We all know how the economy has hit the legal job market, but in an article from The Legal Intelligencer found on New York Lawyer, we can take a closer look at what law grads can expect when it comes to finding associate work.
In general, firms have definitely cut back on hiring traditional first-year associates. And while hiring patterns may be increasing slightly now, it could be quite a while until they’re back as they were pre-recession.
In most of the country’s largest firms, there are fewer hires of summer and first-year associates, but at least salaries have remained around $145,000 or $160,000. Whereas a few years ago a firm may have hired 150 summer associates and taken on most of them full-time, now that firm will hire fewer than 20 in the summer and make offers to even less. Accordingly, the few that are hired “are the well-schooled, top-of-their-class attorneys firms can tell clients they were able to hire.”
The next tier of associates is made up of staff lawyers who are not on partner track and are essentially doing the same work as the top tier, but with “less expectations from the firm,” and are being paid from around $90,000 to $65,000.
The third tier are the contract or temporary lawyers who work on a project per diem with no benefits and no guarantee of future work. Thus, “when demand starts to pick up for legal services, the latter two groups of associates can fill in for the work traditionally done by more expensive partner-track associates, making the need for traditional associates significantly reduced for the foreseeable future.”
Nevertheless, the National Jurist reports an upswing in hiring for recent law grads. At Columbia Law School, there was an increase of 8 percent in the number of interviews firms have agreed to conduct with second-year students. And many firms have revealed their intentions to hire more summer associates for 2011. However, this is no indication that finding a job will be easy, and it is still best for students to “take a broader approach, both geographically and by practice area, when choosing where to apply.” We will only truly know if legal hiring has improved come next summer, but we’ll be keeping tabs until then.
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Read the full article: Hiring Patterns in Legal Sector
