Big Law early recruitment raises bar for students, schools, firms

The struggle is real for some first-year law students, also called 1Ls, in Indiana who want to work at Big Law firms once they graduate. These aspiring attorneys not only face an intense workload and a different style of learning but also the added stress of large legal offices beginning recruitment during the first semester.

The timeline acceleration over the past few years has prompted students to apply for summer associate positions before their initial grades are even available.

“I remember sitting in torts [class] and somebody telling me — we’re probably in week 10 of our first semester — that the application portal has already closed for one of the biggest firms,” said Cameron Champine, a student at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law in Indianapolis.

This new normal applies pressure to all stakeholders in Big Law recruitment: firms racing to hire top talent, career advisers rushing to prepare students for the process and 1L’s adjusting to law school while competing for slots in summer programs.

“During the semester, when we’re eager for our students to learn the basics of legal skills … they are focused on the possibility of getting jobs after law school is over,” said Christiana Ochoa, dean and Herman B Wells endowed professor at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law in Bloomington. “For a first-generation student walking in the door and realizing you have to apply in your first semester for a long-term job, that could be very stress-inducing.”

The fast and furious process is impacting law students. According to a 2025 survey administered by the Law School Admission Council, or LSAC, in collaboration with the National Association for Law Placement, or NALP, nearly 73% of respondents said the accelerated Big Law recruiting timelines affected their first-year experiences, with about 37% saying the recruiting led to general dissatisfaction. And earlier this year, students from 18 law schools in the United States — including Harvard, Georgetown, Northwestern and Columbia universities — asked the American Bar Association to review the issue.

However, the competitive market for 1Ls to secure offers and for firms to lock in the best students continues to drive the need for speed.

“It’s effectively FOMO [fear of missing out],” said Vincent Versagli III, director of career development at Notre Dame Law School.

“Everybody’s afraid that they’re going to miss out on the great candidate if they wait.”

The revolution

Traditionally, Big Law firms recruited for 2L summer associate positions around the start of the second year of law school. Legal offices followed NALP guidelines, such as not soliciting before Dec. 1 and giving students 28 days to accept offers. In 2018, NALP changed its recruitment guidance because of antitrust concerns.

“The new guidelines were much more market-oriented and focused on the concept of reasonableness and provide much less guidance and constraints,” Ochoa said. “Things have been changing since then, and they continue to change.”

With the onset of the pandemic in 2020, in-person interviews became virtual meetings, making it easier for firms to connect with students without having to fly attorneys across the country.

“People got comfortable with video interviewing,” Versagli said. “School programs still played a big part in the process, but [interviews] were more commonly done virtually.”

In time, law-school-sponsored recruiting became less essential as students began reaching out directly to law firms and bypassing the intermediary institutions.

“What we see now with Big Law is employer-sponsored recruiting,” said Karley Clayton, assistant dean of professional development at the IU McKinney School of Law. “They are moving at their own pace. They have a different process where they are interviewing not at the law school but usually earlier and at their own firm.”

Jump starts, ‘jumbo’ offers

With Big Law application portals now opening as early as October, 1Ls may start the search for a summer associate position just weeks into their first semester. According to NALP, more than half of offers in the 2025 recruiting cycle were made before June of the students’ first years, compared with 4% in the 2024 period. 2025 was also the third consecutive year of record acceptance rates, at 52%.

“One of the slides that I saw at the LSAC conference showed the majority of offers are now being accepted in February,” Ochoa said, “which means that all of this is happening during students’ exams.”

On-campus interviews, or OCIs, play a minor part in the recruitment process, with school-sponsored recruiting producing only 20% of offers for summer 2026 programs, according to NALP. For summer 2025 positions, more than half of the offers came from OCIs.

“This year, for our fall OCIs, we don’t have any large firms participating [at McKinney],” Clayton said. “It’s all medium, small, in-house, government, public interest.”

Some firms have begun to provide “jumbo” offers, extending employment for 1L and 2L summer associate programs at once. Sarah Donovan, a student at Notre Dame Law School, accepted another version of the ‘jumbo’ offer from Eversheds Sutherland in Washington, D.C. The firm plans to give her a stipend for working at the Notre Dame Clinical Law Center this summer, in return for her joining their practice next summer.

“We provide pro bono work [at the clinical law center],” Donovan said. “We have seven different clinics … so you get a taste of different work in each of those clinics.”

Dentons Bingham Greenebaum in Indianapolis doesn’t make “jumbo” offers, a move Chief Legal Talent Officer Shannon Williams called “a conscious decision.” Instead, the firm focuses on recruiting and retaining 1Ls.

“If all of those first-year summer associates are successful, and they all accept our offers to come back, then we don’t need to hire 2Ls because that would fill all of our second-year hiring needs,” Williams said. “That’s been successful for us the last few years.”

‘A challenging process’

To prepare students for the early Big Law recruitment process, Indiana law schools have begun working with 1Ls ahead of the first semester to address expectations. For example, the 0L program at the IU Maurer School of Law kicks off in July.

“That program includes Zoom sessions that introduce our incoming class to career services and to our 1L legal profession experience and course,” Ochoa said. “We also follow that up with a Zoom session on networking, professional communication and the recruiting timeline.”

The period for accepting offers has tightened as well. After one firm gave Donovan, the Notre Dame student, seven days to respond, she asked for an extension while she spoke with other offices.

Champine, who worked at Dentons in Indianapolis over the summer and will return in 2027, recalled how fast the process moved after he emailed a contact at the firm.

“We had an interview a few days later and then an offer the same day,” he said. “Everything was pretty much done within 10 days.”

While Donovan and Champine waited until December and January, respectively, to start their job searches, Donovan still felt like she was balancing a part-time job with being a full-time student.

“I was scheduling screener interviews on my lunch hour,” she said. “I was scheduling the longer interviews on my Friday afternoons when I didn’t have class. Or if I had to travel, trying to mitigate only missing one day of class and determining which classes I thought I could miss.”

The recruitment hustle is also risky for students and firms, especially with “jumbo” offers. If the match isn’t right, 1L’s might rescind offers, while firms could get stuck with underperformers.

“What if you have a first-year summer associate who you extended a first and second offer to, but they come in that first summer, and they’re not successful? What do you do?” Williams said. “It’s created a challenging process for all of us. But I don’t think the Indiana market is as affected as the major cities … Chicago, St. Louis, New York, D.C., those firms with offices in Indianapolis — that’s pushed a few of the firms to [recruit] early.”

Measuring impact

Until the market changes, the best approach for 1Ls might be to concentrate on first-semester grades and save the Big Law job search until after final exams.

“The reality is, these law firms are still looking at their grades,” Versagli said. “It’s not like they’re able to move through this process and have an offer before people see how they did in their law school classes. [Academic performance] still matters.”

To ease the pressure, Donovan recommends students practice self care when possible. She took a weekly ballet class and maintained her cycling habit to deal with the strain.

“I made sure that I still had an outlet in my life to provide some balance from the stress and to give myself a break,” she said.

The potential for course-correction might already be developing. In the most recent recruiting cycle, NALP reported that the median number of 2L summer program offers was the lowest on record, and the total number of students participating in 2L summer programs was the lowest since 2021.

“Those data trends taken together indicate that law firms are putting the brakes on runaway recruiting, and that is not surprising given the many economic uncertainties they face, not the least of which is the virtually unmeasurable impact that [artificial intelligence] will have on the practice of law,” LSAC Senior Advisor James Leipold said in a blog post.

Versagli predicted that stakeholders will get a more accurate picture of early recruitment’s impact in the coming years.

“People are going to have data that’s going to show whether it worked or it didn’t,” he said. “If we end up at a point where it’s having a negative effect on retention, and law firms feel like it’s been bad from a business perspective, then maybe we’ll get a change.”