BigLaw Making “Jumbo” to First-Year Law Students?
According to Karen Sloan writing in Reuters, BigLaw is sweetening its offers to law students and making those offers earlier, while also tightening the golden handcuffs. The key innovations are that (1) students are being interviewed during their first semester of law school, and (2) offers are made for both summers. The idea, I gather, is that the firms want to keep the top students for themselves.
Judging by the universally negative response to this news on Bluesky, I take it that I am supposed to be scandalized by this development, but I can’t muster the requisite moral outrage. I assume that all offers are contingent on first-semester grades being acceptable and, in any case, all offers are for at-will employment. I can’t imagine that the law firms are committed to hiring the students for both summers if they do not meet expectations. I can’t imagine that the law firms would try to enforce what must be one-sided commitments if a student decides not to continue at the firm after the first summer.
Karen Sloan interviews experts who discern “an information vacuum both ways,” but it’s not as if another semester of law school is going to change things. I had a great experience as a summer associate and associate at a BigLaw firm, but I was always aware of how fungible I was. I expect that is, if anything, more true today than it was twenty years ago. Does it really matter to the firms whether they hire an associate who will be the Editor-in-Chief of the school’s flagship law review? Can’t an ordinary member of the editing staff do just as good a job at document review? Are the firms looking for partner material? Is there anything to suggest that first semester grades are a good indicator if that is the goal of recruiting?
And from the students’ perspective, you can’t really know what life is like at a firm until you work there. And even when you work at a firm, there are different cultures within each firm. I worked for a few months at a firm in Florida before going back to my BigLaw firm in New York. I had a wonderful, collegial relationship with the partners with whom I worked in the litigation department at that firm. I was told that on the corporate side, things were much more hierarchical, and male associates were only allowed to wear white or oxford blue button-down shirts. I was told that the dress code was a demand of the firm’s most important corporate client. I can’t imagine. It’s not that I would mind what color shirt I had to wear, but that would be my brown M&Ms — I could never respect a client who judged me by the color of my shirt rather than the content of my work product.
And firm culture can change no matter when you were hired. The firm with which I worked as a summer associate and which I rejoined after clerking, was a smallish New York office of a global law firm. The litigation department was a tight and collegial of two dozen attorneys. While I was clerking, the firm merged with a New York based firm with 300-400 attorneys and offices in the World Trade Center. I mostly worked with a partner with whom I was comfortable from my days as a summer associate, but things were very different and then 9/11 happened and the work environment changed again.
The so-called “jumbo” offers, in which firms try to lure first-year students into working for the same firm after both the first and second years, come with a $25,000 bonus. Given that salaries for new associates now start at $225,000 at these firms, $25,000 would not entice me to stay at a firm where I was not happy, nor would it even prevent me from trying a different firm if I was happy but curious.
The one critique of the change that makes sense to me is that moving up the interviews to October or November is inducing panic in first-year law students. In my day, we had early-interview week during the first week of classes or even the week before classes began. That was a fine time, when students have recovered from the first semester and are not yet embroiled in the work of the second semester. On the other hand, I’m not sure what about these interviews is panicked-inducing. You got the interview based on whatever data got you into law school. Just go in there and be your LSAT score and undergraduate GPA. They are studying your resume, so make sure you know it well.
That said, I do remember that when I was clerking, the feeder judges started a new race to the bottom while jockeying to get the best clerks. Things got so bad that judges were recruiting first-year law students. My judge, who was a feeder to the legal academy but not the Supreme Court, had to play along. On day, she was on the phone with a Yale law prof, and he was complaining about how hard it was for him to act as a reference for first-year law students. She covered the mouthpiece, caught my eye, and mouthed the words “Who is this?” to me, to my great amusement. After she hung up, she said, “Everything he was saying was true, but I don’t make he rules, and in any case it was completely unhelpful to the student he was supposed to be recommending, which was the point of the call.
Eventually, the feeder judges settled on a different time frame, and everybody moved on without any real damage to the federal judiciary attributable to the hiring process. I suspect that given a cycle or two of “jumbo” offers, things will return to the normal world in which law firms attract that most attractive candidates with something totally normal, like paying 24-year-olds with minimal experience a quarter of a million dollars, plus a big bonus for feeding prompts into AI.