posted on Monday, September 03, 2007 12:11 PM
by
Lou Michels
Law firm hiring--lawyers heal thyselves!!
Law firm hiring is coming under some scrutiny, as the cost of bringing in a single summer intern approaches $250,000 for some firms. Add to that the starting salary of first-year associates in places like New York and Chicago ($165,000) and you start to realize the stakes that are involved for firms as they compete to bring in the talent that management hopes will be worth the price. It's not too much of a stretch to say that most employment lawyers would not recommend that their clients use the same hiring practices that the lawyers' law firms follow.
A recent article in law.com highlights the ineffective systems used by many law firms to bring in students who will work there for the summer, and, it is hoped, ultimately accept a position with the firm. The ugly reality is that only 28% of the students offered a job by a major law firm will accept, and of that group, 40% will leave by the end of their third year and 62% by the end of their fourth.
The biggest problem is lack of contact with the applicants. My own firm is guilty of this to a certain extent, we rarely have more than 30 minutes to talk to applicants in our offices, and even less time for the in-school interviews. As a result, most law firms begin to fall back on things that don't require a lot of time to assess, such as grades. Unfortunately, as the article points out, grades are not a particularly good indicator of anything other than success in law school. Moreover, the kinds of relatively superficial and repetitive questions that are asked during the actual face-to-face interviews aren't really designed to provide much guidance either to the law students, or the lawyers interviewing them.
Other high-end white-collar professions, such as banks and accounting/consulting firms don't engage in this kind of "through a glass darkly" evaluation process. Frequently, these outfits begin recruiting at the undergraduate level, and follow potential recruits through their advanced degree schooling. They spend enough time with the individual to know whether that person has the temperament for their practice, and they simply don't interview everyone who walks in the door, unlike the typical law school interview processes. Finally, a number of these companies use personality assessments in order to find out whether the person who looks good for 45 minutes in an interview will be able to hold up to months of stress in a corporate financial setting.
Clearly something will have to change--firms can't afford to spend 6000 hours of attorney time to recruit 57 law students for a three-month summer internship, as an Atlanta firm did this year. With increasing recruiting costs, and rising salaries, firms will have to develop some type of mechanism to hire people who are able to pay for themselves in the short run-- firms simply cannot tolerate the numerous false starts that the current system produces.