In legal recruitment, there is probably no higher investment than the wooing of top students from their first year of law school to their last day in a firm’s summer program. And the summer associate program is the high point of the recruitment process.
According to “Perspectives on Fall 2004 Recruiting,” recently published by the National Association of Law Placement (NALP), 75 percent of students who are summer associates at New York law firms accept a job offer from the firm to return as a permanent associate. However, only 25 percent of students who receive summer associate offers from those firms accept them in the first place. Thus, the problem certainly isn’t keeping them once they’re in the door; it’s getting them through the door to begin with.
