Transcript
"Why are law firms not hiring as many associates as they used to from law school like they were in the 1990s?"
Now, I don't know if that's the case, I don't have those statistics in front of me, but I know that, and I think there's an article that's running in American Lawyer that I was interviewed for yesterday and they had this question.
One of the reasons they don't hire as many new associates, I think hiring has slowed down over the past year, and a lot of that has to do with people working remotely. And, I do think that there's not as much new hiring going on because there is really a kind of a fall off of new associates. What happens is when people are new out of law school, you really don't know if they're going to work. You have no idea if people are going to work out or not, and that's an issue. And so what happens is a lot of times people will be trained and then leave. Many people wanna do other things than practice law, and so there's just a lot of issues.
And law firms don't know that. So the only way they really can know if the person's going to stick around is when the person has been there for a couple of years and they can see. A lot of times law firms actually prefer hiring laterals because they don't have to mess around with this stuff. And people that graduate out of big law schools will act like they want to stay in the law firm and work there a long time, but most of them will leave and lateral to another firm, or they'll go in house or they'll take another job. So that's a big risk for firms because, when they're hiring new attorneys out of law school, the attorneys are likely to leave. They're likely to go to other firms, they're likely to do all sorts of things, and the law firm will have invested in training and will lose all that time in training.
When an attorney is new, so law students, new attorneys, they take a lot of time. They have to be trained, and then a lot of times they have to write off their time because they're not doing work effectively and so forth. So for law firms, it's actually a lot of work. And, I think back in the 1990s, there probably was a lot more expectation that people would stick around. I think that has a lot more to it. I don't know, honestly, if there's a lot less hiring going on, proportionally, but I do think that law firms, a lot of law firms would prefer to hire to do that.
