A Shark Tank-style “Hackathon” at Hunton Andrews Kurth, which tasks summer associates with pressing legal industry challenges, does more than bring fresh ideas to the firm. It makes the summer program more valuable and can provide another metric for evaluating potential first-year hires.

And, a firm hiring partner said, it brought spark back to the Am Law 100 firm’s summer program, as all of the summer associates and the committee evaluating the Hackathon proposals gathered in the same room in the firm’s Washington, D.C. office for presentations.