Biglaw was once a well-oiled pyramid scheme. Hire an army of junior servants to work hard in discovery or due diligence for a few years and, by process of elimination, the next generation of partners would rise. Law students camped out in a hotel, submitting to 20-minute interviews that decided their careers. Whatever else could be said about campus recruiting, it provided structure.
This structure has disappeared. And replacement has ripple effects throughout the law firm’s hiring process.
Firm outlooka legal market intelligence firm, has just released a five-year associate recruiting white paper covering 2021 to 2025. As we talk about law firms moving away from on-campus recruiting and the risks AI presents to junior recruiting, law firms have been reorienting themselves around the lateral market. And in 2025, for the first time in years, the majority of associate hires took place at experienced the end of the market – lateral associates, ex-government employees and refugees – rather than straight out of law school.
Law student hires fell to 37.5% of all associate hires, down from 43.8% in 2021. Firm Prospects calls this 6.4-point decline “the largest structural change in the data set in a single category.” When the “brute force” tasks that once filled a junior associate’s day—reviewing documents, first drafts of research notes, and all the other unglamorous tasks that firms charged juniors with—begin to be absorbed by software, the economic case for hiring an untrained law graduate becomes harder to demonstrate. Why pay to season a 1L when the market is full of three- to five-year-old associates that arrive pre-seasoned?
Recruiter fees may seem high, but they are a bargain compared to training costs.
The few proponents of the death of campus interviews argued that it could level the playing field. Optimists argued that direct enforcement democratize the process when companies no longer favor the same dozen campuses with an end-of-summer campus blitz.
The report reveals that the exact opposite happened.
Firm Prospects has tracked law student hiring by more than 500 law firms across grade levels. T14 students have remained essentially stable: hiring of T14 graduates at large companies has only declined by 2.6% over five years. But everyone else collapsed. Hiring of T18-50 students at large companies (I assume we count T14s by including all schools that held at least a tie in those ranks during this period) fell 8.7 points. The T51-100 fell 10.5 percent. And students from schools ranked between 101 and 200 saw their share of hiring in large companies collapse, going from 52.6% in 2021 to 36% in 2025, a free fall of 16.6 points.
Because companies kept showing interest in the same campuses, they simply started outsourcing the hiring to 3Ls in exchange for money. Not to mention, direct applications place the research burden on the student, rewarding applicants with resources and the institutional manpower needed to navigate hundreds of companies without a timeline or rules. Furthermore, when a company finds itself overwhelmed by an avalanche of undifferentiated applications, it chooses the cheapest sorting mechanism available, namely the reputation of the school. Or, as the report puts it dryly, companies are “returning to the natural tendency of using law school rankings as a performance indicator.” The on-campus interviews may have been a faulty filter, but it was, you know… a filter. It at least forced companies to show up on a campus and look someone from a regional law school in the eye. Remove the filter and it’s not meritocracy, but rather HR hitting a Command-F for “Columbia.”
The third major observation is that New York is in decline.
New York’s share of hiring T14 law students has fallen 11 percent in five years. Its share of T18-50 students fell by almost 12. The winners were Chicago, Washington and – the term that keeps coming up – the Sun Belt. Atlanta, Austin, Dallas and part of Florida all won across the board. None of this will shock anyone who has seen Biglaw firms plant flags in Texas at a rate that has turned “another firm opens an office in Dallas” into a recurring phenomenon. Above the law kind of title.
It’s tempting to view the three results as separate trend lines, but I don’t think that’s the case. Biglaw has spent the last five years quietly optimizing. It’s all about experience rather than potential, prestige rather than pipeline, and cheaper (but growing) markets rather than expensive. And it’s hard to imagine this trend reversing any time soon.
Joe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Think like a lawyer. Please feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter Or Blue sky if you’re interested in law, politics and a healthy dose of college sports news.
