Top California law firms now want students to apply as they start school

Law school. It’s long nights at the library, reviewing case law and preparing for the bar exam. At the end of the three years law students spend grinding away is the hope of a lucrative law career. But few students know that they now may need to find an employer before they have even finished their first semester, and it’s creating chaos.

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The shift made one student’s first semester “extremely anxiety-inducing,” an incoming third-year UC Berkeley law student, who was granted anonymity for this story in accordance with Hearst’s ethics policy due to fear of professional repercussions, told SFGATE. 

“I literally got stress hives for half of the first semester of law school,” the student said. “I worked out of a top-five-in-the-world litigation firm for three years, and I’ve never had that level of stress.” The job, she explained, required up to 105-hour workweeks. 

Most private U.S. law firms, collectively known as  “big law,” hire for their entry-level associate positions through summer associate programs that take place between students’ second and third years. At the end of the summer, 96% to 98% of students receive job offers for post-graduation. The rate is one of the most important factors students consider when scoping out summer associate programs. And California is the second-largest market for lawyers in the U.S., according to the American Bar Association, so many summer jobs are in the state.

The starting salaries at a top law firm range from $215,000 to $225,000 for first-year associates as of 2025, according to the Cravath salary scale, a formula set by the highest-ranked law firm. For many students, this is the job that will help them pay off their law school debt, which typically averages $137,500 after graduation, and sets off their careers. Debt, the Berkeley law student said, motivated her choice to pursue big law.

“Law school itself is a very, very stressful time for students, particularly the first semester, as they’re adjusting to law school and learning how to be a law student,” said Nikia Gray, executive director of the National Association for Law Placement, or NALP. “The fact that they now have recruiting on top for these large firms is adding to the stress.” 

Between juggling difficult first-semester coursework, where grades are important to lock in a job offer, and applying for jobs based on limited information, many students have taken issue with an emerging trend of earlier and earlier recruitment timelines by big law firms. And for first-generation students or students who do not come from a family of lawyers, they could be at a greater disadvantage in being prepared for the recruitment timelines.

A (over the 2025-2026 school year) from the Law School Admission Council and the NALP found that that men, those attending more selective schools, non-first-generation college graduates, students ages 23 to 29 and those who knew they wanted to pursue big law before attending law school had greater awareness of earlier timelines. 

About 56% of over 3,000 respondents felt that the sped-up timelines had a negative impact on their first-year experience, and 71% of those considering big law jobs said their first-year experience was negatively impacted. Around 22% of all respondents noted the timeline had a negative impact on their ability to focus on coursework.

“In the back of my mind, I’m like I have to make this work, because if I don’t impress these people, then I will be hard-pressed to find a different job that pays as well,” the UC Berkeley student said. “Law school is $300,000 … I don’t have any money to cover that, and I didn’t get a scholarship. It’s kind of brutal.”

The sped-up timeline has left students with less time to think about what area of law they are actually interested in, students who spoke to SFGATE said. The first- and second-semester classes would normally allow students to explore what areas of law they are interested in, including transactional law, one student noted, which is the primary work of big law. That opportunity is effectively gone now for students who want the best chances of working in big law.

Another incoming third-year Berkeley law student, who was granted anonymity because she feared employer retaliation, said she waited until on-campus interview times, around January and February of the first year, referred to as 1L, to apply for jobs. She wanted to go with honors attorney roles that offer loan forgiveness, but the Trump administration cut many of those programs, and she turned to big law to pay off her debt.

Despite having an offer from a large banking firm in her first year, she realized she didn’t want the job and turned it down with no backup plans.

“I was so unprepared,” the student said. “I was vaguely aware that it was an earlier cycle than typical, but I was focused on things that were right in front of me, which were getting our internship for summer of 1L,” the student said. She ended up working a litigation-focused summer associate role at a technology law firm, a job she got via on-campus interviews.

The trend of earlier recruitment, Gray said, is motivated by competition between firms. If one firm is moving up the timeline, other firms feel obligated to follow so that they do not miss out on the “best” crop of students. While in practice, this might increase accessibility to jobs, it has actually narrowed the ability of students from less prestigious schools to get big law job opportunities, according to a Firm Prospects study in May.

“It seems like the soonest it’s been, and I expect it’s going to happen earlier,” Gray said, referencing her recent conversations with recruiters.

The recruiting process has transformed: It used to mainly start with a law school’s on-campus interview program, but now the process largely consists of online, direct applications and online interviews, the survey found. Timelines are shifting too: 2024 had already seen an earlier recruiting period, moving to the spring semester of the first year. Now, first-year students are beginning to apply and interview for summer associate jobs even earlier, in the fall semester.

Nine out of 50 of the top law firms listed in Vault’s 2025 national law firm rankings began accepting resumes in November, an SFGATE review showed. Nearly half, 23, of the the top 50 firms don’t list a date for application openings, and 11 firms state they accept applications on a rolling basis, according to Vault or their company websites. None of the top 15 firms SFGATE reached out to responded to requests for comment.

Some firms said that their timelines match up with market trends, with many recruiting both online and through on-campus interviews. Susman Godfrey, whose recruitment opens in June, much later than the other firms, emphasized a later recruitment schedule on its Vault profile, with “no exploding offers, no race to apply while balancing classwork, and no decisions based on partial records.” (One common tactic is to give students limited windows to accept jobs, with some firms opting to offer a job for two consecutive summers instead of one.) “Law students,” Susman Godfrey wrote, “will have the opportunity to complete their first year of law school.”

“I think a lot of students who hesitated to apply earlier ended up having not as good of a time in recruitment,” Edwyn Lozano, an incoming second-year at UCLA, said. “It did add an extra layer of uncertainty.” He noted that some firms had finished interviews in the fall and were just waiting to offer spots until first-semester grades came out, based on his observations and conversations with peers. 

The NALP released a statement in April advising firms to schedule their activities at times that do not interfere with student schedules, to avoid conduct that puts pressure on students to accept offers, and especially to be careful about recruiting around students in the first semester. 

However, no one body could enforce regulations on the recruitment timelines, which could potentially be an anti-trust violation, Gray said.

Firms have been testing earlier recruitment timelines for decades, although the recent trend is the starkest. “Fall recruiting” used to begin in the September or October of a student’s second year before the 1970s. But when New York schools moved timelines to August of the second year to avoid conflicting with classtime, other schools noted the competitive advantage and also moved their recruitment to August.

By 2000, most schools agreed that August was the prime time for on-campus recruiting. And this was the main way for firms to recruit for positions, requiring lawyers to fly out and spend lots of time and money. And schools were the intermediaries.

Up until 2018, the NALP included timeline guidance in its annual recommendations. The NALP plays an important role between schools and firms, collecting data on employment and setting standards for law recruiting and employment. In 2010, it weighed a suggestion to push recruitment timelines back several months, in response to layoffs and job offer rescissions — consequences of the economic loss of the 2008 recession.

Jones Day, a prominent law firm that represented Donald Trump in his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns, drafted an eight-page letter in response arguing that the suggestion punishes firms who have a competitive advantage and cited potential antitrust law violations.

The recommendation was ultimately not implemented for the same reason Gray noted before — violating antitrust laws. 

Technology also changed the game for recruiting. Since the COVID-19 pandemic brought in new avenues for recruiters to meet students online, firms no longer had to fly out to meet them. According to 2023 numbers recorded by the NALP, only 53% of students were recruited through on-campus recruiting.

With earlier timelines and online recruiting, some students think that puts the firms in a position where they are recruiting students who aren’t necessarily passionate about the field of law.

“You’re just going off vibes at that point,” Jonathan Hale, an incoming third-year law student at UCLA pursuing public service roles, said. When Hale first started at UCLA in 2024, he remembered going to three to four events a week hosted by big law firms, who he said largely sponsored all school events.

That’s because, he learned, law firms keep track of how many off-campus events and socials you attend during their hiring process. Firms want to see how students gel with the associates, to test if they fit the firm culture. Hale described it like “fraternity” culture. When he attended an event hosted by a prominent law firm at a private night club off Sunset Drive in Beverly Hills, he felt “grossed out.”

“There were Bugattis in the valet, there was oak-paneled walls, all of the servers were wearing Southern-style pink suits with KFC Colonel Sanders bow ties, and they were so deferential,” Hale said. 

The earlier timelines have also had an impact on who gets hired. According to a , the hiring of summer associates of color fell sharply from the prior year, down 5.5 percentage points to 37.5%, the sharpest decline on record. (The survey also had a smaller share of firms responding than prior years.)

Students said big firms might feel more comfortable recruiting earlier, when there is limited information on students, because they expect high turnover rates from associates. Some firms may give out “cold offers,” officially offering a job at the end of the summer associate term but telling the student they don’t actually want them to work at the firm, for the sake of boasting high return offer numbers.

“I think for some people, it’s a ticket out, it represents hope and opportunity, and people are able to keep a balance of their work and the causes that they care about and their family and all that,” Hale said. “But for some people, working at these firms, regardless of the outcome, it’s a symbol of prestige. And that’s how the law firms sell it to the students with the way they advertise themselves on campus.”

The American Bar Association did not respond to requests for comment.