Mid-tier law students out of luck for biglaw? Forum

[jzadeh]

I go to a top 50 law school which has a poor showing for OCI. I went to law school hoping to get a high paying corporate law job and it seems nearly impossible unless you go to a top 20 law school. The larger firms that are here I heard are just here for show basically and the smaller firms don't pay much more than I would have made out of undergrad nor handle anything other than small business and individual work, which is disappointing.

Any thoughts?

[ClubberLang]

Surely you knew this coming in, but if you're at the top of the class you have a shot at biglaw, but it certainly isn't a given. The good thing about the recruiting schedule is you'll know if you are in or not by the end of August. If it doesn't work out with OCI, honestly the thing to do if you were set on biglaw is to drop out and move on with life.

Best advice is to hustle and not rely on your school's OCI. Hustle on your own, mass mail, go to job fairs (if there are any left).

[jchiles]

I don't have the same grand ambitions, but I go to a similar school and our OCI had about 20 employers come, and I can think of about 10-12 students who accepted offers with big or mid law firms hiring though OCI. I don't think there is any way I could have known going in that there would be so few employers hiring on campus, so I get your frustration.

If you have good grades you might be surprised with how effective directly contacting firms/mass mailing is. I received a lot of straight-to-callback interviews this way, but it is a grind to keep setting up these interviews and traveling at times far outside the market your school is in.

Idk about dropping out if you can't get big law, but if you miss the boat in the next month or two you probably aren't going to end up in a real high paying job straight out of school.

[TLSModBot]

I don't think there is any way I could have known going in that there would be so few employers hiring on campus, so I get your frustration.

I don't know how this could be right. There is ample information on the hiring statistics for every school (NALP data at the very least). Plus, there is this whole forum of people I've heard about who can advise on the desirability of certain law schools for particular career paths.

Maybe 6-7 years ago when the bottom fell out of the legal hiring market, I could understand people getting 'duped' into going to lower-tier law schools with biglaw dreams, but now with the wealth of information and the well played-out public narrative of how law school is not the value proposition it once was, even the barest bit of research should clue anyone in before committing.

[jchiles]

I don't think there is any way I could have known going in that there would be so few employers hiring on campus, so I get your frustration.

I don't know how this could be right. There is ample information on the hiring statistics for every school (NALP data at the very least). Plus, there is this whole forum of people I've heard about who can advise on the desirability of certain law schools for particular career paths.

Maybe 6-7 years ago when the bottom fell out of the legal hiring market, I could understand people getting 'duped' into going to lower-tier law schools with biglaw dreams, but now with the wealth of information and the well played-out public narrative of how law school is not the value proposition it once was, even the barest bit of research should clue anyone in before committing.

Yeah I'm not trying to say you can get duped into going to a lower ranked school at this point, I meant that I couldn't find a list of employers recruiting at my school on NALP or any other website, aside from some fairly outdated partial info on law school numbers.com. I was well aware of the number of students getting jobs with different sized firms, and I don't know if schools are required to publish specific OCI recruiter information or not, but I remember looking for this and being unable to find accurate info.

And TLS is a decent resource but there definitely aren't posters with knowledge of all OCI recruiters showing up at schools in this range. Which makes sense, it is "top law schools" after all. Basically just don't go to a T2 school expecting to get a job through OCI.

[A. Nony Mouse]

For the record for future students, you can ask schools you're considering for a list of employers who hired through OCI for the last few years. If they don't want to give it to you, that's probably a bad sign - I think schools often post who hires through their OCI on their career sites.