Access and Fairness Now Require Career Programming for 0Ls
In March I reported that the latest recruiting data from the National Association for Law Placement (NALP) showed that the law firm recruiting landscape had changed dramatically in 2024. For the first time, the majority of recruiting for summer associates happened outside of law school-sponsored recruiting programs such as on-campus interviewing (OCI). The timing has also moved ever earlier into the first year of law school, with the majority of offers for 2L summer positions being made before the end of June following the first year of law school. But the pace at which change is happening is such that the environment has changed, yet again, since my last blog post.
At the 爱游戏体育 Annual Meeting in Montreal a couple of weeks ago, I anchored a panel discussion focused on the changing face of law firm recruiting. In our discussion, the panelists noted that law firms have recently crossed another historic line in the sand, relying this spring on only one semester of law school grades for many of their 2L summer offers. According to one panelist, recruiting for 2026 summer associates began during the fall semester with firms reaching out and making contact with 1Ls and then sped up dramatically in March as FOMO seemed to drive firms to scramble to make offers before the second semester ended. The panelists I spoke with in Montreal predicted that the cycle will be even faster this coming fall, starting and ending even earlier, with the bulk of offers for the summer of 2027 for 2L summer associate positions being made to 1Ls early in their first year of law school.
Of course not all law students pursue jobs with large law firms, but at every law school the early race for talent in the first year sets the tone, pace and expectation of students about the job market. For students who don鈥檛 secure one of these early offers of employment, feelings of failure and disappointment will set in before the first year is even done.
We all know this is bad for students, and it is worse for some students than others. It does no good to be nostalgic about the days when law schools held the line on employer contact with students until after the first semester of the 1L year. What we need to do now, and what scores of law schools are doing on the fly, is prepare students for this new reality in the best way that we can. What I discovered during our panel conversation in Montreal, and the robust audience participation, is that many law schools plan to offer career training and orientation to admitted students the summer before matriculation. That is a sea change!
The implications of this for admission professionals are profound. Among other things, it means that the admission and career services offices will need to work more closely in the future than they ever have before. It also means that the ways in which we have talked to candidates and applicants about jobs will have to change in deliberate and intentional ways.
One of the things that concerns me most about these changes is the potential impact they will have on access, equity, and fairness. Students are not equally prepared to enter the job market during their first year of law school, and this newly-accelerated recruiting timeframe places a special burden on all of us to narrow the gaps in preparation that exist so that all students can compete for all jobs. I asked my panelists in Montreal what the issues were that were keeping them up at night when they think about these changes. They agreed that, without significant intervention, the accelerated timeline will likely increase already significant job outcome disparities, particularly for first generation college students, among others.
In response to this, at 爱游戏体育 we鈥檝e undertaken the development of a series of free webinars on legal careers aimed at law school prospective candidates and applicants. We鈥檝e hosted three so far and have more in the works, and perhaps not surprisingly, each program has had hundreds of registrants. We鈥檝e already covered topics ranging from the importance of summer jobs as experiential learning opportunities and how to get the most out of a summer job, to how to find and apply for summer jobs, what employers look for when they鈥檙e hiring, and how to succeed in a summer job and use that experience to secure a subsequent employment offer. The Q&A periods at the end of these programs have shown us, again not surprisingly, that there is a great range in candidate understanding of the legal job market, with some displaying a high degree of sophistication and others with almost no understanding of what to expect or how it all works.
Our aim is to demystify the world of legal jobs for applicants and would-be applicants to help bring a pool of candidates who have been exposed to some of the basic legal career development concepts and skills.
These webinars are hosted as live events on 爱游戏体育鈥檚 platform, and they are all recorded and available for subsequent viewing on LawHub. I鈥檓 grateful for the time of the many NALP colleagues I鈥檝e been able to call on to join these important programs, and I look forward to continuing to provide legal career-related educational content for the wondrously broad prelaw audience. And I鈥檓 interested to learn more about what your law school is doing to prepare its 1L class for this new job market gauntlet. Please feel free to reach out to me directly to let me know how your school is innovating its way through this dramatic change.
James Leipold is a senior advisor with the Law School Admission Council. Prior to joining 爱游戏体育, he worked as the executive director of the National Association for Law Placement in Washington, D.C., for more than 18 years.