Before the fall semester had even gotten into full swing this year, I had already met with multiple first-year law students — some on the verge of tears — expressing anxiety about the new timeline for BigLaw hiring.
1Ls are uncertain about how to juggle this year’s unprecedentedly early recruitment process while they’re still learning to brief their first case, and they’re feeling immense pressure to make life-changing career decisions with minimal exposure to practice areas, firm culture or even what being a lawyer truly looks like.
Over the past five years, BigLaw recruiting has steadily accelerated from structured, predictable OCI programs during the fall of 2L year to the current state of year-round outreach, early applications and networking events, and 2L summer associate hiring occurring a full 18 months before the job starts.
Career-making (or breaking) decisions are being made before law students have had a chance to earn more than a single semester of grades, before law review results, before they’ve taken a single elective course, before they’ve been able to build meaningful professional networking relationships and often before they’ve even landed a 1L summer internship, much less completed it. What began as an “early start” has now become unsustainable.
The consequences of this shift ripple across every corner of the legal industry: from law school career offices to faculty and students and to law firms themselves, and no one is winning. The integrity of legal education, and the legal profession, demands that we make a change.
The human toll on students
The first year of law school is designed to build intellectual foundations: critical thinking, legal analysis and the disciplined curiosity that shapes a future advocate. Yet the ever-shortening recruiting timelines now force students to focus on résumés, networking and interview prep before they’ve even mastered how to read a casebook.
Career exploration, once a hallmark of the law school experience, is being stunted. In past years, students had time to discover: to realize they loved litigation after moot court, to find their voice through a clinic or to uncover a passion for intellectual property after a technology law seminar.
Today, many students are being funneled into practice areas and firms before they’ve had the opportunity to explore. Not only are students unable to accurately identify their practice area interests and aligned potential employers, but they are also shuttled into an application and interview process where they very often feel overwhelmed and underprepared — a recipe for poor performance.
This premature decision-making doesn’t just affect individual satisfaction. It shapes the profession itself. When early recruiting shortcuts the process of genuine professional development, we risk producing lawyers who are mismatched with their practice environments, disengaged or disillusioned early in their careers. Lawyers already struggle with mental health as a group; we can ill afford to add to the problem.
If left unchecked, the current model will likely deepen inequities as well. First-generation students without prelaw exposure, family connections or financial resources are disproportionately disadvantaged by accelerated hiring. They have less access to the informal networks and early insights that can help them compete in the early recruiting landscape. Similarly, students who experience significant improvement and growth from fall to spring of their 1L year will be severely disadvantaged, and in many cases effectively excluded from the process. A sustainable recruiting model is not only about timing. It’s about fairness, access and the long-term health of the profession.
The pressure on career advisors and faculty
For law school career advisors, the current model is a sprint that starts before the racecourse is even set. Advisors are rushing to deliver professional development workshops, résumé reviews, mock interviews and practice area programs before students are truly ready to absorb the material. Instead of guiding exploration, we’re triaging anxiety. The timeline has turned what should be a developmental, reflective process into a logistical scramble — one that leaves little room for the mentoring and meaning-making that are central to legal education.
Meanwhile, faculty members face the challenge of competing with the noise of recruiting pressures in their classrooms. The first semester of law school — a time meant for intellectual immersion — is increasingly fragmented by career anxiety and employer outreach. Students are rushing through their Legal Research and Writing classes, often hastily finishing their first assignments before they are even due, just to have a hopefully serviceable writing sample. They are pressured to try to be excellent candidates for AmLaw 100 firms before they’ve fully figured out how to be a law student.
As Professor Jamie Abrams aptly observed earlier this year, “[t]his manufactured arms race harms legal education pedagogy, creates a logistics nightmare for students and educators, [and] imposes psychological harms on students.” Her words capture what those of us working with 1L students witness firsthand: exhaustion, confusion and a sense of defeat among students before they’ve even begun their professional journeys.
Why the system doesn’t work for firms either
The irony is that this frenetic pace doesn’t serve law firms well either. I have yet to meet a recruiter or lawyer involved in the hiring process who is happy with the current pace. Recruiting teams are pressured to engage early or face the risk — real or imaginary — of missing out on talent, forcing them to make hiring decisions with extremely limited data. They are assessing first-year students who have only been exposed to a handful of classes, often before grades, feedback or professional experiences can provide meaningful insight into their potential fit.
Professional Development teams then inherit the downstream effects: onboarding summer associates who may not yet have the resilience, communication skills or professional judgment needed to thrive in BigLaw’s high-stakes environment. Practice Group management will increasingly face mismatched placements and higher attrition: costly outcomes for firms that invest heavily in training and retention.
The result? Everyone is working harder, but for worse results.
Potential paths toward reform
The problem, while complex, is not insurmountable. The legal industry has solved major structural challenges before through collective action, such as the creation of the original NALP guidelines and later reforms to OCI. We can do it again.
Several potential solutions are already emerging in conversations across law schools, professional associations and firm recruiting departments. We must work together to identify the best pathway toward greater balance and sustainability.
A few ideas that have emerged include:
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Revisit industry guidelines and shared frameworks
It may be time for NALP or the ABA to establish modernized recruiting guidelines that reflect the realities of the harms caused by an unregulated system. A shared framework could help level the playing field, reducing the “arms race” dynamic that currently drives early recruitment. -
Regional or consortium-based agreements
Groups of peer schools and firms could collaborate regionally to coordinate recruiting timelines. These agreements could minimize competitive acceleration while fostering collaboration and transparency. -
Joint law school–firm working groups
Collaborative task forces that include schools, firms and professional organizations could collect data, evaluate the downstream effects of current timelines and design empirically grounded reforms. -
Voluntary employer ethical recruiting pledge
Firms could take the initiative by voluntarily pledging to uphold ethical recruiting practices, including timeline restrictions. Such accords could be spearheaded by coalitions of law firm recruiting and professional development departments or bar association groups.
A call to collective action
The accelerated recruitment cycle threatens more than just logistics. The law has long been a profession grounded in judgment, reflection and service. These qualities take time to cultivate. When the system prioritizes speed over discernment, it undermines the very competencies that the profession values most: analytical rigor, ethical reasoning and professional identity.
The question isn’t whether the current system is sustainable; it’s how long we can afford not to act. Meaningful change will require collaboration among law schools, firms and professional associations. But the rewards — more robust law school experiences, greater alignment, stronger retention, and more fulfilled young lawyers — are well worth the effort.
Let’s open the conversation:
- How are early recruiting timelines affecting your students, teams or firms?
- What data could help us design a better system?
- What experiments — regional collaborations, ethical accords or internal reforms — might serve as models for the future?
I invite voices from across the profession — students, advisors, faculty, recruiters and attorneys — to share their perspectives with me at anna.konschak@temple.edu. Together, we can shape a more balanced, equitable and humane recruiting system — one that supports curiosity, clarity and confidence at every stage of a lawyer’s development.
Because when we honor the role of legal education in professional growth and career development, everybody wins.
Anna Konschak, Esq., is the director of the Office of Career Services at Temple University – James E. Beasley School of Law. She can be reached at anna.konschak@temple.edu.
