Biglaw Associate Hiring Plunges By 43%, Officially Ending The Lateral Party

// Ed. note: Welcome to our daily feature, Quote of the Day.

The last three years has taught firms some pretty hard lessons in regard to how to go about building up the associate ranks. They grew at an exponential rate in 2021 and, as work went down, they no longer needed the number of attorneys that they had.

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If you look at all of the factors at play—that corporate work is down, compensation increased—all of these things together just results in lateral hiring just being very conservative.

— Summer Eberhard, a California-based legal recruiter at Lateral Link, in comments given to Bloomberg Law on new report by the National Association for Law Placement, which concluded that lateral hiring had fallen by 35% over the course of 2023, with associate hiring nosediving by 43%, while partner hiring dropped by 10%.

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Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter and Threads or connect with her on LinkedIn.

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Biglaw, Lateral Moves, National Association for Law Placement (NALP), Quote of the Day