By Jamie R. Abrams
BigLaw has manufactured an “arms race” for talent that is hurting employers, students, recruiters, career counselors and legal educators alike. Like most arms races, the action of one law firm has triggered the reactions of others, all seeking to cultivate the impression of superior strength while instead imposing enormous (and often-absurd) costs on everyone.
This arms race pushed BigLaw hiring for 1L summer into October of the 1L year and leapfrogged BigLaw hiring for 2L summer into March to May of the 1L year while collapsing diversity-centered recruitment portals into this murky process, abandoning on-campus recruitment and blurrily suggesting that 1L summer applicants are simultaneously being “precruited” for summer 2L. If you found that prior sentence to be a dizzying time warp of poorly sequenced chaos, then you understand precisely.
This timeline fosters a fictitious scarcity mindset absent any evidence that the talent pool is smaller or harder to assess while undermining the exact educational processes and professor-student relationships seeking to cultivate robust future talent.
“Talent” is not preordained at 1L orientation, and to adopt this mindset is myopic and exclusionary. Rather, talent develops from inquisitive growth mindsets, thoughtful feedback and adaptation, resilience and persistence, problem solving, creativity and self-reflection. Premature hiring processes perpetuate deep biases that arise from rushed decision-making with incomplete information.
This manufactured arms race harms legal education pedagogy, creates a logistics nightmare for students and educators, imposes psychological harms on students, and frays what should be synergistic relationships between legal education and law practice. Educational pedagogy should allow all students time to grow, adapt and transform before employers assess job readiness. Students need time to cultivate skills and flourish in their educational institution.
Instead, this year’s fall 1Ls began working on preparing their summer job resumés before they had submitted a single piece of written legal analysis. 1Ls skipped afternoon/evening classes early in the fall (often in groups) to attend law firm mixers with no clear assessment of their employment viability at these firms while simultaneously (and understandably) seeking excused absences and professional references from the very professor whose class they were skipping.
Professors who give formative assessment, such as legal research and writing professors and 1L faculty with midterms, do this laborious task because it is an equitable educational best practice to give students low-stakes assignments to assess and strengthen competencies before a high-stakes outcome attaches.
In this frenzied hiring environment, formative assessment instead became the source of student panic and resentment because 1Ls sometimes perceived critical feedback as fatal to their BigLaw employment viability instead of an opportunity to learn. BigLaw hiring timing further reinforced this inversion of formative development by giving 2L summer job offers before students ever began their 1L summer job. This undermines educational pedagogy and professional formation.
This timeline bets against education itself and sends an exclusionary message that students land “prestigious” jobs based on their pedigree or preexisting network alone. Students need to complete their first graded assignment before their first exam, their first exams before applying for their first jobs, perform in their first job before seeking their second job to form as professionals. This also yields more fruitful interviews and reference calls. It allows students to be present and purposeful in the task before them—whether class participation, a first writing assignment or a first assignment in a summer job.
This manufactured arms race also creates a logistics nightmare. Students are pulled off campus for extensive programming that often conflicts with campus activities. They are compelled to choose between the possibility of a job lead vs. class attendance or between holiday family time vs. sending out applications or exam studying vs. attending interviews (sometimes out of the geography entirely).
Recruiting professionals and law school career counselors are servicing and processing more student candidates than is necessary or efficient with increasingly slim budgets. 1Ls are compelled to seek references from fall and spring faculty before faculty have assessed a single piece of work product or called on the student in class. 1L faculty are rushed to meet aggressive grading deadlines. These logistics are burdening some of the most overworked stakeholders in this ecosystem already.
The psychological harms are steep too. Students cannot yet assess their employability in this sector. Professors and career counselors can’t advise strategically either, absent grades. Students cannot consider BigLaw contemporaneously with other employment sectors, a vital comparator to secure and retain talent.
Students jammed their Thanksgiving, winter and spring breaks with BigLaw recruitment tasks, steepening an acute wellness crisis and creating inequities for those balancing travel, family caregiving, paid employment and health barriers. Grades became the goal for 1Ls over learning (explicitly so now while perhaps always implicitly so). Students with offers are left feeling entitled to—and frankly desperate for—the grades that match the contingent offers. This is a flawed psychological pivot to an already-tenuous wellness picture for 1Ls, lawyers and higher education.
Finally, this arms race reflects a fundamental breakdown between the private bar and legal education. It devalues the classroom and evaluative processes of legal education because it makes decisions before students have learned foundational skills, thus disproportionately privileging those with law experience and existing networks. Yet it simultaneously makes offers contingent on grades, which is frankly a worst-case scenario.
The solutions are simple. They cost us nothing. Let students finish their fall semester immersively and with a purpose. Let fall faculty assess fall work product wholly, allowing formative and summative assessment to do its job. (Or make offers without contingencies.)
Let career counselors transition into 1Ls’ lives after 1Ls have learned more about themselves, the profession and law school pedagogy. Don’t put students in a high-stakes gamble brewing with resentment hoping that their grades match their contingent offer. Let students complete their first summer job before recruiting them for their second summer. They will know more, understand themselves better and be more authentic and well-rounded. Faculty, in turn, will also know our students more holistically and concretely.
This arms race harms everyone in its process, pedagogy and logistics. It undermines the well-being of 1Ls, educators and career services and recruiting professionals. It causes tension in relationships that should be synergistic and reciprocal.
Most dissonant, institutions following this new timeline—a necessary complicity to position students successfully in this highly competitive market—simultaneously boast deep commitments to wellness, professional identity formation, formative feedback and equitable institutional practices. Those specific aspects of legal education pedagogy were the most striking and noteworthy reforms seeking to build inclusive institutions that prepared more practice-ready graduates.
Now, the searing tensions between stated institutional values relative to lived student experiences comes across as tone deaf to law students (at best) and gaslighting (at worst). Law faculty wholeheartedly want to help train practice-ready students, tell employers about our students’ strengths and abilities, and improve our own pedagogies in conversation with employers about their needs and expectations.
This is a reciprocal relationship that should deploy equitable practices that are fair, methodical, paced, thoughtful and grounded in skills and knowledge, not gambles and guesses. A reset to rein in runaway recruitment practices helps build a more equitable, sustainable and thriving profession at a time when we need this outcome more than ever.
Jamie R. Abrams is a professor and the director of legal rhetoric at the American University Washington College of Law. She is the author of numerous books and articles about legal education pedagogy and the recipient of multiple teaching awards for innovative and inclusive teaching practices.
