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Harvard, Recruiters Advise Law Students to Cast a Wider Net
The American Lawyer
July 17, 2009
It may be summer, but Harvard law students already are feeling a chill in the job market they're looking to enter.
In the wake of mass deferrals at law firms, Harvard Law School advised first- and second-year law students to widen their search for summer associate positions. As Bloomberg reported Thursday, HLS's career services center distributed a memo earlier in the spring to students suggesting they consider more geographic regions in their search for a summer 2010 job, send out resumes early, and, most importantly, save money (it never hurts to save when job prospects are anything but certain).
"It's certainly going to be a more competitive year based upon all that's happening in the market," Mark Weber, the school's assistant dean for career services, tells The Am Law Daily.
Considering law firms outside major metropolitan areas might be a smart way to stay in the game, according to the school, which recommended students consider mid-Atlantic cities like Baltimore and Richmond, or Midwestern cities like Milwaukee.
Legal recruiters agree that the more a law student is willing to think outside of the box, the smoother the job search might be.
"These are places where firms are looking to take advantage of a different caliber of students than they are used to getting," Sheri Michaels, global practice group leader of Major, Lindsey, and Africa's associate group, tells The Am Law Daily. But Michaels cautions law students to be sure the cities they look in are places where they will genuinely be interested in living and working, or they may not be satisfied when they find themselves there after graduation. "If the market turns around in two years, will they want to switch from Cherry Hill to Philadelphia, Newark to Manhattan, or Baltimore to Washington, D.C.?"
As we reported Tuesday, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius has canceled its summer associate program for 2010. Law schools fear the firm may just be the first of many. The firm was one of the first of more than 50 Am Law 200 firms to defer start dates for this fall's incoming class of first-year associates. And now several firms like Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, Ropes & Gray, and Hogan & Hartson have told current summer associates they'll have to defer a year before starting their jobs.
Recruiting large classes of new summer associates could create a bottleneck at law firms, where associates already have been deferred for the next two years. This is complicating the search for a summer associate spot by law students, even those at top ten schools like Harvard.
Michaels recommends that students consider the widest net possible, even looking for job opportunities in international offices for the summer.
"International opportunities are a great way to get more exposure," says Michaels. "I know there are a lot of lateral opportunities right now where firms are looking for associates with fluency in Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean."
This article first appeared on The Am Law Daily blog on AmericanLawyer.com.
