Forget law school recruitment. Build your own lawyers.

Law firms that really want to win the war for talent should look beyond the tiny pre-filtered population of law students and extend their talent search to the whole world. Here's how they could do it.

This past spring, word emerged that some large US law firms were “jumping the gun” on traditional law school recruitment. Rather than waiting for on-campus interviews and other open-access opportunities to meet potential new recruits, these firms are directly hiring from the ranks of brand-new students.

“Firms have now shifted recruiting to their own online platforms and encourage students to apply ahead of their schools’ OCI,” reported Bloomberg Law. “Nearly half of law firms’ summer program hires last year came outside of OCI recruiting.” New rules on virtual recruitment have enabled this innovation for firms seeking first crack at the most promising candidates before rivals have a chance to size them up.

The downside, of course, is that students so early in their legal journey have hardly any track record of legal accomplishment for the firms to assess, and they usually aren’t ready to make an informed decision about their first legal employer. But firms aren’t bothered, because they love this idea of customized virtual recruitment: “I can’t imagine a scenario where we ever go back to flying attorneys all over the country in a two-week period of time to interview candidates,” said one firm’s recruitment director.

This is an interesting development, one that might well foreshadow the end of OCIs and a diminished future role in first-year recruitment for both law schools and groups like NALP. But I’d like to encourage law firms to think bigger. Don’t just recruit earlier from the ranks of first-year law students. Forget the schools altogether. Recruit from before law school. Find your future lawyers in the general population.

Here’s the problem for law firms that look for new lawyers only among the ranks of law students: They are unintentionally restricting their talent search to a microscopic fraction of the world that’s been pre-filtered by law schools and the legal education industry for their own purposes.

Law students are not a randomly or fairly generated population. Law school applicants enjoy significant socio-economic advantages relative to other people, including the ability to attend university, perform well academically, and complete an undergraduate degree — all of which correlate with socio-economic status. But there’s an even more basic advantage that accrues to people with those advantages: It would even occur to them that law was a realistic career possibility. There are countless people in our society for whom becoming a lawyer is about as likely a dream as walking on Mars.

But not everyone who would like to become a lawyer will be able to start this journey. The even smaller number of successful law school applicants possess those characteristics their school’s admissions committee favours. That includes, in many highly ranked universities, legacy admission status for children of alumni, which further reinforces pre-existing privilege.

But in all cases, those characteristics include the ability to afford the law school experience, whether through scholarship or bursary, or (far more often) private wealth or government loans. Tuition at my well-regarded law school in my final year (1992-93) was about $2,300. Thirty years later, it’s eight times higher. In my non-wealthy family, I could afford to attend law school back then; I absolutely could not today.

The entrenched unfairness of the entranceway into legal practice is a deeply serious problem for the legal profession — not that the profession has treated it as such. But law firms have different concerns. They’re engaged in an increasingly brutal war for future talent, and they need every competitive advantage they can find to come out on top. But only a very few firms can pay top dollar for new hires; the rest have to persuade law school graduates on their own merits as best they can.

But for the truly imaginative law firm, a third option exists: Expand the talent pool beyond what the law schools are content to offer.

Here’s how a law firm could proceed in this direction. Sponsor a general talent search in its preferred regions of the country, announcing: “We’re looking for people to become great lawyers someday. If you think you can be one, fill out this application and tell us why. If we agree, we’ll interview you; if we both agree this is a great fit, we’ll send you to law school — and help pay your way.”

Law firms that approached recruitment this way would have their choice of the best candidates from the entire population. They could, if they wished, interview the most promising high school or community college students from low-income areas and put them into a future talent development pipeline that would pay off years down the road.

But they wouldn’t have to restrict themselves to young people. They could choose experienced technicians and professionals from all walks of life — data scientists, social workers, engineers, salespeople, anyone with the right mix of intellect, talent, desire, and skills the firms are seeking. They could interview people with work backgrounds and life exposure, no longer restricted to disproportionately young and inexperienced students. They could cast their net as wide as they like.

Teaching people law is the easy part. Building expert domain knowledge and relational aptitude is hard. Finding people with the drive, ambition, character, and judgment that mark future leaders is hardest of all. This approach to recruitment would allow law firms to find people with the hard parts already in place — those who’ve already lived some life, learned some hard lessons, and earned some valuable skills. And it would change the makeup of firms, and perhaps even the legal profession, making it more representative of the wider population.

But I wouldn’t want law firms to stop there, either. The ultimate endgame, from my perspective, would be for law firms to bypass law school in this process altogether.

The problem with legal education is no longer as simple as “Law school doesn’t prepare you for a legal career.” That’s a 20th-century complaint. The problem now is that law school, for many aspiring lawyers, is actively detrimental to their legal career.

Law school takes up 32 months of your life, studying court cases and writing essays for professors while developing work habits and approaches you’ll have to unlearn once you enter a legal business environment. The debt load you emerge with (routinely in the six figures) effectively restricts your employment options to large law firms with incredibly demanding expectations. In many ways, you’d have been better off not having gone to law school — but the degree is almost universally a prerequisite for law licensure.

I’ve been urging legal regulators to drop that requirement and replace it with a legal knowledge examination instead. To date, I’ve found no takers for that proposition among state bars, courts, and law societies. So here’s another way to attack the same problem: Law firms could not only recruit from the pre-law-school population, they could enroll those candidates in their own legal education program. They could create a “Legal Business Law School.”

A law firm could create its own legal knowledge curriculum, one that satisfies regulatory standards for learning outcomes while also inculcating enrolees in the practical realities of the legal services business. The “faculty” could include the firm’s lawyers (both younger associates with recent experience as new calls and older partners preparing to transition out of active practice), along with other trained legal instructors. The pedagogy could be based on the latest professional development best practices. Lawyer competence standards are available to anyone who’s interested.

The “Legal Business Law School” would not be free. New recruits would have to pay the firm for this education and training, although the total amount would certainly be less than the average law degree and could be completed in less than half the time. Once the recruits have completed the program to the firm’s satisfaction, they could write the relevant bar exams (having received from the firm all the benefits of bar exam prep that private providers would deliver). Upon passing the exam and whatever character and fitness tests the local authorities apply, they would present themselves for licensure.

The licensing authority would then have a decision to make. Does it bar the applicant from licensure (or even from taking the exam in the first place) on the grounds that no law degree has been earned? The law firm could make clear to the regulator its confidence that these candidates are suitable for licensure — a position that, if necessary, it would be happy to advance through litigation.

A law firm wouldn’t need to walk this challenging path alone. A consortium of law firms could pool resources and join efforts to create that “Legal Business Law School” in their region. Participating firms would benefit from new lawyers educated and trained in ways that meet their needs: business-oriented, client-focused, practice-trained, and steeped in big-picture thinking. Such an entity would instantly become an attractive alternative to traditional law schools.

This might seem quixotic to you, but I’m not so sure. Most law firms I speak with these days are deeply dissatisfied with the state in which their youngest cohort of lawyers arrive. The firms feel increasingly shortchanged by the lawyer formation process and deeply irritated by their unasked-for role of “lawyer finishing school.” There would be clear benefits to moving their recruitment process even earlier to pre-law-school — or to consider bypassing the schools entirely.

The next few years are going to bring tremendous upheaval to the legal sector, and even those systems that work fairly well are in danger of falling by the wayside. Lawyer formation is not one of those systems. It is expensive, time-consuming, and inefficient; worst of all, it does not serve the interests either of lawyers or the law firms that want to hire them.

This is a broken process, long overdue for challenge and change. Law firms don’t have to wait around for that to happen. They could lead that change themselves.