I want to begin by sharing my experience navigating the law school hiring cycle.

During 1L, I was fortunate to be accepted into the State Bar of Wisconsin’s Diversity Clerkship Program. I applied and interviewed in January 2024, was accepted into the program in February, interviewed with employers shortly afterward, and ultimately secured a placement in March.

In 2024, that was incredibly fast. I withdrew applications from several employers who would not even begin reviewing applications until late March. Among my close circle of classmates, I was one of the first to secure a summer position, while many found jobs later in April.

That summer, I began applying for 2L summer clerkships. Nearly every attorney I worked with was surprised that I was already thinking about the following summer’s employment in June. I participated in on-campus interviews in July and received an offer in August.

Of the five Wisconsin law school students who would eventually join me at that firm, I was the only one hired through on-campus interviews (OCI). The firm, like many others of its size, opened their application in May and considered applicants on a rolling basis, creating a significant advantage for those who applied directly rather than wait for the traditional OCI process. Even then, I still had many classmates searching for 2L summer jobs throughout their 2L year. At the time, I was still considered “early” in the process.

Fast forward to my 3L year. At the beginning of second semester, two 1Ls separately reached out to me for advice on finding summer employment. One of them, struggling through tears, told me that they felt like a failure because they had not secured a 1L summer position yet. They had applied to dozens of jobs without receiving an offer, while seemingly everyone around them already had one. Another told me they were considering dropping out entirely because they believed their difficulties finding employment meant that they were not cut out for the legal profession.

This was in January 2026. In just two years, the hiring timeline had accelerated so dramatically that my own experience in 2024 was considered far behind the curve by 2026 standards.

Later that spring, I met a 1L who told me he had accepted a summer position at a large, prestigious law firm for both his 1L and 2L summers. He had applied, interviewed, and received an offer before his first-semester grades were even finalized. His 1L summer position would last only four weeks, and he was contractually prohibited from seeking other opportunities during the remainder of the summer.

I could not understand how a student who had not yet taken a single law school exam was already being asked to make decisions that could shape the trajectory of an entire legal career.

All I could think was: What are we doing?

Why Is This Happening?

From the perspective of law firms, law schools, and even students themselves, the accelerated hiring cycle does make a certain amount of sense.

For law firms, the race is about securing top candidates as early as possible. Most attorneys recognize that first-semester law school grades do not perfectly predict who will become an excellent lawyer. While they can provide a comparison for individuals on an equal scale in 1L, someone’s performance on a single three-hour criminal law exam is not the best measure for how that same individual may develop as a contract drafter.

So why wait? Why not identify promising students early and evaluate them based on personality, work ethic, prior experience, communication skills, and eagerness to learn, rather than relying exclusively on a single set of exams?

For firms with the resources to recruit aggressively, the current system offers a major competitive advantage. Large firms have started bypassing OCI entirely because they can find their candidates before the process begins. Why wait for a law school to set up interviews when they can do it on their own? They can move quickly, lock in talented students early, and dictate the pace of the hiring market. Without 1L grades to judge candidates, they are basing these hiring decisions on things like word-of-mouth recommendations and even LSAT scores.

Law schools also have incentives that push the cycle forward. Career services offices dedicate substantial resources to helping students secure jobs, and schools themselves are heavily evaluated based on employment outcomes.

According to the U.S. News law school rankings methodology, employment outcomes ten months after graduation account for a significant portion of a school’s overall ranking. As a result, schools have every incentive to encourage students to secure employment that guarantees post-graduate employment as quickly as possible.

Generally, the jobs making those guarantees are large law firms. That is why career services offices are giving presentations to 1Ls in October about résumés, networking, and summer applications and focus so heavily on employment at large law firms.

From the student perspective, the incentives are obvious. Who would turn down an offer from a prestigious firm that pays thousands of dollars and provides a sense of security before the stress of finals has even fully set in?

For many students, having employment locked down early feels like a dream. It removes uncertainty and allows them to focus elsewhere.

How Might this Hurt the Profession?

Despite the logic behind it, this accelerated hiring cycle has the potential to harm the legal profession.

Students are receiving a narrower legal education experience because they are being forced to make career decisions before they have exposure to the profession itself.

Many are deciding what type of law they want to practice before taking foundational courses, participating in clinics, or experiencing different practice settings. Others feel pressured to prioritize large firm opportunities over public service work simply because the large firms begin hiring before other employers have even considered whether they can afford to hire anyone. After completing the requirements for diploma privilege, they rarely experiment with new subjects and instead narrow their education to fit a mold that they agreed to as a 1L.

The result is that students are missing experiences that are essential to becoming thoughtful, capable lawyers.

Take the 1L student heading into Big Law mentioned earlier. He will spend only four weeks at the firm during his 1L summer. Subtract a week or two for orientation activities and the inevitable learning curve that comes with entering a professional environment for the first time, and there is barely any time left for meaningful work.

How much can a student realistically learn in two weeks? How can they meaningfully engage with projects, receive feedback, revise their work, and improve? How can they establish relationships with the attorneys in that office? They cannot. But despite that, they accept these positions because of the massive pay and guarantee of a 2L summer job.

Compressing this experience into a few weeks reduces summer employment to little more than a recruiting tool rather than a learning opportunity.

The hiring cycle is also changing how students engage with law school itself. Law school risks becoming less a place for exploration and professional growth and more a process of preserving credentials long enough to secure employment.

I helped organize Moot Court Board tryouts this year. We had record levels of initial interest from a 1L class of more than 250 students, yet only a little over 30 students ultimately participated in tryouts. That number was roughly the same as when I was a 1L in a class of about 170 students. Mock trial, journals, and clinics saw this same trend.

I asked dozens of 1Ls why they chose not to participate. The most common response was simple: “Why spend a significant amount of time on something that no longer matters?”

Many students had already secured summer positions for both 1L and 2L summers. They no longer felt interested in building their résumés through moot court, mock trial, journals, clinics, or other cocurricular experiences. Instead, many preferred to do the minimum necessary because they already had their job offers.

The accelerated hiring cycle shifts the hiring process from a place where every student is seemingly judged from a similar starting point based on merit to a process filled with disparity.

Especially for first-generation students with no connections to these large law firms, they are at a significant disadvantage to those who have connections. Many of these students are just learning what Big Law even means by the time that those more connected to the legal world are already having second and third interviews.

This accelerated system also places students who grow and improve academically over their three years at a disadvantage because they cannot show that growth when applying in fall of their 1L year. It’s becoming a game of “who do you know?” rather than a selection process based on skill and potential.

The current system also disadvantages smaller employers. Small firms, government offices, and public interest organizations often lack the recruiting and financial resources necessary to compete with large firms for early talent. They cannot send recruiting teams to campuses in October or extend offers months before competitors have even begun reviewing applications.

As the hiring cycle accelerates, these employers increasingly lose access to strong candidates before they ever have the opportunity to participate in the process.

What Do We Do?

There are firms that recognize this problem and have taken steps to mitigate it. Susman Godfrey, a firm with hundreds of attorneys across four offices, announced that they would not consider candidates until they have their final 1L grades. It’s refreshing to see this from a large firm, but will other firms follow?

I won’t pretend to have a perfect answer to this problem.

The purpose of this piece is not to lecture firms on how they should recruit students, but rather to describe what is happening inside law schools and to raise concerns about how the accelerated hiring cycle is reshaping legal education and professional development.

What I do know is that the legal profession needs to start having serious conversations about whether this system is sustainable.

Right now, students are being asked to make career-defining decisions earlier than ever before, often before they have had a genuine opportunity to discover what kind of lawyers they want to become. I don’t believe that this is sustainable for our profession and has the potential to harm the quality of legal education and our profession as a whole.

This article was originally published on the State Bar of Wisconsin’s Litigation Section Blog. Visit the State Bar sections or the Litigation Section webpages to learn more about the benefits of section membership.