James Leipold. Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi

Figuring out whether a legal employer requires summer associates or associates to sign mandatory arbitration agreements is about to get easier.

The National Association for Law Placement will start including data about the use of such agreements in its Directory of Legal Employers—a key resource for law students in their employment searches.

Starting in 2020, the directory, which provides information about recruiting practices, demographics and other metrics on thousands of law firms and legal organizations, will include three additional questions. The first centers on the firm's policies surrounding employment disputes and workplace misconduct for summer associates, associates and non-partner attorneys. The second asks whether those employees must sign nondisclosure agreements, while the third asks if they are required to submit to mandatory arbitration.

The addition of those questions is another win for the People's Parity Project—a national organization of law students that began at Harvard Law School who seek to end the use of mandatory arbitration in the legal field and elsewhere. The group, which now has chapters at eight law schools, launched a petition earlier this year asking NALP to help students identify which firms use mandatory arbitration so they can make informed decisions during the on-campus interview process. Nearly 1,000 people signed the petition.

"Making information about which firms use forced arbitration more accessible to all law students helps raise awareness of the problem, which gets us one step closer to our goal of ending forced arbitration, once and for all," said Harvard law student Sarah Bayer, in an announcement of the change.

NALP executive director James Leipold was unavailable to comment on the change Wednesday, but he did confirm the addition of the three questions to its upcoming employer questionnaire. NALP informed its members of the addition last month.

Leaders of the People's Parity Project said that NALP initially rejected its request to add mandatory arbitration questions to the directory, but officials said the organization would reconsider the matter when its board of directors met in November.

The NALP push is among other attempts by law students to get more information about the use of mandatory arbitration in the legal profession. The movement began in the spring of 2018 when Ian Samuel, a former Harvard Law lecturer and professor at Indiana University Maurer School of Law, sparked the movement with a tweet in March 2018 revealing that Munger, Tolles & Olson required summer associates to submit to mandatory arbitration agreements. (Samuel resigned from Indiana in May following a university-led misconduct probe, while Munger Tolles quickly did away with the arbitration agreements.) Law students from 50 schools then surveyed large firms and legal organizations about their use of mandatory arbitration for summer associates, but fewer than half of the firms responded. The students have encouraged their classmates to boycott interviewing with firms such as DLA Piper that require associates to sign such agreements.

Since then, some law schools themselves have begun requiring firms to disclose any use of mandatory arbitration. But the inclusion of that data in NALP's Employer Directory will make that information available to a much wider swathe of law students.

NALP has rejected the request by the People's Parity Project to include a questions about the use of mandatory arbitration for nonlawyers, it said.

"We wish NALP had heeded our advice to ask legal employers about their policies regarding nonlawyer employees as well, because we don't think employees with J.D.s should have more rights than those without," said New York University law student Marwa Farag.