Big Law Is Hiring Students Before Law School Has Time to Tell Firms Who Is Good at Law
Some of the country’s most lucrative legal jobs are being allocated years in advance. The earlier firms recruit, the more the advantage shifts toward students who arrived already knowing how the system works.
The Financial Times reported Thursday that firms including Paul Weiss, Simpson Thacher and Milbank will open applications before Christmas for 2028 summer-associate positions, meaning a student who started classes this fall could be interviewing this semester for work that begins in 2029. Those programs lead almost directly to permanent jobs paying $235,000 to start on the Milbank scale that Sullivan & Cromwell matched this summer. The timeline has compressed to the point where students make career-defining decisions within months of learning how law school works.
Big Law historically relied on on-campus interviewing after the first year, which gave employers grades, writing samples and nearly a year of observed performance. That system did not evolve away — it broke. On-campus interviewing collapsed during the pandemic, screening went virtual, and firms began engaging students directly instead of through career-services offices. NALP found that 80 percent of summer offers in the 2025 cycle came through employer-led recruiting rather than law school channels, and that 85 percent were made by the summer following first year. Schools lost the scheduling authority that had structured the market, and no one has taken it back. When hiring runs ahead of the evidence traditionally used to sort candidates, other signals fill the space.
The Summer Job Is the Job
The stakes are high because Big Law’s summer program is not an ordinary internship pipeline. Research from the Law School Admission Council and NALP finds that large firms hire almost all entry-level attorneys through second-year summer programs, with roughly 96 to 98 percent of summer associates receiving return offers. Securing that position amounts to securing a career before the second year of law school begins.
Students know this. An LSAC-NALP study of the 2025 first-year class found 88 percent were aware by October that recruiting had accelerated, but only 25 percent knew about the timelines before they enrolled. The rest learned the rules at roughly the moment they were expected to compete under them, which is a difference that falls unevenly. A student whose parent practices law, or whose undergraduate network includes attorneys, or who attended a school with established firm pipelines, arrives knowing what a summer associate is and how fast applications move. A first-generation student may arrive believing the old sequence still holds: attend class, earn grades, learn the profession, then recruit. By the time that student understands the market, seats are gone.
Firms Are Now Buying the First-Year Summer
The clearest measure of how far this has moved is that firms have started paying for a year they do not employ. At least 15 Am Law 100 firms now offer stipends between $25,000 and $50,000 to first-year students who commit early. Sidley pays $50,000 through its Professional Pathways program, Milbank $50,000 in two installments, Latham $25,000, and Davis Polk doubled its payment from $25,000 to $50,000. The structure is consistent across firms: the student commits to the firm’s second-year summer program, spends the first-year summer at a nonprofit, government agency or judicial internship, and the firm funds it.
The arrangement does something genuinely useful — public-interest summers have long been unpaid or barely paid, which restricted them to students who could afford the loss. It also converts that opportunity into something distributed by firms rather than earned independently, and available only to students the firms have already chosen. A pathway that once ran around the private market now runs through it.
Earlier Hiring Changes What Counts as Merit
Without first-semester grades, employers lean harder on what exists before law school: undergraduate credentials, prior work, school prestige, networks and interview polish. Reuters found that Big Law hiring is already concentrated in a narrow set of institutions, with only 16 law schools sending at least half their 2025 graduates to firms of 251 or more attorneys, while 89 schools sent 10 percent or fewer.
Firms are not engineering exclusion. They are responding to each other. Once one firm identifies desirable students earlier, every rival has reason to move earlier still, and the equilibrium keeps sliding backward with no one able to stop unilaterally. The stated rationale points the other way, though. Firms describe the acceleration partly as preparation for automation — securing students who will supply the judgment, client management and strategic thinking that survive as routine legal work becomes machine-assisted. Judgment is precisely the attribute a first-semester student cannot yet demonstrate, and the firms have designed a process that stops looking before it becomes visible.
Where This Breaks
Law school is supposed to generate new information about people. A student without connections can turn out to reason exceptionally well. An overlooked undergraduate can become the strongest writer in the room. Someone uncertain about corporate practice can discover an aptitude for transactions by studying them. Compressing recruitment into the opening months shrinks the window in which any of that can register, and pushes selection back toward what students carried in the door.
The correction, when it arrives, will not come from a fairness argument. It will come from attrition. Recruiters have already said the speed makes it harder to ensure offers go to people who will succeed, and mismatched associates are expensive to lose two years into a career. Cooley has begun hedging — filling roughly half its 2028 class during the first-year cycle, holding 30 to 40 percent for later, and working the overlooked third-year market, with its chief talent officer describing the aim as seeing a broader range of students over time.
Watch for more firms adopting that split, and watch for how it gets explained. It will be framed as talent strategy and retention discipline rather than as access. The firms that pull back will be the ones that concluded the early cohort underperformed, which means the argument that finally slows this down will be the one about money, made by the people who created the problem.
