NALP's Fall 2008 "Perspectives"

NALP has issued some "Perspectives on Fall 2008 Law Student Recruiting" (large pdf). Basically, NALP says last fall was a crappy time to be a 2L.

The linked pdf contains a lot of information (er, "perspectives") but to my mind there are really only two relevant perspectives when you get down to brass tacks: employed, and not-employed. The rest is number-crunching:

The most dramatic impact of the current economic situation on legal employment opportunities can be seen in the numbers that describe the fall recruiting of 2Ls. Across employers of all sizes, the median number of offers extended dropped dramatically from 15 to 10. At the largest firms, firms with more than 700 lawyers firmwide, the median number of offers dropped from 30 to 18.5. Similarly, the percent of callback interviews resulting in offers for summer spots fell precipitously to 46.6% from a figure that had hovered at or above 60% for three years. Not surprisingly, the offer acceptance rate also jumped. At 32.5%, it is the highest rate recorded since 2002.

First, cheers to you, NALP, for saying "situation" and not "climate." Second, those numbers caught me off guard. They are certainly in line with popular wisdom about last fall’s hiring, but they seem a bit at odds with experience – at least at Boalt. My sense is that callbacks from Boalt’s fall OCIP,¹ which occurred before and during the market collapse, went out at a rate similar to last year. There is no need to speculate because the CDO has data to back this up (I filled out their survey, didn't you?), but my sense is that we did far better than schools that hold OCIP in, say, October. There is inertia to institutional decision-making, including hiring decisions, and it can require a real affirmative effort to change course once a large organization has made a decision. (Cite Thelen, which was scheduling callbacks for the last few weeks of the firm’s existence.) Perhaps I’m wrong about everything I’ve said up until here, but if I’m not, the timing of Boalt’s 2008 OCIP helped some of us catch the last train out of town.

If correct, that’s good news for my class but it bodes ominous for the class of 2011. If there is pressure at many firms to keep summer classes small because money is tight, and if there is an inertia to hiring trends, then the batten-down-the-hatches mindset is unlikely to change between now and September. On the other hand, I doubt firms that scale back their summer class sizes do so uniformly across law schools. My guess is that even in a shrinking market Standford, Boalt, and UCLA will be feeder schools for BigLaw USA. Chapman and Loyola?  Not so much. So, to those of you in the class of 2011 who chose Boalt for its career- and door- opening opportunities down the line: good call. Your decision may pay off sooner than you think.


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¹ "OCIP" or "OCI"? "OCIP Process" is downright inexcusable, but I go back and forth on the acronym. Help!