Post
by HelltotheNo » Thu Feb 10, 2011 2:49 pm
I had someone PM me this about Emory and the OCI rumor/reality
this may be helpful to some other users on the forum
"The idea that Emory's OCI slide was disproportionate to its peers is entirely a myth, largely due to the sensationalism of TLS, drawing unfounded conclusions from misleading statistics. There are a couple of reason for why it's not true.
1. Nobody bothered to look at Emory's OCI from 2009 or 2008. Most of the schools in the top 25 will have over 100 firms come to their OCI, and every firm is looking for the exact same thing: kids in the top 1/3.
So theoretically Notre Dame could have the entire NLJ 250 show up to OCI, but if all of them are only looking for kids in the top 1/3, then 2/3 of class will still go without jobs. The fundamental problem with using OCI numbers as a proxy for employment is inherently flawed unless you can find the number of offers given out on average per firm.
When the economy tanked a while back, Emory already had only 61 firms at 2008 OCI, a paltry number compared to every other school in the rest of the T25. The firms however, where taking about 1.5 kids on average from OCI, resulting in a much much higher ratio of interviews/offers than peer schools. So 2009 OCI, the first doom-and-gloom hiring period, Emory intentionally cut down on their "courtesy" interview firms. I don't exactly know the motivation for this, but I think it was a result more of firms not feeling the need to interview. At a lot of schools, firms knew they weren't hiring, but if they didn't at least come to OCI then they would be afraid of severing the ties they had with that school. So a bazillion employers around the nation these past two cycles interviewed at schools and didn't hire a single person. This was not the case at Emory.
Now, a lot of people like to peg this fear up to "recent" OCI struggles. But I don't know if you noticed in that last paragraph. Emory has had 29 firms come to OCI two years in a row now, and only 61 in the boom times, so there is no "recent woe" so to speak, nothing has changed. The entire premise of "OCI woes" is mainly based out of ignorance of the fact that Emory has always had a low number of firms attending OCI. Part of that was explained in the aforementioned paragraph, but the other part was because
2. Emory's OCI is decentralized, and that number only takes into account the southeastern region for hiring. Mainly firms from Florida, various other midsized towns in the southeast, and of course Atlanta. Now, i'm not going to lie to you, getting biglaw from Atlanta is tough right now. As a proportion of its population, Atlanta led the nation in layoffs in the legal sector. I think the number was right around 7%. So naturally a 50+% drop (61 to 29) in firms from 2008 to 2009/10 was huge, but it doesn't actually reflect the state of hiring from Emory.
One of the great things about Emory is that, outside of the top 20, it has some of the best mobility to big cities. Emory is a brand name that carries (best to New York,) but also at other firms throughout the southeast, especially if you have connections.
I don't know what the logic is. But Emory has an OCI New York, in New York. As well as an OCI Los Angeles, in Los Angeles. They have one for DC and Chicago too, but none of them are as big as New Yorks. I think the total number of firms coming to OCI outside of the "On Campus" was around 40+, so if you want to do an all inclusive OCI count (aka what other schools actually published) it'd be over 70 firms. Now I know at these OCIs the firms are not quite as inclined to hiring as the main one back in Atlanta, but people absolutely do get jobs there. I have a very good 3L friend who got a job at a Dechert off of Emory's NYOCI. Two other kids in that same class got jobs and Kirkland & Ellis from that same OCI.
So final question: is Emory actually doing worse than it's peers as of late. Well, we don't know. Nobody knows, and nobody will know until 2013 when the c/o 2011 statistics are published along with the % of the class landing NLJ250 jobs. The only thing anybody definitely knows is that we don't know anything. Now, from all other circumstantial metrics for judging how well a school's hiring is doing, there is absolutely no indication that Emory is doing any worse than its peers. Sure they're struggling a little bit, but frankly so is every other school in this range. "
