1L Summer Associate Job Placement and the New Harvard Law School Curriculum

Last week I posted the first installment of my analysis of the new Harvard Law School curriculum's impact on law firm placement. As expected, some were very skeptical about whether what one learns in law school has any impact on elite firm placement.

I completely agree with those skeptics -- I do not believe that law firms are going to care about the actual substantive knowledge HLS students pick up in these new classes. However, the curriculum does a lot more than just change what classes HLS students take during their first year. Most notably, the curriculum changes will change the total # of classes first year students take (and the total # of grades they receive) and move first year fall exams from mid-January to mid-December. This post will discuss the impact of the latter change on the market for first year summer associates.

I. Background & Regulatory Environment

The first year law student summer job search -- both for summer associate positions and all other employment opportunities -- is a highly unstructured and decentralized process. Unlike second year summer employment, most first year students do not obtain their summer jobs through an on-campus recruiting program or any other formal system. Rather, most first year students, particularly those seeking summer associate positions at elite law firms, begin their job hunt by mass mailing their resume and cover letter to dozens—and sometimes hundreds—of law firms in their preferred legal markets.

However, the first year hiring process is not completely unregulated. Nearly all law schools and elite law firms are members of the National Association for Law Placement (NALP), an organization that has promulgated principles and standards for law student recruitment activities. The NALP standards, first adopted in 1978 and modified several times in subsequent years, place a number of important constraints on the first year law student hiring process. Most importantly, the NALP guidelines prohibit first year law students from communicating with any legal employers, including law firms, before December 1. Furthermore, NALP forbids law school career service offices from providing summer job search advice to first year students before November 1.

About 920 first year law students worked as summer associates during the summer of 2005, with 60 percent of NALP law firms having hired at least one first year student for their summer program.

II. The New Curriculum and its Impact on Harvard's Market Status

The NALP standard prohibiting first year law students from applying for summer jobs before December 1 has traditionally given Harvard and Yale students a significant advantage over peer schools. Because virtually all law schools schedule their first year examinations in the middle of December, most first year law students face a trade-off between applying for summer associate positions on December 1—a time consuming process that can take several hours, or even days—and studying for those all-important first year exams. Given the impact first year grades have on second year summer associate hiring, law review membership, judicial clerkship placement, and even entry into law teaching, it should come as no surprise that many law students are not willing to risk receiving lower first year grades for a higher chance of obtaining a first year summer associate position.

But first year students at Harvard Law School and Yale Law School have never had to make this trade-off between first year grades and the first year job search. Harvard and Yale have traditionally scheduled their first year exams in early to mid-January—approximately a month after peer schools such as Stanford and Columbia. Thus, Harvard and Yale first year students can prepare their summer associate job application materials for a December 1 mass mailing, while still having plenty of time to study for their first year exams. Not surprisingly, Harvard and Yale have placed significantly more of their first year students in summer associate positions than their peer schools.

Harvard’s new curriculum may cause Harvard to lose this competitive advantage relative to its peer schools. Once the curriculum changes are fully implemented, Harvard first year exams will no longer take place in January, but will be held in December, consistent with most other law schools. As a result, future Harvard first year students will have to face the same trade-off between exam performance and job placement as their peers at other schools. This will almost certainly cause fewer Harvard students to apply for first year summer associate positions as early as possible, and likely reduce the number of first year Harvard students employed as summer associates.

My next post in this series will address counterarguments and potential mitigating factors.

*Cross-posted at AutoAdmit.com.