ABA Journal Op-Ed: BigLaw’s Manufactured ‘Arms Race’ For Talent Recruitment Harms Us All, by Jamie R. Abrams (American):
BigLaw has manufactured an “arms race” for talent that is hurting employers, students, recruiters, career counselors and legal educators alike. Like most arms races, the action of one law firm has triggered the reactions of others, all seeking to cultivate the impression of superior strength while instead imposing enormous (and often-absurd) costs on everyone.
This arms race pushed BigLaw hiring for 1L summer into October of the 1L year and leapfrogged BigLaw hiring for 2L summer into March to May of the 1L year while collapsing diversity-centered recruitment portals into this murky process, abandoning on-campus recruitment and blurrily suggesting that 1L summer applicants are simultaneously being “precruited” for summer 2L. If you found that prior sentence to be a dizzying time warp of poorly sequenced chaos, then you understand precisely.
This timeline fosters a fictitious scarcity mindset absent any evidence that the talent pool is smaller or harder to assess while undermining the exact educational processes and professor-student relationships seeking to cultivate robust future talent.
“Talent” is not preordained at 1L orientation, and to adopt this mindset is myopic and exclusionary. Rather, talent develops from inquisitive growth mindsets, thoughtful feedback and adaptation, resilience and persistence, problem solving, creativity and self-reflection. Premature hiring processes perpetuate deep biases that arise from rushed decision-making with incomplete information.
This manufactured arms race harms legal education pedagogy, creates a logistics nightmare for students and educators, imposes psychological harms on students, and frays what should be synergistic relationships between legal education and law practice. Educational pedagogy should allow all students time to grow, adapt and transform before employers assess job readiness. Students need time to cultivate skills and flourish in their educational institution. …
The solutions are simple. They cost us nothing. Let students finish their fall semester immersively and with a purpose. Let fall faculty assess fall work product wholly, allowing formative and summative assessment to do its job. (Or make offers without contingencies.) …
[T]he searing tensions between stated institutional values relative to lived student experiences comes across as tone deaf to law students (at best) and gaslighting (at worst). Law faculty wholeheartedly want to help train practice-ready students, tell employers about our students’ strengths and abilities, and improve our own pedagogies in conversation with employers about their needs and expectations.
This is a reciprocal relationship that should deploy equitable practices that are fair, methodical, paced, thoughtful and grounded in skills and knowledge, not gambles and guesses. A reset to rein in runaway recruitment practices helps build a more equitable, sustainable and thriving profession at a time when we need this outcome more than ever.
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