “It has required us to devote time to researching firms, completing applications, and attending networking events, during an already busy semester where we’re supposed to be focusing on classes and learning the fundamentals of legal thinking.”

“Friends and I often explicitly discussed which was more important: reading a case for class or working on a cover letter for a firm,” this 1L added. “And we often prioritized the latter because it felt like our early careers were on the line.”

“The academic disruption this is causing is not sustainable,” said Casaleggi. “We should be letting first-year law students get their feet under them—by learning how to read cases, take cold calls, and study for exams. We need law students to become law students first.”

“Law students are having to navigate recruiting as they’re still trying to navigate law school—interviewing at the same time as they’re figuring out where the bathrooms are,” said Nikia Gray of NALP. “Schools feel very protective of students’ well-being, so there’s a lot of frustration and even anger over what’s happening among career-services deans and counselors. They see students day to day, struggling with mental-health challenges, and they have students crying in their offices.”

“Different firms and markets are moving at all different times—but some students hear of their classmates getting interviews, when they haven’t had any interviews yet, and these students start to panic,” said Casaleggi. “And then they go on Reddit, and all nuance goes out the window. The student anxiety is off the charts—and it’s entirely understandable.”

One student at Boston University even withdrew from law school, less than two months into the semester, after suffering panic attacks.

Going through recruiting as a 1L “was so much on top of everything else,” this student—or former student—told Reuters. “I thought it was completely unfair.”

‘You Might As Well Be Throwing Darts’

Adding recruiting and its attendant anxieties on top of the existing demands of the first semester of law school isn’t good for students academically. It isn’t good for their mental health. And it also doesn’t make for sound career choices.

“Probably the most unfortunate part of this process is that we have to make decisions that shape our early careers based on little information about ourselves and our interests,” said a Yale 1L. “By the time we accept an offer, none of us will have done a clinic, a legal internship, or even a semester of classes that we chose to take.”

“There’s no way that a 1L who’s still taking Contracts, Torts, and Civ Pro can make an informed decision about firms and practice areas,” a 3L at Duke told me. “It took me a long time, a lot of research, and talking to many people to come up with meaningful heuristics for distinguishing firms. If you’re picking a firm in your first semester of law school, you might as well be throwing darts. It’s a totally impossible task.”

If firms are recruiting so much earlier, you might expect them to extend greater flexibility to students in terms of picking a practice area or declaring their interests within the law. But if anything, the trend is in the opposite direction.

“As recruiting has moved earlier, we’ve also seen an increase in firms expecting students to know what practice areas they want to work in,” said Casaleggi. “But most first-semester 1Ls don’t have fully-formed ideas about what they might want to do in the law—and I don’t mean that in a negative way, because as 1Ls, they haven’t seen enough to know what they want to do.”

Making students pick firms and practices this early is causing more students to select firms that might be great firms, but aren’t the right firms for them. And it’s causing firms to hire candidates who might be great candidates, but aren’t the right candidates for them.

“We’re increasingly seeing many more mismatches, on both sides of the aisle,” Casaleggi said. “More and more students are coming back to us and saying they want to re-recruit as 3Ls—but historically, 3L recruiting has been very limited and narrow.”

This mismatch could permanently affect careers—in unforeseen ways.

“When I was a 1L, I thought I wanted to be a transactional lawyer, and I spent my 1L summer doing corporate work,” said a Biglaw partner who is today a leading Supreme Court litigator. “If I had to pick a firm and practice area as a 1L, there’s a very good chance I’d be doing something completely different.”

A Disproportionate Impact on First-Generation Students, Minority Students, and ‘Late Bloomers’

Certain groups or types of students will bear the brunt of this accelerated recruiting timetable. First-generation law students will find it especially difficult.

“Both of my parents were lawyers,” said Menagh, the Fordham 3L. “I’ve had a very different experience compared to someone who has never met a lawyer or didn’t know any lawyers growing up. There’s nobody who can help them through the process in the same way.”

“The accelerated recruiting timeline is systematically disadvantaging students who are first-generation professionals, attend schools outside the traditional T14, and don’t have the cultural capital to know this recruiting process even exists,” wrote Kourtney James, former firmwide diversity recruiting manager at Morgan Lewis & Bockius, on LinkedIn. “We’re creating a system that rewards proximity to privilege.”

Also on LinkedIn, Dean Eboni Nelson of the University of Connecticut School of Law wrote, “I worry about what this will mean for the legal profession, given its longstanding diversity and inclusion challenges. To quote the great Sam Cooke, I hope ‘a change is gonna come.’”

Dean Nelson’s concern about the impact on diversity is understandable. According to Nikia Gray of NALP, the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023) is already affecting where students from underrepresented minority groups go to law school, by shifting them toward less-selective less schools. A New York Times analysis found that the number of Black students matriculating at the nation’s top 18 schools declined this year, even though Black students as a percentage of all law students held steady (at around 8 percent).

In light of how large firms focus on highly ranked schools when recruiting, reducing the number of minority students at elite schools will make it even harder for these students to land Biglaw jobs. And the earlier recruiting timeline will likely exacerbate this effect, by making it harder for minority students at non-T14 schools to distinguish themselves through grades and activities.

The latest version of the process also puts disproportionate emphasis on a student’s first-semester academic performance.

“Grades aren’t everything, but they’re important to many employers, and not everyone does well their first semester of law school,” Casaleggi said. “Some students won’t do well in their first semester, and firms will miss out on those late bloomers.”

This point resonated with Bryan Heckenlively, a partner at Munger Tolles & Olson.

“My first semester was my worst semester in law school,” he said. “My career might have taken a very different trajectory if it had been decided based on that one semester.”

In the end, Heckenlively graduated near the top of his class at Berkeley Law, completed two federal clerkships, and joined Munger, where he made partner and now chairs the recruiting committee. In that role, he oversaw the firm’s revamp of its summer program (discussed in more detail below).

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Law Firms ‘Need To Be in the Game’—But Aren’t Happy About It

Law students and law schools are generally upset over the incredibly early recruiting process. What about law firms?

“The firms are generally unhappy, but they feel they have no choice,” according to Casaleggi. “The competition between firms that has pushed the process earlier doesn’t reward restraint; the risks are too high.”

In the last recruiting cycle, Cleary Gottlieb opened its portal to applications in May of the 1L year. For this cycle, it opened its portal even earlier, in November of the 1L year.

“We made this move in response to the market,” explained Maureen Linch, a tax partner at Cleary and member of its global talent management committee. “Like other firms, we’re competing for a similar pool of talent—so if other firms are hiring at this time, we need to be in the game.”

But this is not the process that she would have designed or selected herself—and Linch identified, candidly and thoughtfully, some of its drawbacks for firms.

“We have limited information about the candidates,” she said. “They don’t have work experience in the law, for the most part. They don’t have grades—which aren’t the only thing that matters, but they are a metric.”

“They don’t have as clear a sense of what they want to do, compared to students farther along in law school, so it’s harder to find things to talk about during interviews. And it’s more challenging for firms to plan for the future, when we have a group of individuals who are less certain about what they want to do in the law.”

“I’m going through a stack of résumés on my desk, and it’s very difficult to differentiate law students after only two to three months,” said an office managing partner at a prominent firm. “There’s a prejudice in favor of candidates with impressive undergraduate schools or pre-law-school employment, but this might not bear any relationship to how they perform as lawyers.”

“We run a higher risk of selecting people who don’t want to be in our city or aren’t as interested in what we do at our firm. As someone who takes mentoring seriously, I want to make sure we’re getting candidates who are making the right choices for them. But this process seems almost designed to ensure that that won’t take place. It’s dispiriting.”

And recruiting this early isn’t just bad for a firm’s culture. It also threatens something that partners have to care about, in an increasingly competitive market: profitability.

“Firms are going to see much more associate attrition going forward, and this will hit their bottom line,” said Casaleggi. “Associates often don’t become truly profitable for firms until their third or fourth year, but a growing number of associates aren’t making it to their third or fourth year.”

“So the mismatch factor is huge. And firms should be concerned about that, even if they’re not as concerned about the academic disruption and mental-health challenges faced by students.”

Inadequate information about candidates and an increased risk of mismatch are what led Munger Tolles to restructure its summer program. I recently praised Munger’s approach as “an effort to stop the insanity and make the recruiting process more flexible and less pressured.”

The revamped Munger program is less about converting summer associates into permanent associates—in a departure from tradition, offers of full-time employment are not extended at the end of the summer—and more about forming a longer-term relationship between the firm and the candidate. That lawyer might decide to join Munger after a clerkship or two, or maybe after a few years at a different firm.

“As a small firm, we’re very focused on the quality of our lawyers, making sure that everyone we bring in the door is someone that we’re comfortable having on a lean team and introducing to a client,” said Heckenlively of Munger. “It’s very important for us to have a certain minimum amount of information about our candidates. So it wasn’t going to be workable for us to hire people in January of their 1L year, with the expectation that they’ll become our full-time lawyers.”

The Unintended Consequences of Hyper-Accelerated Recruiting

Hyper-accelerated recruiting will likely have a number of unintended consequences, both within and beyond Biglaw. Here are some possibilities.

First, we could see erosion in the primacy of the 2L summer program as the main source of entry-level or junior associates. The Munger Tolles approach of essentially decoupling its summer program from its hiring of full-time associates could become the wave of the future.

If firms start noticing more mismatch and greater associate attrition among former summer associates who return as full-time associates, firms might shrink their 2L summer programs, while increasing their hiring through other channels: more hiring of recent graduates, judicial law clerks, and lateral associates from other firms. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more lateral hiring of junior associates with only one to two years of experience, as opposed to the midlevel associates who have been the traditional targets of lateral recruiting.

And law students might also start recognizing that the 2L summer program isn’t the only entry point to a firm. As Professor Orin Kerr of Stanford Law tweeted, “[l]aw students will realize that you don’t have to sign on to the firm where you summered, resulting in a more active market in straight-to-associate hiring.”

Second, we could see a rise in 3L recruiting. Historically, 3L recruiting has been limited and narrow, a way for firms to fill very specific needs—e.g., an opening for a junior tax associate in the Houston office. But if we see more mismatches between 2L summer associates and their firms, more robust 3L recruiting could serve as a safety valve or corrective of sorts—a way of fixing mismatches before a lawyer spends two or three years at the firm where they happened to summer, but isn’t the best fit for them in light of their long-term interests.

Imagine a student who, as a 1L, accepts an offer to do a 2L summer at Cravath—mainly because it’s one of the few firms that she’s heard of. During her 1L summer, she works for the World Bank. As a 2L, through coursework and serving as a research assistant to a professor of international law, she discovers a passion for international arbitration. She might want to re-recruit as a 3L—not because Cravath isn’t a great firm, but because certain other firms focus more on international arbitration.

“We are looking into increasing the population of 3Ls that we hire,” said Maureen Linch of Cleary (which does have a Chambers-ranked practice in international arbitration, as well as many foreign offices). “When law students are choosing firms this early, they are doing so with incomplete information. So we can imagine summer associates going to a firm, not having the best experience, and wanting to explore other options. We think the 3L market will become more active, and we’ve already been dipping our toes in it.”

Third, at law schools, we could see reduced participation in law review and moot court. Traditionally, according to Nikia Gray of NALP, law journal and moot served as “résumé boosters,” valuable to students in their quest for Biglaw jobs. But if students land firm jobs in January of their 1L year, before the process of applying to the law review or the moot court team, they’ll be less motivated to pursue these activities.

“One big issue is what will happen to law reviews, when there’s less of an incentive to join the law review or serve on the board,” said an articles editor of their school’s flagship law review. “We already noticed fewer submissions for the law review competition in the most recent cycle, after recruiting moved up to the 1L spring.”

Fourth, getting 1Ls committed to Biglaw so early could have a negative effect on other sectors of the legal world, such as public-interest work or government service. The legal profession is a series of interconnected webs—so what happens in Biglaw has spillover effects for other practice environments.

“The new recruiting timeline could further undermine the delicate ecosystem of public-interest law,” said Professor Tanina Rostain of Georgetown Law, a scholar of the legal profession and access to justice. “Now 1L students feel immense pressure to commit to Biglaw, before they’ve had the chance to explore public-interest careers. This early in law school, students have hardly any information about legal career paths. What they do know is that these firms pay extraordinary amounts of money—and these students have enormous debt loads.”

Some firms are offering to pay their future 2L summer associates to perform public-interest work during their 1L summers. The firms might present this as their generous support of public-interest work, but Rostain doesn’t see it that way. Her fear is that these well-funded 1Ls—who have already committed to spend their 2L summers in Biglaw—will “crowd out” students with a stronger interest in public-interest work, taking away 1L summer internships that these students need to advance in the public-interest world (which is a challenging career path to begin with).

What Is To Be Done?

In the course of my reporting, I spoke with law students, professors, and career-services counselors, as well as law firm partners and recruiting professionals. With a few exceptions—such as a 1L at Yale who told me that “getting Biglaw recruiting out of the way earlier is huge,” and “a lot of the firms really are quite similar”—the vast majority of my interviewees expressed dissatisfaction with super early recruiting.

“This is madness—a lose-lose-lose situation that’s bad for students, schools, and firms,” a 3L at Yale told me. “And I don’t understand why top law schools and top firms don’t use their market power to stop it.”

It can be summed up in a word: antitrust.

“One natural possibility would be for the law schools to get together and agree not to permit law firms to recruit before the second year or some such thing,” said Professor Eric Posner of Chicago Law, an expert on the antitrust laws as applied to labor markets. “But such an agreement might violate the antitrust laws.”

In December 2018, as noted above, NALP revised its recruiting guidelines. The biggest change was the removal of specific dates and timelines for different steps in the process—a move that was motivated by antitrust concerns, according to NALP executive director Nikia Gray.

“Over time, the Department of Justice’s and Federal Trade Commission’s interpretation and enforcement of antitrust regulations had changed, leading the agencies to remove or update much of their published guidance that businesses had relied upon to tell them what conduct was permissible,” wrote Gray. “With it, many associations found it necessary to revisit their codes of conduct, ethics policies, and guidelines—and NALP was no exception.”

I asked Gray a question that several sources asked me: might NALP get back in the business of issuing concrete timetables? Her response: “No, that is not something we can do.”

In the absence of the coordination that’s prohibited by antitrust law, what we’re most likely seeing in the Biglaw associate market is what labor economists call “unraveling.” Unraveling happens when employers and candidates make employment decisions earlier and earlier, often too early, for fear of being left behind or losing out if they wait.

According to Posner, what appears to be happening is that “law firms are (legally) coordinating on starting salaries, through follow-the-leader pricing”—e.g., adhering to a salary or bonus scale set by a recognized market leader, such as Cravath or Milbank. And so, because there’s so little competition between firms on pay, “competition is displaced into the timing of offers—but that just leads everyone to make early offers, so no one gains and everyone loses.”

It’s a standard prisoner’s dilemma. The market participants could cooperate for mutual benefit—but because such coordination is legally prohibited, the incentives favor acting for individual gain, even if everyone acting that way makes everyone worse off in the end.

In a thoughtful and thought-provoking paper about the unraveling of labor markets like the ones for medical residents and judicial law clerks, Posner chronicled some interesting history. In 2002, three physicians filed a class action challenging the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP), the elaborate system used for matching medical students with hospital residency programs. But after a fierce lobbying effort by medical schools and hospitals, Congress passed a law effectively granting the NRMP an antitrust exemption.

Could Biglaw obtain a similar exemption? I doubt it.

According to the congressional findings in support of 15 U.S.C. § 37b, the medical-match program “has effectively served the interests of medical students, teaching hospitals, and patients for over half a century.” Many would disagree with that—including Eric Posner, who views the NRMP as enabling the exploitation of residents. But getting the American people and Congress to care about the training of doctors, who treat all of us, was surely easier than it would be to get the public to care about future Biglaw associates and the elite law firms that hire them.

And there’s at least one other reason to believe an antitrust exemption would be tough to get today.

“Congress’s view on antitrust has shifted since the medical-match program got that exception in the early 2000s,” said NALP’s Nikia Gray. “Aggressive antitrust enforcement is one of the few areas of bipartisan agreement.”

Can Someone Else Please Fix This Problem?

If coordination is unlawful and the law can’t be changed, does any individual actor have the power to make a difference? Law schools argue that law firms need to step up to the plate.

“If we tried to push back as an individual school, we’d put our students at a disadvantage,” said Rostain of Georgetown. “If a leading firm like Cravath was willing to wait, that might inspire other firms to follow, and something might change. But firms have this crazy sense of desperation that they’re going to miss out on the ‘best’ students. It’s very much like clerkship hiring.”

“When I’ve asked why Harvard goes along with this, I’ve been told that if we don’t do it, our competitors will do it, and our students will be disadvantaged—consigned to the equivalent of selling pencils outside of Macy’s,” said Wilkins of Harvard. “The only people who can stop this are the law firms.”

“They would have antitrust issues if they had a lateral agreement,” he acknowledged. “But firms have ways of telegraphing things to each other. Look at how they set compensation through ‘conscious parallelism,’ after they were told that they couldn’t sit around a table in their club and fix salaries.”

The firms, however, maintain that the schools are best situated to take a stand.

“The top law schools have far more market power than the firms,” said a department chair at a major firm. “All the firms are vying for students at the very top law schools.”

“I’ve been surprised at the relative silence of law school deans on this subject,” this partner continued. “If Yale Law came out against early recruiting of its students, would any firm just skip out on hiring anyone from Yale? Of course not.”

“When we put together our summer class, we have a rough idea of how many students we might get from a particular school. If Yale said it was going to hold off, we’d take note of that, and we’d leave enough room in our program to accommodate them.”

I could see the situation improving if maybe a few actors take initial steps, and a few more follow them. On the school front, maybe Yale or Harvard Law could take a stand against excessively early recruiting—and maybe that would empower other top schools to follow suit, just as they did when Yale and Harvard led a boycott of the U.S. News rankings (which resulted in rankings reform).

On the firm front, maybe a few firms could follow the example of Munger and chart a different path. For example, one career-services counselor pointed out to me that Wachtell Lipton announced February 6 as the application deadline for its 2027 summer program—even though many other firms will probably be done hiring by the end of January.

By expressing its willingness to conduct a less rushed process that will extend into February, Wachtell “is betting on itself—and betting that even with a somewhat slower process, it can still get the talent it wants,” according to this counselor. “They’re taking a risk. But given their market position and smaller size, they probably feel they can take a risk that other firms can’t.”

Finally, here’s an intriguing development. Law students from 18 law schools—the top 14 aka “T14,” which actually amount to 17 schools (because of a four-way tie for #14), plus Cornell Law, a traditional member of the T14—have drafted an open letter to the American Bar Association. Law student associations at ten law schools have voted in favor of signing the letter, with others still considering it.

The letter contends that accelerated recruiting is “undermin[ing] legal education, student and staff well-being, and the recruitment market.” It then suggests possible courses of action the ABA might take—including “evaluating whether accreditation standards might better support the educational focus of the first year of law school.”

Could the ABA use its power as the only nationally recognized accreditor of U.S. law schools to issue accreditation standards that might improve the current Biglaw recruiting process? It’s an interesting idea. But its timing isn’t great: the ABA’s accrediting role is facing scrutiny right now, from the Florida Attorney General, the Texas Supreme Court, and most recently, the Federal Trade Commission.

This much is clear: the orderly and organized OCI process that I went through in 1997 can’t be brought back. In the words of Nikia Gray of NALP, “We can’t put that genie back in the bottle.”

But hopefully the Biglaw recruiting process will get better, not worse, going forward. The chaos of the current time cannot continue.

“We might not be able to go back to the past,” said Lois Casaleggi of Chicago. “But we have to get somewhere different than where we are now—for the students’ sake.”

UPDATE (12/19/2025, 12:03 p.m.): For additional discussion, please check out the latest episode of the On the Merits podcast, where Nikia Gray of NALP and I discuss the current recruiting timeline with Jessie Kamens (my fabulous editor at Bloomberg Law, when she’s not podcasting).

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