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I saw a story on Above The Law the other week that Cravath had posted a job for an attorney recruitment person who would handle lateral hires. Anyone know whether Cravath is starting to hire lateral associates?

They have. I saw a attorney lateral from Debevoise to Cravath. Pretty sure this counts as lateral hiring.

Anonymous User wrote: ↑

Sat Aug 21, 2021 6:47 pm

They have. I saw a attorney lateral from Debevoise to Cravath. Pretty sure this counts as lateral hiring.

Interesting. What’s the vibe like at Cravath about that?

Cravath has hired other lateral associates over the years, just not as many as other firms.

It seems the practical thing to do in this environment. From this article I'd conclude that not taking laterals just isn't sustainable. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/business- ... tion-story

DougEvans789 wrote: ↑

Sat Aug 21, 2021 7:17 pm

Anonymous User wrote: ↑

Sat Aug 21, 2021 6:47 pm

They have. I saw a attorney lateral from Debevoise to Cravath. Pretty sure this counts as lateral hiring.

Interesting. What’s the vibe like at Cravath about that?

Cravath has always hired laterals but only for non-core practices. The Deb lateral came over with David Portilla to do financial regulatory work (which Cravath hadn’t previously done so they wanted some associates with experience to support David). As far as I can tell, all of the recent laterals have fit this historical practice and there haven’t been any general corporate/lit associates hired who are fungible with the normal rotating associates.

The other bucket of lateral hiring is they occasionally hire back people who left Cravath (there’s one new guy like this) and those people generally go back to being regular associates in whatever practice they were in.

Personally, I think they’ll probably have to start lateral hiring associates for corporate at some point but Cravath has always bucked big law trends and convincing the partners to make such a drastic shift will take a lot.