BLOG POST
Reflections on the 2024 NALP Legal Recruiting Summit
January 26, 2024
by Albert Tawil
Albert Tawil is the Founder & CEO of Lateral Hub / Summer Associate Hub. Previously, Albert was an IP/Tech Transactions associate at Cleary Gottlieb and Fenwick & West after graduating from NYU Law in 2017.
It was fantastic to see so many of you yesterday at the NALP Legal Recruiting Summit in NYC!
For this week’s LHLP Blog Post, I’d like to reflect on the insightful and interesting sessions from throughout the day and conversations we had with our clients, friends, supportive law school career advisors, and new contacts.
1/ The Value of Positive Psychology: My good friend Jordana Confino provided a wonderful presentation about positive psychology. Attendees were chatting about this throughout the rest of the afternoon, as it really resonated with many people’s own personal growth goals. There are many things in life that are obvious, but we don’t think about them clearly until someone articulates it – that’s who I felt about Jordana’s exercise, when she asked everyone in the room to think about how we would respond to your ourselves in the context of receiving negative feedback and then asked how we would respond to our friend in that same situation. We are very hard on ourselves, but very compassionate to our friends — but we should be compassionate to ourselves too.
2/ Layers to Pre-OCI Recruiting: As you all probably know, there are plenty of layers to the hot topic of pre-OCI recruiting. When we decided to launch Summer Associate Hub last April, we did so based on detailed feedback from firms, students, and schools, to figure out what would be most helpful for all sides. Here are a few takeaways from our conversations and the very interesting panel “Surviving the Summer: How Law Firms and Law Schools are Dealing with the Summer Months.”
- One law school career advisor from a school outside the T14 mentioned that direct apply outside of OCI has been the most successful way for students to get jobs. They are advising them to understand what they want and seek it out, and not simply wait for OCI. This makes a lot of sense, especially for schools in that category – students can be more targeted and intentional when they have the education early on about what they want and where they can land, instead of just interviewing at 20 firms simply because they are at OCI. This is a lot like a lateral search. I often say that one benefit of pre-OCI recruiting is that it prepares students better for a traditional open-ended job search that they will almost certainly encounter within the first several years after graduation.
- One law firm representative said that the most important thing for them in recruiting 1Ls/soon-to-be 2Ls is giving students the information about what the practice is actually like and having students meet attorneys in real conversations instead of more general networking receptions. I enjoyed hearing this, because that is a key focus of Summer Associate Hub. We are solving an education problem: 1Ls are choosing early in their law school career where they want to work, and need better access and information about what law firm practice is like. This is especially the case for first-generation law students. During this upcoming spring, we will have an entire series of virtual events, where firms join panel discussions on practice areas and legal markets and host breakout rooms for students – it is an engaging and efficient way to educate students while differentiating your firm through real people describing their real experience. (Surprisingly, but not surprisingly, the breakout rooms have been most successful component of our virtual programming so far.) We also have a video series where law firm attorneys can describe their practice and day-to-day in under 6 minutes (”Practice in Point One”) for this very reason.
- There was also discussion on this panel about how one firm involves attorneys within the recruiting process. This has the additional benefit that attorneys “see how the sausage is made” since many law firm attorneys don’t realize what recruiting teams within the firm actually do. This resonated with me: I remember shortly after I started Lateral Hub in 2022, I attended the NALP Annual Education Conference in New Orleans. I was still working as a part-time BigLaw associate at the time (shout out to Fenwick for allowing me to do that), and took vacation to attend NALP. As probably the only law firm associate at the conference, I was blown away. Seeing behind the curtain of Recruiting and PD, I hadn’t appreciate how much time, effort, and thought was put into recruiting, retaining, and developing attorneys. I remember thinking “do the associates back home know about this?” The answer is no and involving attorneys in the recruiting process is a great way for them to get more perspective into the support that underlies their experience at the firm.
3/ Leading by Example: At the very end of the session mentioned above, the panelists spoke about how they support their team members’ well-being during the busy summer recruiting season. The shortest response, from a Recruiting Director on the panel, was the most impactful: lead by example, and nobody is too high for any task, such as getting into the weeds of Symplicity or coordinating a screener. Actions speak louder than words, and when leaders lead by example, that creates company culture – not free food or unlimited PTO. As a small team at Lateral Hub, we have the same philosophy: anything can be anybody’s job. And it was nice to hear that this is the case even for large firm recruiting teams with dozens of team members across offices.
4/ Our 2L Job Fair: Our Summer Associate Hub 2L Job Fair this June was naturally a topic of conversation during roundtables (or so we heard), given the focus of the Summit on law student hiring. What was interesting was the positive feedback from schools. Multiple schools had set appointments with us to learn more about it, many law school career advisors saw the job fair as a welcome opportunity for their students, and didn’t feel it threatened their own OCI or other programs. In fact, many schools see it as an enhancement of on-campus programs: for students who attend in June and network with firms, they will be in a better position to properly rank firms during a pre-OCI resume collect or during OCI itself. Part of our mission is to work alongside (and not against) schools, and it is nice to see that schools feel the same way.
5/ The Danger of Generic Data and Predictions: We spoke with several attendees about the long presentation on the legal industry and law firm economics from 2023. Although this data was interesting, it poses a danger: predictions are just that.. predictions (see Black Swan by Nassim Taleb). Making decisions based on general predictions can be difficult, especially in our industry where law students are hired more than 2 years before they begin as full-time associates.
In addition, macro-data does not account for the large differences between firms. For example, the issue with general statistics about lateral partner hiring is that there is a wide deviation between firms based on each firm’s strategy and position in the market: one firm we met yesterday told us they have hired almost 60 lateral partners in the last 2 years, since lateral growth is a key part of their new business strategy. That is specific to their firm, and other firms may have a completely different strategy based on size and practice areas strengths.
Another example is growth of practice areas. In a slide that presented practices that are opportunities for growth, I noticed Labor & Employment was very far to the left, all alone by a mile in the “not growing” category. Based on this slide, it is tempting to report back to your firm and nix the entire L&E group. But the reason L&E is positioned there makes sense: there are many large firms who provide L&E support for companies (defending against employee claims) as a lower-cost volume practice area, and are unable to charge premium fees for that work. L&E work at a highly-ranked ranked midsize or large firm with salaries hovering around $200K or higher (which represents 99% of the attendance at NALP conferences) looks very different from L&E work at a large volume firm, but that is not accounted for in the more general data. I wonder where L&E would have been positioned if we focused only on those highly-ranked firms.
6/ Feedback on LHLP: Last but certainly not least, several people had gone out of their way to mention how much they enjoy the LHLP Newsletter – always great to hear and even more motivation to keep it going. Thank you for that!
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Looking forward to seeing you all and continuing the conversation in Boston this April for NALP AEC!