Associate Moneyball
My old friend Bruce MacEwen over at Adam Smith Esq has yet another brilliant post on his blog today. (Small wonder he's hitting 300,000 + page views per month!) The post is titled Associate Moneyball. Its about the lunacy surrounding the archaic methods that so many firms still use in recruiting law school graduates. Lunacy, because of the stellar rates that they command from the moment the ink dries on their degree cerificates. Try to join McKinsey & Co and you're probably in for up to five hour-long, mind wrenching interviews including case studies. Not so, with most law firms.
Why not? The main reason, I think, lies in one of the statistics that Bruce quotes.
"According to the National Law Journal's "250" report (ranking the largest 250 US firms by lawyer headcount), the number of associates at those firms has increased 76% over the past decade while the number of law school graduates has gone up just 7%. Firms are going to more law schools, reaching farther down into the class ranks, or both. And at the elite schools, firms are simply pushing harder. Georgetown Law, for example, anticipates a 10% increase in firm interviews this year, and the same again next year."
So the laws of supply and demand predicate against being too picky, especially at the top schools.
I enjoyed the solution proposed by an anonymous commentor to this post:
"If I were starting a law firm today, I'd zero in on the best women lawyers in this age range whose firms have rejected them because these lawyers don't fit the firms' billing structure. I'd supplement them with dad lawyers who are similarly situated, put a full-time day care center on the ground floor, create a flex-time policy that actually delivers flexible time, replace billable hour targets with sophisticated financial and client satisfaction metrics, and preside over what I expect would be a very happy and financially healthy firm."
Mmmm ... I don't think one can argue with that!