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Building a Better Legal Profession

11/6/2009 9:56:09 PM EST

Stanford Law School Dean Larry Kramer Discusses Interviews and Jobs

Posted by BBLP

It's a tough interview season with fewer jobs for law students. Stanford Law School Dean Larry Kramer talks about how insights from this season could change the process for the future.

Q: What were your expectations coming into this recruiting season?

A: Our expectations were that it would obviously be tougher than true for the past number of years, but that with hard work and a proactive approach on our part things would work out.

Q: And what’s your take on what actually happened? Did it match that expectation?

A: Well it’s not over yet. One of the differences is that this recruiting season is extending pretty long. There are still people looking for jobs and still firms looking for people.

But things are so far about what we expected and in the end I think we’ll be ok with a lot of hard work on our part.

Q: What kind of hard work? What are Stanford and other schools doing to help students navigate the job search process?

A: At Stanford we enlarged our Office of Career Services in anticipation of this recruiting season and provided students with a lot more individual counseling. We reached out to people and strongly suggested they come work with us and form a particular plan. We then touched base again and, if the first plan didn’t work out, helped students identify other firms and or positions that would work for them. The faculty and I have also been making a lot of personal calls for students.

Q: How is Stanford changing its strategy moving forward?

A: I think we’ll stick with this. What we’ve done is try to gather a lot more information to give students on a broader array of firms and give them more counseling. I think we’ll institutionalize that because it’s just a good thing, it’s not just about the economy even though it was driven by the economy at first.

Q: What do you think firms were thinking coming into recruiting season?

A: My impression is that most of the firms, because of all of the deferrals last year and the uncertainty about the economy, shrank their summer classes. In some cases by as much as 50-75%.

Firms were also more conservative in the number of offers they made on the theory that yield would be higher. That turned out not to be true for some firms. So one of the reasons this recruiting season has been extending out is because firms ended up with fewer people than they had room for.

There were also opportunities for smaller firms and boutique firms to get in touch with us this year to find Stanford students. And they did just that. We created whole process where we reached out to about 250 firms that hadn’t been recruiting at Stanford in the past few years or had never recruited at Stanford.

Q: So have we seen the worst? Will next year be better?

A: What I’m hearing from the firms is that by next year things should have “turned around”. One thing to keep in mind about that, though, is that I think, like the rest of the economy, everyone had been riding a bubble. First we had the dotcom bubble and that burst. Then we had the larger economic bubble that law firms were riding too and that burst.

So what we’re looking at in terms of things turning around is a return to normalcy, but normalcy means something more like the way things were in the ‘80s and ‘90s. There are going to be good jobs out there and jobs to be found. But you’ll want to look carefully and choose a firm that’s right for you. If you look at the ‘80s and ‘90s Stanford students did superbly in the job market, so we’ll come out of this. But students still won’t see as many offers as they did at the peak of the economic bubble.

Q: If you had a magic wand how would you change the OCI process?
A: Oh. *laughs* I think that law schools have done to the OCI process what judges did to the judicial clerkship market. We have forced it so that it’s way too soon and it’s smushed into way too short a period. It’s not working for anyone anymore.

First of all I’d move it back to the spring of 2L year. I’d spread it out over more time so students would have a chance to get more classes under their belt and, hopefully, get a better sense of what kind of a lawyer they want to be. They would also have more time to get a sense of the firms they’re considering so that when the time came to accept an offer they’d have a much better idea of what they wanted to accept.

In general it’s key to have it happen later in law school when you have more classes behind you and when you have a stronger sense of what you want to do. I think that’s really important. That way students can look at more options, and we could even have more employers participate if it’s spread out over more time.

Q: What do you think the chances are of actually making those changes? What would need to happen?

It’s a reasonable possibility. I think it will take awhile. But there’s an awful lot of interest on the part of law firms and law school deans.

Those changes aren’t driven by this academic downturn. What happened was a handful of law schools wanted to get the jump on other schools. Like with judges and the clerkship process, we need to set down some alternative process rules.