<p>These are some exerpts from a recent article on law firm recruiting from the American Lawyer. The article mainly describes the recruiting process at big law firms for students at top law schools.</p>
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Is This Any Way to Recruit Associates?
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It's a scary prospect, meeting with partners at a big firm about a job. But, as one law student who landed a summer position at Latham & Watkins quickly realized, the pre-interview jitters were the hardest part. "I don't think through the entire interview process I got one difficult question," he says. In fact, the partners he met weren't all that interested in his academic work or his future career: "Almost everyone I talked to did fantasy football and was really interested in talking about their inner-firm leagues," he says. Partners might have been trying to make a connection with him by chatting about the trivial, but as the Latham summer puts it: "You don't feel you are being seriously vetted for a position." </p>
<p>Ask law firm recruits -- particularly those from elite schools -- about the recruiting experience, and the stories are fairly similar: Short interviews, shallow questions and a sheaf of boilerplate marketing materials. It's not much better on the other side of the equation. To find qualified candidates, firms respond to cattle calls at top law schools. There, partners meet 20 students a day for 20 minutes at a time for several days in a row. On the basis of those meetings, students are called back for a series of 30-minute office interviews. If a student is from a good school, has an acceptable resume, and decent social skills, he or she is practically guaranteed an offer for a summer position within 24 hours of the office visit. And nine times out of 10, a summer job leads to an offer for a full-time associate position.
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Firms spend as much as $250,000 to recruit a single summer associate, according to Am Law 200 recruiting partners and legal consultants. That includes all of the lawyer time spent recruiting and the hard costs (dinners, plane tickets, beach towels with a firm logo). Despite the expense and effort, just 28 percent of students who are offered a job by a big firm (one with more than 250 lawyers) will accept, a survey of 300-plus law firms by the National Association for Law Placement shows. This is due in part to the large number of offers that each student receives. And after associates do join a firm following their summer stints, 40 percent of them will leave by the end of their third year and 62 percent by the end of their fourth. True, firms count on most associates eventually leaving in order to keep their partnership ranks trim and profits high. But, according to NALP figures, firms report that 51 percent of associate departures every year are unwanted.
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While a handful of U.S. law firms are experimenting with new approaches, the vast majority of Am Law 200 firms are sticking with a recruiting system that hasn't changed much since the early 1970s.
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Am Law 200 firms send recruiters to ten to 30 law schools and at least a half-dozen job fairs. Students at top-tier schools will interview with an average of 25 to 30 firms each. Partners say that the process has intensified in recent years because many schools have shifted their recruitment weeks to August. In the past, on-campus interviewing was spread across September and October.
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In other words, it's an associate's market. As we reported last year, the number of lawyers working at Am Law 100 firms has tripled since 1986. Part of that growth has come from expansion in the associate ranks. According to The National Law Journal, a sibling publication, the number of associates in the 250 largest law firms has increased 76 percent over the last decade. During the same period, the number of law school graduates has gone up just 7 percent.
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Firms are responding to that crunch by reaching out to a wider array of law schools, doing more lateral recruiting, and fighting fiercely for graduates of the tier-one schools. Gihan Fernando, assistant dean of career services at Georgetown University Law Center, says that firms sent 10 percent more interviewers to campus in 2006 than in 2005 and anticipates a similar increase in 2007. Every additional interviewer allows a firm to meet 20 more students a day. And at top schools, there are enough firm-sponsored cocktail parties and luncheons to make a meal plan redundant. It's so hectic that schools have started recommending that firms refrain from hosting purely promotional events. Wendy Siegel, director of recruitment at New York University School of Law, says that students are more likely to remember the food at Nobu, a chic Manhattan eatery, than the name of the firm who paid for it.
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The callback period can be just as frantic. Firms have to arrange for each of the 20 students who may come through the office on a given day to meet with three or four partners.
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Once firms make an offer, they move into hard-sell mode, hosting dinners, drinks, and trips to the ball game. Cahill Gordon & Reindel hiring partner Noah Newitz says that he and his colleagues try to keep in weekly e-mail contact with their top prospects during the post-offer period. Alston & Bird hiring partner Jonathan Lowe estimates that it took 6,000 hours of attorney time to recruit 57 summer associates for the firm's Atlanta office this year.
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To limit the time they spend on follow-up, firms often make offers to students on the day of the callback in the hope that students will be flattered into an immediate response. "It's an incredibly effective tool," says the Latham & Watkins recruit. "After the callback, they send you out to a really nice restaurant. They got the wine, toasted me, and offered me the job. They wanted me to accept right away, and it was hard not to." Within Latham, he says, lawyers get bragging rights if their recruit accepts at dinner.
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But the rush to hire has its perils -- as the low acceptance and high attrition rates among associates show. One of the biggest mistakes firms make, say legal consultants, is to rely too heavily on academic credentials. Eva Wisnik, a law firm consultant who worked as a staff recruiter at Schulte Roth & Zabel and Cadwalader, says that in her experience, firms often look no deeper than the grade point and class rank. "Someone who was No. 2 in a class," she says, "we would talk ourselves into hiring them. Oftentimes they wouldn't do well."
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That's because academic performance is not necessarily a proxy for work performance.
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Firms use grades as a crutch because it gives them a false sense of limiting risk, says Jim Kennedy, a consultant who counsels law firms on interview techniques. Lawyers assume that if a student got the thumbs-up from a Stanford Law School professor, then she must be smart and able to succeed. They use the interview to see if they like her, rather than to probe whether she's got the chops (and desire) to make it in a law firm. It's known as the cross-country flight test: "They just try to see if this is someone I could sit next to for six hours," says a Stanford student.
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But resistance to change is fierce, within both law schools and law firms. Four decades ago, a consortium of schools created voluntary guidelines, with a timetable, to make the recruiting process more predictable for students. "The reason it worked," says Jim Leipold, executive director of NALP, "is that law schools can say, if you want to recruit on our campus, you must abide by these rules. They have that leverage."</p>
<p>Changing those procedures so that their students will be more carefully vetted is not a priority for schools. For one thing, a school's prestige relies in part on the number of graduates who land jobs at top firms. In addition, the basic orientation of law schools is to maximize the number of choices available to their students. NALP former deputy director Julie Hamre says that schools believe that students benefit from having many interviews and many offers to choose from. Even now, with students seeing more firms than they can track, schools are focused on keeping the interview counts high.
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Law firms are in no position to pressure schools to reconsider. School administrators set the on-campus schedule, so firms are wary of doing anything to strain that relationship. It is a real disadvantage to be booked at the end of recruitment week, because students are burned out and, with callbacks already in hand, more likely to cancel.
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Already, inefficiencies in entry-level recruiting are driving firms to hire more lateral associates, who are more expensive to hire and even less likely to stay at the firm in the long run. According to NALP, 56 percent of entry-level associates will leave a firm within four years; 73 percent of laterals leave in the same period. More expense and more turnover. No wonder partners just want to talk about fantasy football.
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