Reflections on the 2024 NALP Foundation Hiring Partner Conference
March 8, 2024

This week, I attended the NALP Foundation Hiring Partner/Recruiting Director Conference in Atlanta (despite being neither of those things).  Thanks again to King & Spalding for their hospitality.

The conference was a short one-day affair with a fun dinner/reception Tuesday night and a day full of interesting programming on Wednesday.  The theme of the conference was artificial intelligence (AI), which was the topic of most of the programs – from law student learning to attorney practice to legal recruiting.

As always, the highlight of the conference for me was catching up with our clients and other friends at law firms and other vendors.  The informal conversations that come when you put the dynamic and fun legal recruiting in the same place are always the most valuable part.  If you were there, great to see you, and look forward to seeing you in Boston in a few weeks, hopefully.

Here are some takeaways from the NALP Foundation Conference – and if you have any thoughts too, get in touch!

 

One of my fears, and the fear of many law student and lateral candidates, is that AI would be used to filter out candidates without human review.  There are a lot of reasons for this, including the fact that strong candidates can come from a variety of experiences and groups.  Trusting an AI model to do that analysis on its own is dangerous.

However, the commentary on using AI in legal recruiting put me at ease.  The law firm representatives mentioned that, to the extent they are using AI in their workflows, it is to be more inclusive and make the human analysis quicker.  For example, by packaging data in a more easily readable format or summarizing information.  This makes sense to me as a proper use of AI in recruiting and I’m interested to see where this goes.

 

Zooming out to the use of AI generally in legal education and practice – on both the law firm and law student panels on AI, the consensus was that we cannot stop someone from using AI, rather figure out when and how to use it with proper guardrails.  Since ChatGPT came onto the scene, I had spoken with lawyers often how this is similar to redlining software or legal research programs like LexisNexis or Westlaw.  Certainly lawyers saw those developments years ago and were afraid: legal research that was done over an entire week using physical books in the library can now be done in a matter of hours.  All of these litigators would lose their jobs!

But that didn’t happen.  Instead, litigators were freed up to spend their time on higher level aspects of the case.  Litigation got faster, since parties could do the research much more quickly. 

Much of the commentary shared this view.  One interesting point from a law firm was that their uses AI haven’t sped up practice per se – rather, adding to the quality, with additional analysis that the lawyer can use in putting together a brief, for example.  Even in cases where AI does save time (for example, creating first drafts of boilerplate documents), many agree that this would free up associates to do other work.  Is it necessarily a bad thing for an associate to start with a first draft and learn how to improve it, versus starting one step behind, creating the draft from scratch?

One concern that was raised was whether junior lawyers will truly learn if they can rely on AI tools.  My response is this: are we upset that junior lawyers are no longer learning how to look up cases in a physical book?  If it is something that can be done automatically in the future, is there a use to spend attorney time learning it?  I think it depends on the specific task, but food for thought. Maybe the items we streamline with AI should focus on the tasks that have less learning opportunity – and I imagine that is where it would naturally gravitate.

 

One of the most interesting sessions of the day was from a panel of law students from law schools in Georgia – they spoke about AI, but then finished up the panel talking about their experience with the BigLaw 2L hiring process.

Every time we speak with law students, it validates to us why we created Summer Associate Hub.  A few tidbits stuck out:

–Students across the panel made decisions on the firms they chose based on in-person interactions and personalized outreach.  In the age of pre-OCI recruiting, in-person engagement is key. Getting resumes through a resume collect and expecting your firm to differentiate itself from 100 other large firms is a tough game to play – to a 1L (like me in 2015), every firm looks and sounds the same. “We have the best people, with the best work, and we are so collaborative.”  Firms that succeed get out there and connect with students on a personal level.  One student touted a diversity-focused job fair he attended and how he was able to connect with so many firms in one place and differentiate those that stood out to him.  Sound familiar?  This is only more evidence why our in-person 2L Job Fair in NYC this June is so important – meeting students in June in person in a centralized location is real and authentic engagement that helps you determine who is a fit and make your firm stand out.

 

–One 2L said that the biggest advice she gives to 1Ls is to start making connections now.  Get to know attorneys, hear about their practice, and start to learn what it’s like to work in different areas.  I loved hearing this because it’s exactly why we launched our live virtual series this spring.  Firms joined us to present to students about different office locations and practice areas.  It’s been amazing to see how students from top schools around the country have taken advantage of this. One top NYC firm told us they have already had several candidates in the office for informational interviews, after meeting in the breakout rooms that we hosted virtually.  Several law students have reached out to us thanking us for the resource enabling them to connect with several firms when they had no direct connection otherwise.

 

–Outreach is key.  Students mentioned firms who gave them an offer and just stayed still in they accepted or rejected were not as attractive.  Firms who reached out in the meantime, checking in, asking what else would be helpful, and personalized that outreach were the most attractive.  For a law student, the recruiting team is often the only real interaction they formally have with a firm.  How the recruiting team communicates is a signal to the law student about how the firm operates generally.  This is not surprising but often lost on firms – the same applies with laterals.  Laterals who apply to firms and never hear back after an interview leave with a bad taste, and of course that trickles into word of mouth with other potential laterals. “Don’t bother applying there, they ghosted me.”   This is a topic I speak about often – come hear our session at the NALP Annual Education Conference in Boston “In Their Shoes: Understanding the Candidate’s Perspective in the Lateral Search” on Wednesday afternoon for more thoughts on this!  (I’ll be joined by an all-star group: Amy Killoran, Alumni Advisor at Northwestern; Elizabeth Claps, Director of Alumni Relations at Cleary Gottlieb; and Val Federici, expert legal career coach and founder of Level Up Legal.)

I’ve written about this in a prior blog post after the NALP Legal Recruiting Summit in NYC.  Data is interesting but we need to go a layer deeper to understand how it impacts us and why that data looks that way.  Firms, even within the AmLaw 100, are very different with very different hiring strategies, and high-level data doesn’t always account for that.  Here are a few pieces of data that stood out, with my thoughts:

–One piece of data stated that 93% of firms participated in OCI in 2023.  Hard to reconcile as anecdotally we are hearing from many firms that OCI participation has been scaled back dramatically.  Turns out, this stat included any firm that interviewed at least one candidate at OCI, and did not measure the number of actual OCI schedules.  That deeper layer would have been more meaningful.  Thanks to the Recruiting Director who called that out and clarified during the Q&A.

This stat caused a lot of discussion afterwards: 70% of the Class of 2020 has already had 2+ jobs.  28% have had 3+ jobs.  (Not clear if this includes clerkships, but I would guess yes.)  Either way, this is a high number as we are not even 4 years from the Class of 2020 starting at firms.  Here are some thoughts, which accounts for some of the breakout discussion we had after the presentation:

—–The Class of 2020 may be an anomaly as they got a “cold start” with entering BigLaw as a remote associate.  Class of 2019 had similar stats, but same could be true: those associates were only at a firm for 6 months before Covid hit.

—–The insanely busy lateral market in 2021 saw a lot of junior associates moving jobs earlier then they would, for a rare opportunity to land at a firm they normally wouldn’t be able to get into, or to get a signing bonus (or both).  (Whether that was a good decision for those associates is a separate conversation…)

—–Almost everyone agrees we have a BigLaw education problem.  1Ls/rising 2Ls are choosing where to work after just one year of law school and zero law firm experience.  You are making a decision based on very limited information.   This is not new but will only get worse with early recruiting, unless we can give students easy and helpful content and opportunities to make educated decisions.  This is something we are aiming to solve with our top-notch practice area content on Summer Associate Hub, including virtual programs, so students can learn about these items as they consider where to work.  I believe this is a large factor behind early laterals moves.  (I was one of those laterals and left as a second year – I wasn’t able to identify what I wanted to do specifically until I was practicing.)

—–I have to believe a decent chunk of these 70% were subject to the increased layoffs and performance-based terminations (and “performance-based” stealth layoffs) that occurred in late 2022 and 2023.

—–This data should be a signal to law firm recruiting teams.  It is officially outdated to penalize a candidate for having too many moves.  Instead, firms should consider understanding from the candidate WHY and getting comfortable with them to stay at your firm.  There are a lot of reasons a person could have moved 2-3 times, and they are not in the minority.  Rejecting candidates outright for this reason without asking for more info is tough in this day and age, especially with this information.

 

–The NALP Foundation conducted a very interesting “stay study” – about why associates stay at law firms.  I can talk about this topic all day – what motivates law firm associates goes to the heart of recruiting, retention, legal practice, and other areas, and I write about this often on LinkedIn.

According to the study, the top reasons laterals stay is compensation.  This goes against everything I know about the associate experience.  It’s about the work, the people, the hours… not the money.  But I loved how NALP Foundation explained this — they stay when they feel they are being compensated at a level that is fair and they are happy with.  That doesn’t mean top of the market.  It is consistent with the idea made famous by Frederic Herzberg: money is a hygiene factor: once it is a certain baseline, then money is something that makes someone not leave.  But what makes someone LOVE their job and be motivated are the other factors – fulfilling work, responsibility, people, work-life balance, and other related items.

 

–Always fascinating to see how the data is all related.  Some examples: 

—–According to the NALP Foundation stay study, one of the most common reasons for laterals looking to leave is to focus on a specific practice area.  For students, it’s about culture and finding somewhere where they can learn.  There isn’t much else to go on.  For laterals, it’s a more nuanced search to find the practice they want.  As a practicing attorney, you get a sense of what you like and then realize you want to focus on something specific.  Back to the 1L education problem and the 70% stat for Class of 2020.  (Come join our NALP AEC panel on Wed Apr 17 for more on this topic, see above!)

—–The lateral movement volume is the same as it was in 2019.  Many experts have been saying this after things slowed down in late 2022 — it seems slow after the insane 2021 and early 2022, but we are just back to normal.  But many lateral recruiters would agree it feels different.  Firms have told us they sense laterals are staying put more and afraid to leave.  This may be because they are nervous about last-in first-out with layoffs (generally a myth).  So how do we reconcile this?  My sense is that although 2023 had similar lateral rates as 2019… 2023 likely had a lot more INVOLUNTARY lateral movement, caused by layoffs and performance related terminations.  The data looks the same, but I think the underlying facts are very different.

 

Hope you enjoyed this – reach out with your thoughts!  Would love to hear it.