After a period of considerable volatility following the recession, a new study finds that entry-level law firm recruitment has stabilized.

The National Association for Law Placement's survey, “Perspectives on 2017 Law Student Recruiting,” looked at the recruitment activity on law school campuses and job fairs last year and found those efforts remained mostly steady compared with the prior year, despite robust recruitment by some firms.

“Recruiting numbers were mostly flat compared to last year, and in some cases we saw some pulling back, particularly at the largest firms, suggesting that the most recent period of growth has ended,” said NALP executive director James Leipold in a statement.

Following the near collapse of recruitment efforts by law firms following the recession, firms have worked to rebuild their activities and summer programs to capture talent. Big Law recruiting volume and practices, according to the data collected by NALP, are now on par with those efforts implemented before 2009.

Even so, the survey found that for the second year in a row the aggregate summer offer volume decreased compared to the year prior. Forty-three percent of law firms that responded to NALP's surveys said that they had made fewer offers for the 2018 summer programs than they did for 2017 summer programs. As a whole, offices in New York City made fewer offers for summer programs while Silicon Valley remained flat.

In addition, the survey found that the average summer program class size at the nation's largest law firms also dipped in 2017. For firms with more than 700 lawyers, the average summer class fell to 20 in 2017 from 22 in 2016.

NALP also noted that recruitment levels varied across law firms in the most recent cycle. Some firms reported increasing their recruitment activity and having larger summer classes while other firms have scaled back their efforts and have much smaller summer classes.

The survey found that nearly 29 percent of law firms reported visiting more campuses in 2017 compared with 2016, while 34 percent said they visited fewer.

NALP suggests that this stratification of recruitment efforts parallels “the dispersion and market segmentation in law firm performance generally.”

The survey also found that 95 percent of participants in summer programs received an offer for an associate position, with acceptance rates hovering between 84 percent and 86 percent for nearly seven years now compared to pre-recession rates between 73 percent and 77 percent.

Acceptance rates also varied considerably by city and region, NALP found, with the lowest rates coming from Washington, D.C., Dallas, Houston, South Florida and San Francisco.