NALP: Accelerating Recruiting Trends Amidst Market Slowdown

By James Leipold

This week National Association for Law Placement (NALP) released its most recent data and analyses of the state of the law firm recruiting market, and by my reading there are three important stories that emerge:

1. Winter is coming
2. The on-campus interview (OCI) is dead
3. Super early is too early

For many people across the U.S., winter did indeed come in all its glory and violence, and I always relish the opportunity to drop a Game of Thrones allusion (it’s been a while!), but the winter I am talking about is the slowing of the legal recruitment market.

The steady rise in law school applications in recent years has been buoyed by many things, including our current politics, but in part it has been lifted by the year-over-year record high employment outcomes from law schools in recent years, and those positive outcomes have been driven largely by red hot recruiting by law firms. The latest NALP data indicate that the red-hot temperature is finally cooling to something closer to lukewarm.

NALP reports that for the most recent recruiting cycle, the median number of offers made for 2L summer programs was the lowest on record, and as a result, for all law firms last summer, average 2L summer program class sizes fell to their lowest level since 2020. In the largest firms, summer class sizes fell to their smallest since 2012. In addition, the total number of students participating in 2L summer programs and receiving associate offers was the lowest since 2021. Those data trends taken together indicate that law firms are putting the brakes on runaway recruiting, and that is not surprising given the many economic uncertainties they face, not the least of which is the virtually unmeasurable impact that AI will have on the practice of law.

Those students who were summer associates in 2025 and will graduate in 2026 are members of the smallest entering law school class since 2017, so this contraction in law firm recruiting may not affect the overall employment rate for that class too dramatically. The two classes that follow, however, are considerably larger, and the class of 2028 is the largest entering class in 13 years. These two trends — a falling law firm appetite for recruiting large numbers of new associates and a rising class size in law schools — will likely converge in ways that bring down overall law school employment outcomes in a measurable way. Like admission, law school graduate employment rates trace peaks and valleys, and with winter upon us, we appear to be about to ski downhill for a while.

The Death of the On-Campus Interview 

The second story, and perhaps the bigger story, is the death of the on-campus interview (OCI), the long established first step in the law firm recruitment process, but a short hand that now stands in for any law-school-sponsored recruiting programs. For more than 50 years, some version of OCI was the dominant way that law students found employment with larger law firms. And while the importance of OCI has been diminishing steadily since the COVID pandemic, 2026 may finally be the year that we can declare it officially dead.

With the death of OCI, the language that describes recruiting has also changed. Recruiting professionals now talk about “law-school-sponsored recruiting” (the remnants of OCI) and “employer-sponsored recruiting.” NALP reports that the majority of offers for summer 2026 were made via employer-sponsored recruiting (80% were made via employer-sponsored recruiting versus just 20% from school-sponsored recruiting). In the largest firms and in the northeast, that trend is even more pronounced, where 86% of offers resulted from employer-sponsored recruiting. Law student direct applications to law firms (thus bypassing law school career services office policies and programs) have been the most utilized recruitment method for the past two recruiting cycles, and for the most recent cycle 93% of law offices reported accepting direct applications, but only 71% of law offices reported participating in any OCI programs.

Early Recruitment

The separate but related third story is that with the death of OCI and law school regulation of the recruiting process, the timing of recruiting continues to move earlier, with students having to grapple with Big Law recruiting events and activities as early as their first semester in law school. This is not news, but NALP reports that the timing of offers for summer programs moved to its earliest yet in 2025, with the majority of offers for 2L summer positions being made prior to June of the 1L year. According to the recently released NALP data, 5% of all summer offers were made in March or before, 15% in April, 36% in May, 29% in June, 11% in July, 3% August, and 1% in September or later. In total, 56% of summer offers were made prior to June of students’ 1L year, and 85% of offers were made before July 2025, a huge single-year jump considering only 34% of 2L summer offers were made before July 2024.

This super early recruiting, in addition to disrupting first year academics for all students who participate, also surely exacerbates disadvantage and privileges advantage in ways that make the game harder than it needs to be for all sorts of students, including many first-generation law students. Recently, leaders of 18 student organizations from law schools that send a high percentage of their students to jobs in large law firms wrote to the Council of the American Bar Association's (ABA) Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar to protest this accelerated recruiting timeline and ask the section to intervene. On the school side, career services offices are having to conduct pre-matriculation career programming to enable students to begin preparing for the recruitment cycle before they get through orientation, and law school admission professionals are weighing whether admission decisions should be based, in part, on employability, prescreening students for likely success in this fast-paced recruiting landscape. In my mind these are all bad developments.

There are no easy solutions here, and antitrust constraints are likely to limit the ABA’s ability to intervene in this free-market system, as NALP itself has been similarly thwarted in the past, but it certainly seems that there must be a better way. Perhaps the slowing market for Big Law recruiting will itself help put the brakes on some of these negative developments.

Interested in learning more? I will be discussing these very issues at the LSAC Annual Meeting in May with two senior NALP leaders, Mike Gotham, the chief talent and recruiting officer at Stoel Rives LLP, and Beth Moeller, the assistant dean of Career Services at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law. I hope you can join us for that conversation in Spokane, Washington! And you can find the full data set from the most recent NALP recruiting cycle at https://www.nalp.org/perspectivesonrecruiting.