Flush with incoming associates, law firms pulled back on 2024 summer associate hiring, rivaling Great Recession levels
March 12, 2024, 12:22 pm CDT
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According to a report released Tuesday by the National Association for Law Placement, 46% of callback interviews in 2023 resulted in offers for 2024 summer associate positions, a decline of 6 percentage points from 2022. (Image from Shutterstock)
Law firms that recruited law students in 2023 for summer associate programs in 2024 took a cautious approach, resulting in one of the softest recruiting seasons since the Great Recession, according to a report released Tuesday by the National Association for Law Placement.
The offer rate for summer 2024 programs for second-year law students was the lowest recorded since 2012, according to a March 12 press release and the NALP report, Perspectives on 2023 Law Student Recruiting.
Forty-six percent of callback interviews in 2023 resulted in offers for 2024 summer associate positions, a decline of 6 percentage points from 2022. The acceptance rate, on the other hand, was 47%, an increase of 6 percentage points from 2022 and the highest ever recorded by the NALP, indicating that students were receiving fewer competing offers.
The median number of offers extended by law offices to 2Ls for summer 2024 programs was seven offers, the lowest figure since the recruiting cycle for summer 2010 programs.
The softened market for 2024 summer associates follows a record number of 7,570 second-year law students participating in summer associate programs in 558 law offices last year. Among that number, 7,294 of the summers accepted associate offers.
“Recruited in the midst of the post-pandemic hiring surge, the total number of students participating in 2023 2L summer programs was the most ever recorded by NALP and resulted in over 1,100 more students receiving associate offers this year than in 2022,” the NALP report says. “Now facing the prospect of all these new lawyers flooding their offices in the fall, firms may have growing concerns about absorbing additional new talent if client demand does not increase to keep pace and they continue to carry excess capacity through 2024.”
The report also found that the traditional vehicle for hiring 2Ls—on-campus interviews—is declining as a recruiting strategy. Only 53% of summer associate offers for 2024 programs were made through this process.
“What the data suggests is that OCI is still a valuable recruiting tool,” said Nikia L. Gray, executive director of the NALP, in the press release, “but that firms are increasingly viewing it as a vehicle to ‘round out’ their summer programs after engaging in a vigorous round of pre-OCI recruiting to secure their ideal candidates.”
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