Recession hits new-Lawyer recruiting

The four-year boom in recruiting at law schools is officially over, according to the National Association for Law Placement (NALP). Among third-year law students who had clerked at a law firm the summer before, only 90 percent were offered entry-level associate positions by those firms in 2008?down nearly three percentage points from the previous year. It's the lowest rate of offers made to such students since 2003, when the figure was 87 percent.

Meanwhile, law students are more eager than ever to accept these offers: 80 percent said yes, the most since the NALP began gathering such data in 1993. However, firms reported lower acceptance rates from third-year students who had not clerked for them over the summer (see chart).

Signs of the downturn showed up in other places, as well. For example, 46 percent of law schools reported a decrease of at least 5 percent in the number of employers doing on-campus recruiting in 2008, compared with 2007. Also, 39 percent of law-firm respondents said they recruited at fewer law schools in 2008, compared to the previous year.

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