Choosing
Wisely
The new-associate recruitment
system is full of inefficiencies.
For a better approach, look to
The current oversupply of new associates has sent law firms scrambling to imple-
ment short-term adjustments, such as secondments and deferrals. But the legal pro-
fession needs more than temporary half-measures. The new-associate recruitment
RONALD J. CALA II
market is fundamentally broken, and it has been
for some time. Incremental changes are not going to address its underlying problems. The market needs a structural fix—a centralized matching
authority, like the one that the medical profession
has been using for more than half a century.
Firms make most of their new-associate offers
to their summer interns. Thus, associate recruitment mostly happens at the intern-selection level.
Summer internships operate as a bilateral matching market, in which law firms rank the candidates they interview and the candidates rank firms
with which they wish to intern. The labor market
“clears” in a decentralized manner. Law firms
choose schools from which to interview, interested
students at those schools apply to particular firms,
the interviewing firms offer summer internship
positions to specific students, and the students decide whether to accept the offers.
This decentralized clearing of the labor market
leads to predictable inefficiencies, to the detriment
of both firms and students. First, it creates bad
matches. A firm waits for a top-ranked candidate
to decline its offer before making an offer to a second-ranked candidate, who by then has gone else-
where, perhaps to their second-ranked firm. The
same dynamic occurs on the other side of the market: A candidate who is wait-listed by their first-ranked firm risks that forgoing a second-ranked
firm could leave them without an offer from either.
Candidates hoard offers, and firms make “
exploding offers” that push candidates to decide very
soon after receiving them.
Second, the job market can “unravel.” A second-tier firm tries to preempt first-tier firms by
approaching students earlier and making them
time-bound offers. First-tier firms respond by
also moving their recruitment dates up. This spurs
second-tier firms to move their recruitment dates
further up. The same dynamic occurs among law
schools. A second-tier school opens its campus
recruitment window just a little earlier than first-tier schools, hoping to encourage firms to make
more internship offers to its students than they
would otherwise. Recognizing that they are being
preempted, first-tier schools also move up their
recruitment windows, encouraging a second-tier
school to move still earlier.
The consequence is that recruitment occurs
long before jobs begin. Currently students are re-
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