(L to R) Marta Galan Ricardo, Columbia Law School; Mark Weber, Harvard Law School and Gavin White, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom (Courtesy photos).

It won't be business as usual this year on the law firm summer associate recruiting front.

Three elite law schools that traditionally send a large percentage of graduates into Big Law have unveiled new, limited law firm interview programs that will take place prior to traditional on-campus recruiting. 

Those early interview programs—adopted thus far by Harvard Law School, New York University School of Law and Columbia Law School—are an attempt by their career services offices to strike a balance between the more permissive early interviewing policies of many competitor schools and maintaining some control over the process. (Harvard, Columbia and NYU sent a combined 859 graduates into associate positions at the largest 100 law firms in 2019, according to Law.com Go-To Law Schools report. That's nearly a fifth of all associates hired by those firms.)

For the full 2020 Go-To Law Schools report, click here.

Firms have been interviewing a small number of law students for summer associate positions prior to official on-campus interview (OCI) weeks for more than half a decade now, but the facilitation of those interviews by the three largest Big Law feeder schools in the country has the potential to shake up the hiring market by encouraging even more early hiring and by alleviating some of the pressure firms experience during the traditional recruiting season.

"We don't want our students to think they are at a disadvantage," said Columbia career services dean Marta Ricardo, of the school's decision to drop its ban on early interviews. "We know that if we don't create a system, they will do [early interviews] anyway, and they will do it with no advice from us. This year is a big experiment, to see how much capacity the firms have to even do early interviews."

In other upcoming changes, nearly all Big Law feeder schools are reducing the number of days law firms must keep summer associate job offers open to 21, down from the previous norm of 28 days. That offer period is going down to 14 days for law firm offices with smaller summer associate programs at many schools. Additionally, some schools are moving their on-campus recruiting programs from early August to late July—yet another sign of the rush to hire summer associates.

The summer associate recruiting landscape has been in flux since late 2018, when the National Association for Law Placement (NALP) did away with its longtime guidelines for when and how firms should recruit law students. Those guidelines encouraged participation in campus-based recruiting programs and uniformity in how and when job offers are extended.

Their elimination has accelerated the early interviewing trend. Career services officials say they still expect most of their students to land their law firm jobs through OCI, but these new, formalized early interviewing programs might help them go into that traditional process with one or two offers in hand. (At all three schools, firms that interview candidates early must keep those offers open until the end of the OCI process so that students can weigh all their options.)

Roughly half of the law schools in the so-called T-14 stuck to the old NALP guidelines during last year's summer associate recruiting cycle, meaning they prohibited firms from interviewing students prior to OCI. The other half look a more liberal approach and allowed students and firms to interview at their convenience, ahead of OCI.

That left schools such as Harvard—which held to the prior rules and prohibited early interviewing—in an untenable position, said career services dean Mark Weber, particularly because summer associate class sizes at the largest firms have been contracting over the past two years. Students were frustrated at being forced to wait when their counterparts at other law schools were interviewing with firms before OCI. And some firms were frustrated that they couldn't interview Harvard students at the same time as candidates from other schools. After careful consideration, Harvard in late December unveiled what it has dubbed "EIP Preview. (EIP stands for Early Interview Program, Harvard's term for OCI.)

The program allows incoming 2Ls to apply to five law firms in June—nearly two months before Harvard's OCI kicks off in late July. Those applications will be released to the firms in mid-June, and they can conduct interviews before OCI if they so choose. Any offers they extend must remain open for 21 days after the end of OCI, however, so that students can compare their options before committing to a firm.

Harvard opted to limit the number of firms students may apply to early so they can concentrate on their spring studies and their summer jobs without being overwhelmed or distracted by copious law firm interviews. The timing also ensures that firms have a full year of grades to evaluate. EIP preview is optional for both firms and students, and students may bid to interview with a firm during the traditional OCI program even if that firm does not opt to interview them through the early program.

Weber uses the analogy of a flood to explain Harvard's approach. The NALP guidelines that encouraged hiring to take place through OCI essentially functioned as a levee. But multiple leaks appeared in that levee when firms started interviewing students prior to OCI, and some schools looked the other way or permitted it outright.

Weber worried that removing the levee altogether—that is, giving students and firms free rein to interview when they want—would create a flood and bring chaos to the hiring market. So instead, the school opted for a controlled flood, where it can release a limited number of early applications without unleashing a torrent.

"By having this approach, we acknowledge that the present system is broken," Weber said. "By taking the middle ground, we're trying to address the concerns of both students and employers while still having some guidelines in place. The structured approach allows students who want to do some early interviewing to do so without being overwhelmed."

Students who enter into OCI with an offer in hand will likely have a more relaxed interviewing week, and early law firm interviews will allow them to practice their interviewing skills and figure out what works and what doesn't, he added. Weber said the feedback he's received from law firms have been largely positive.

Stephen Gill, the hiring partner at Vinson & Elkins, called the new early interview programs a "constructive response" to the concerns he and others expressed about the bans on early interviews.

"I engaged personally in direct dialogue with the career services deans at Harvard, Columbia and others and voiced my concern that their prior policy—which barred pre-OCI recruiting if a firm wanted to participate in OCI—put firms in a tough spot: You either risked your OCI opportunity or you risked that competitors would gobble up the top talent before you got the chance to meet them," Gill said.

Gavin White, the hiring partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom said he also welcomes the changes that Harvard, NYU, and Columbia are making, largely because it will reduce some of the compression firms experience in late July and early August, when many schools are holding their OCI programs at the same time. Spreading the process out over a longer time period should alleviate some of that pressure, he noted.

"Our view is that anything that allows students more flexibility and opportunity to seek employment is beneficial," White said. "It's better for students and it's better for firms. I think these changes do that because they give students more pathways to seek out a job."

Harvard's December announcement of its EIP Preview program did not go unnoticed by competitor schools. Irene Dorzback, career services dean at NYU, spent the winter break mulling over how her school should respond to the change. She alerted first-year students in mid-January that changes to the school's recruiting guidelines could be forthcoming, then gathered feedback from law firms. Ultimately, she felt that NYU could not hold fast to its ban on early interviewing when Harvard, with which it competes closely—particularly in the New York market—was making a move.

"We had to stay competitive," Dorzback said. "That is No. 1."

In February, NYU unveiled its Pre-Season Employment Program (PEP) which tracks closely with Harvard's early interview program. Students have the option to apply early to five firms. But there is one key difference: NYU will release those early applications to firms in March, and firms may conduct interviews starting March 24. They cannot extend any offers until June 8, however, after which spring semester grades should be available. Dorzback said the decision to begin early interviews in the spring came largely from law firms' concerns over conducting a lot of early interviews while simultaneously managing their summer associate programs.

Moreover, the timing is intended to level the playing field for students who are away from their target cities over the summer while also allowing students to give their full attention to their summer jobs, rather than juggle law firm interviews.

"June is a very bad time," she said. "Over 40% of our students work either in their hometown, another city doing public service, or overseas. They are doing interesting things, and they are not around in June and are not able to participate in any early interviewing."

White, at Skadden, said that allowing early interviews in the spring rather than the summer shouldn't give NYU students much advantage over counterparts at other schools, since firms will still want to see their spring semester grades before making decisions.

"Realistically, even if we see students in March, we're not going to make offers until we see a student's full year of grades, so I'm not that there is tremendous benefit in jumping to March," he said.

Within days of NYU announcing PEP, Columbia also unveiled an early interview program that is nearly identical to Harvard's, which allows some early interviews starting in mid-June. That timing will allow students to settle in to their summer jobs before beginning firm interviews, Ricardo said, and any early interviews must take place outside of working hours.

"There is some merit to a more open system, but we decided that a more structured system is what the firms want," she said.

Weber doesn't think that these new early interview programs will change the summer associate recruiting game all that much given that early hiring has been happening for years. But Bruce Elvin, career services dean at Duke Law School, disagrees. Duke has long given students and firms more latitude to interview at their convenience, and the formal entrance of Harvard, NYU and Columbia into the early recruiting game is likely to upend the status quo and ratchet up the anxiety surrounding summer associate hiring, he said.

"There is tons of paranoia. Everybody has FOMO [fear of missing out]," Elvin said. "The employers think everybody else is doing something they aren't. Maybe, but maybe not. Then students say, 'Oh my colleagues at other schools have five offers, and my classmate down the hall has three offers.' But your circumstances are completely different. This is going to be extremely unsettling for everyone involved."

Harvard, Columbia and NYU have each said that their early interview programs are pilots, and they will reevaluate at the end of the recruiting cycle. While an improvement over the current system, the new programs are far from ideal, Weber said.

"If we were designing a system that we thought was best for students and employers, what we are doing now would not be it," he said, noting that it would be better to push summer associate recruiting to the middle of the 2L year, to allow for three semesters of grades. "But that's not the market we are in. The decision we made at Harvard was practical. We are responding to the market we are in, not the market we want."