Legal News

Talking About Axing Summer Programs Before Firms Were Axing Summer Programs

By Brian Harris

By Gina Passarella
Of the Legal Staff

Before news of Orrick?s delay to its 2009 on-campus recruiting came out and before Morgan Lewis decided to cancel its recruiting program and 2010 summer class altogether, Frank D?Amore had predicted that would be just the scenario young attorneys might face in this recession. In his April 13, article in The Legal titled ?Five Sobering Future Trends Could Impact Younger Lawyers,? D?Amore, of Attorney Career Catalysts, said one of those trends would be the death or decline of traditional summer associate programs.

?I also predict that we will see the death, or at least the decline of the traditional large, expensive summer programs at major law firms,? he wrote, lamenting at such a possibility given the enjoyment his summer experience provided years ago.

D?Amore wrote:

I was a passionate advocate of the benefits of a summer program while I was in private practice. This was a key recruiting tool that enabled a firm to evaluate a young lawyer in action, helped to bind him (theoretically) to the firm and tended to revitalize the whole firm for a few months. These benefits, and others, were perceived as outweighing the costs, which admittedly were significant.

I think the balance has now shifted the other way. Quite a few firms have told me that their informal analyses (which my long-term perspective supports) show that lawyers who started as summer associates don't stay appreciably longer than those who join a firm laterally, directly as a first-year, or from a clerkship. While some who leave go on to in-house positions (and become clients), the majority go to other law firms and thus become competitors.

That reality removes a crucial underpinning for a summer program. If interconnectedness is important, and it often is, this, too, is not in play if a firm decides to stop or decrease its hiring of first-year lawyers. This would mean that a second-year summer associate would then be at least two years removed (or more) from his connections in the firm after he departed the program. These hardly seem like the ties that bind.

The costs of a summer program, particularly today, and presumably in the future, as attention to expenses will remain, weigh heavily in favor of ending or significantly scaling back these programs. Most firms pay summer associates a prorated weekly pay that is equivalent to what first-year lawyers earn. As those first-year salaries are under attack, how can a firm justify paying that same scale for clerks whose time is even less likely to ever be collected from more watchful clients?

If these programs survive, I expect they will feature smaller classes with far fewer perks -- the days of flying summer associates across the country and oceans and battling to offer the coolest and most expensive events, will only repel clients. There will always be maverick firms that will go overboard, especially if the salad days return, but my belief is that there will be a paradigm shift in this realm, as sad as that is for me to acknowledge.

Full post as published by The Legal Intelligencer Blog on July 16, 2009 (boomark / email).