There’s not much love around these days for NALP, the group formerly known as the National Association for Law Placement. Its effort to cobble together a new regimen for next summer’s law school recruiting season has been met with scorn and threats. Jones Day has warned of an incipient antitrust violation. On our Web site, Harvard’s Ashish Nanda described the painful similarity between NALP’s latest system and a med school model that failed in the 1950s. In The National Law Journal , Peter Kalis, the chair of K&L Gates, offered a two-word solution for NALP: Abolish it.
NALP sponsors useful research, provides a clearinghouse to exchange some workplace ideas, and has set out a framework that until recently reduced the chaos of law school recruiting. It aspires to be comprehensive and important–witness its six pages of strategic goals–but in the matter of setting out new recruiting rules, it is operating as though it were too small to fail.
