I missed this story back in September: “Big Law First-Year Hiring Set to Plunge as History, AI Collide,” from Bloomberg Law:

Last year, firms with more than 500 lawyers hired 6,588 new graduates, down 538, or 7.5%, from the 2024 peak, according to data released last month from the National Association for Law Placement, which has tracked law school hiring for decades.

The group’s historical data shows a clear pattern dating to the 1980s. Once NALP’s largest group of firms has its hiring peak, incoming class sizes bottom out three years later. That’s what happened after each of the last three peak hiring years, which coincided with US recessions: 1990, 2001, and 2008. …

[F]irms also expect the historical trend to occur once again.

Two-thirds of large firms predict they will have fewer first-year associates in 2028 compared to 2025, according to a survey of 57 large firms conducted by Citi’s law firm banking group this summer. Nearly 60% expect they will have fewer second-year associates in 2028 than 2025, indicating two straight years of entry-level hiring declines.

All of this comes amid a resurgence in the size of the overall JD student population. For a handy summary, refer to Derek Muller’s review of 1L and JD enrollment, from December 2025.

The hiring data should be of interest not only to deans and faculty at law schools that conventionally place a lot of students in Big Law associate jobs but also to schools farther down hierarchies of prestige and expense. Post-2008, here in Pittsburgh – a third-tier city by most measures and a second-tier city in the light of that rare sunny day (or the slightly less rare Stanley Cup title or a Lombardi trophy) – we observed local offices of Big Law firms pulling back on hiring Pitt grads in favor of taking on graduates of “elite” law schools who were struck out in or opted out of Big Law hiring in first-tier cities, including New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC.