SAN FRANCISCO — Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan is mostly doing away with its summer-associate program, firm chair John Quinn told the firm's attorneys in a Monday email. Three years ago, the firm stopped doing on-campus interviews. The Recorder caught up with Quinn on Tuesday to find out why the firm is moving away from the traditional Big Law recruitment path.

Why the change? We question whether traditional summer-associate programs can really serve their purpose, especially at a firm like ours, where we do trial work. We've found that it's very hard to involve summer associates who are only there for the course of the summer in our work in a meaningful way, so the question is: How valuable is that? And then on top of that, these programs are very expensive. So it raises the question whether that money isn't better redirected towards third-year students, judicial clerks and others in the form of signing bonuses and the like. But our thought is to keep a very small program so that there's still some individuals with us for the summer and have some experience with the firm, then go back to law school and speak to their personal experience with the firm. We think there is still value in having a select small number of students that have experience with our firm that can be a source of information for law students.

Three years ago, you stopped doing on-campus recruiting. What did you learn from that? What we learned from that is you don't need to do on-campus law school recruitment. We've managed to do quite well with our own approach, which is having parties, get-togethers in the spring, having partners and associates come to law school campuses to meet with law students, talk about our firm, invite people to submit their résumés, without signing up through the law school placement office with several days of recruiting schedules interviewing people for 20 minutes.