By Michelle Weyenberg and Jack Crittenden
[Editor’s Note: Read Part 1 of this story, How elitism is killing legal education, here.]
William Henderson is perhaps the most respected expert in the nation when it comes to legal education and legal hiring. The University of Chicago Law School graduate has focused his career on empirical analysis of the legal profession as a professor Indiana University Mauer School of Law – Bloomington.
In 2010, he focused on helping law firms use data to make better operational and strategic decisions. He called it Money Ball for law firm recruitment.
He looked at various data points and concluded that law firms would soon be forced to change how they hired.
“The traditional law firm hiring model (pedigree and grades) doesn’t do a very good job of selecting candidates who are likely to succeed as large firm litigators or corporate lawyers,” he wrote in The National Jurist that year. “The traditional credential-based model is gradually being dismantled because clients are no longer willing to absorb the cost of bad hiring decisions.”
He pointed out that in 2007 and 2008, 46% of entry-level associates at the largest firms were graduates of one of 14 top law school. Yet, during the same time period, only 39% of those promoted to partner were from a top-14 school. This indicates that graduates from elite schools were not holding their own when it came to proving themselves in practice.
Further, he noted, only 35% of general counsels for Fortune 500 companies in 2009 had graduated from one of the top 14 law schools.
“That means that the advantage of higher [LSAT] scores and academic pedigree diminishes rather than compounds over time,” he wrote.
But, 13 years later, the same traditional hiring model is still largely in place.
“I underestimated how hard it would be to change,” Henderson said recently. “When forced to choose between more profit or elitism, a lot [of hiring partners] would choose an elite identifier”
He said many firms are proud that they hire from the most elite law schools.
In 2022, the nation’s largest law firms, those with 100 or more attorneys, hired 42% of their associates from the 20 most prestigious law schools.
Other data supports Henderson’s conclusion that law school pedigree is a poor way to hire future stars.
Only 21% of Super Lawyers come from those same 20 schools.
Super Lawyers, which is owned by Thompson Reuters, uses a patented process of independent research and peer input to recognize top attorneys nationwide.
Enrollment at the 20 most prestigious schools makes up 16.7% of all law school enrollment. So, the most prestigious schools do outperform when it comes to producing Super Lawyers. But it is far lower than the percentage hired by big firms, and much lower than what many would expect, given that the elite law schools tend to attract the top students.
Henderson’s research may reveal the answer to why the percentage is not higher. He pointed to a study by Marjorie Schultz and Shelton Zedeck of University of California, Berkeley that found undergraduate GPA, one of the main factors for getting into an elite law school, negatively correlated with “practical judgement, ability to see the world through the eyes of others and developing relationships.”
In other words, some of the very traits that determine long-term legal career success are less common in students accepted to the top law schools.
But law school pedigree is still a dominant factor in the law firm recruitment process.
“As I see it, the scale of legal education pushes legal employers to rely on proxies, at least for entry-level positions,” saidOrin Kerr, a professor at University of California, Berkeley, School of Law and a graduate of Harvard Law. “If you’re trying to choose just one or two people from that incredibly large pool of possible applicants, how do you choose?”
Kerr said you can’t realistically interview everyone who is interested in the job.
“It’s natural to rely on proxies,” he said. “But it’s a shortcut, based on a sense that just based on the odds, someone with higher grades from a higher-ranked school is probably better.”
Henderson recommends a different approach. He advocates using behavioral interviews, personality tests and simulated group work. He said that when hiring is done right, the demographics of those hired will match the demographics of the interview pool.
The problem, he said, is that many law firms instead rely on old-school intuition, which results in associates who mirror the interviewers — graduates of elite law schools and not enough diversity.
Other law schools do what they can to help their students land jobs at big firms. But it is difficult.
“It is extremely hard to crack a big law firm if they have never hired someone from your school,” said Paul Caron, dean of Pepperdine Caruso School of Law and a graduate of Cornell Law School. “Once we have a person [at a firm] and they do well, they become champions for the school and we have success after success.”
