The landscape of legal recruiting in law school has changed significantly over the past 5-7 years. What should prospective law students know about what's changed so rapidly, and how has it impacted how admissions officers make their decisions? What caused these changes (11:04), how do they impact 1Ls (16:15), and what are admissions officers increasingly valuing in the application review process in response to these changing trends and practices (25:07)? How can incoming students best prepare themselves for this new world of recruiting (39:54)?
In this episode of Status Check with Spivey, Anna Hicks-Jaco sits down with Rob Cacace, long-time Georgetown Law career services professional and Spivey Consulting Pre-L Program Director, and Kristen Mercado, former UC Davis Law admissions dean and one of Spivey's newest consultants, to discuss these questions and more.
Here are two short documents from the National Association for Law Placement (NALP) that provide additional context for this discussion:
You can listen and subscribe to Status Check with Spivey on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. You can read a full transcript of this episode with timestamps below.
Transcript:
[0:00] Anna Hicks-Jaco: Hello and welcome to Status Check with Spivey, where we talk about life law, school law, school admissions, a little bit of everything. I'm Anna Hicks-Jaco, president of Spivey Consulting, and today I am very fortunate to be joined by two of my colleagues and two brilliant individuals, Kristen Mercado and Rob Cacace.
I'll let them introduce themselves further in just a moment, but briefly, Kristen is one of our newest JD admissions consultants. She is a graduate of the University of Chicago, both the undergrad and the law school, and she also started her career in law school admissions at the University of Chicago. Most recently, she was the longstanding dean of admissions at UC Davis Law, where she led the admissions operations and was fully embedded in the admissions world for over a decade.
Rob is the founder and director of our pre-L program, through which he has developed a curriculum to teach soon-to-be law students the skills and techniques for law school success. He is a graduate of Harvard University, also both the undergrad and the law school. He has a master's from Oxford, and he is currently the director of career strategy at Georgetown Law, but he is speaking here in his capacity as a Spivey Consulting consultant. And he has been at Georgetown in career services for, I believe, almost a decade.
Rob Cacace: Yeah, over that. Almost 15 years.
Anna: Almost 15 years! Alright. And if you've been a listener of this podcast for a little while, you might have heard Rob on two of our episodes just last year. One on experiences and advice, and insights from being a first-generation college student, and the other on a somewhat similar topic to what we're discussing today.
[1:37] The idea for today's episode actually came from an episode that we recently did with Sam Parker, another one of our most recent consultants who joined us. And she was talking about her top 25 tips for law school admissions based on her time working in admissions at Harvard Law School. And one of the things that she brought up was the impact that the increased pace of 1L hiring has had on admissions. And we thought that would be a great topic for a full episode. So, Rob, Kristen, I think you both have wonderful insights to share on this topic. Would you mind both introducing yourselves a little bit further?
[2:10] Kristen Mercado: I'm Kristen Mercado. Anna's mentioned I've spent the most recent chunk of my career before Spivey in law school admissions and financial aid. And one of the things that was just sort of, accidental, it wasn't necessarily intentional by design, but I happened to share my suite, admissions and financial aid was housed at one end of the office suite with career services. And so for my entire time leading an admissions and financial aid office, I would, on the daily, kind of hear what was happening in financial aid, whether I wanted to or not. And actually, the dean of career services was like three doors down for me. So, throughout my time, I have sort of had a career services, you know, bug in my ear, whether it was kind of thinking about students with STEM backgrounds as being a potentially really valuable asset for a school on the West coast that had strong relationships with the IP community, or just kind of hearing about the more recent changes that Rob can certainly speak to more clearly.
But, it was really insightful for me, particularly because things have changed so quickly, and changed in a lot of really important ways even from—I've been out of law school for a little over 20 years, and I started my, fresh out of law school, I went to a big law firm in Chicago. And so I went through what was now considered sort of old school on-campus interviewing and hiring process. And it's so different now. And I was sort of constantly remarking to my colleagues in career services about those changes and how I wasn't sure how I would've navigated the speed with which things happen now, and sort of the nuance that is there. So, I'm happy to kind of share how that shaped me as an admissions dean as well as just a professional, kind of reflecting on changes. And I don't think of 20 years as being like a huge, a huge block of time for as much change as that been.
So, I hope that it'll be helpful to have a little bit of extra information about how my professional trajectory ended up kind of really being sort of relevant to today's topic. And I'm happy to share those insights.
[4:00] Rob: And I'm happy to be back on the pod with Kristen, who I'm eager to hear from her perspective how this all looks. I have been at Georgetown for many years now, as Anna said. My current role as director, I was executive director for many years, I'm now more in a strategy role of working much with alumni and also just big picture strategy ideas around things like OCI and employer engagement. I will say, though, I will stress that I'm speaking in my independent capacity. I'm not speaking on behalf of Georgetown, in any stretch.
But, to sort of think about that timeline that Kristen was speaking about, I would say the changes have been even inside 20 years, so probably in the last almost five to seven years, that the recruiting landscape has just totally changed. And I think it does have an impact on the experience, from anyone else. So a lot of the work I do on the consulting side with the Spivey team is getting students ready for that very quick, almost surprisingly quick, I'd say, process once you get to law school.
And then thinking about, more broadly, how the industry is going to meet these challenges about readiness, about equity, you know, getting good matches, right? The employers, yeah, there's a rush to get talent, but how good are the matches on the backend, and are people staying? I'm getting a little ahead of ourselves here, but I'm trying to think about all these issues on a kind of a big picture level as well as in the minutiae of how one experiences it during a 1L, the couple months that you have to get ready.
My background also is, I coach attorneys who are in law firms on just thriving in their careers, and I think sometimes the "match" piece is a challenge. We can get into that a little bit, too. Earlier matches don't always make for better matches. But again, I don't want to get too many points out there before we get into the nitty gritty of the discussion. Thanks for having me.
Anna: Yeah, thank you both so much for joining. I think you're going to have great insights to offer on this topic, which, it's great because you both have been embedded in law schools pretty much throughout this whole time that these changes have been happening, Kristen, both from sort of observing the career services side, but also very much seeing how that's impacting the admissions side, and then Rob just fully in the trenches as far as watching all of this happen and seeing how it's impacting students on a day-to-day basis.
So, first, I think I'd like to talk a little bit about scope and who this podcast episode applies to. Does this only apply to people who want to do big law? Does this only apply to people are wanting to apply to a certain range of schools? Who needs to know about this stuff on any level? And we can get into specifics later as far as what particularly is most relevant for who, if that's helpful, but on the broadest level, who should be listening and caring about this episode?
[6:20] Rob: I think it is probably most acutely felt for those who are wanting to pursue big law. Does that mean that folks who are not going to "top schools" should not be listening? I don't think so. One, because I think big law is trying to stretch beyond a traditionally smaller channel of schools that they recruit from. There's been a push to recruit from a broader swath of schools. So, folks from a range of target institutions may want to be thinking about this, because that may be more in play than ever. And secondly, the compressed, accelerated recruiting for big law tends to have impacts on other industries as well. This is sort of broadly a race for talent, and if there's a notion for non-big law employers that that talent will be scooped up quickly and they want to compete for that talent, then that might impact how they recruit as well. I think it's probably more broadly applicable than most might think, but it's probably most acutely felt for big law.
Anna: Yeah, that makes sense.
[7:16] Kristen: Yeah, I mean, I agree with that. I think also at UC Davis, you know, we were sort of right at the cusp of sort of the T50, but definitely not a T14 type law school, but we would have these big law firms. The recruiting happens for a smaller portion of the class, typically, you know, the very kind of top 10%, top 15% depending on the student's profile and those things. There's also this weird pressure, right, where you want to make sure that students who are at these schools that are outside of the T14 or even the T20, right, that your very top students still keep access to those opportunities, because even though they're not pulling from a large percentage of the class, that's part of the calculus they made in choosing a school, right? Was like, "Well, I know if I come here, like I'm probably going to be at the very top of my class, and I'll still have access to some of those opportunities," and so some of the other factors that went into choosing the school.
And I know our career services team, you know, at Davis, then was very acutely aware that they couldn't be sort of just sitting it out on the sidelines and sort of watching what was happening with the higher level schools where it's a larger percentage of the population, there are more firms that recruit there. Wanting to make sure that our students were still competitive, the ones who would sort of be in demand from those firms, and so, needing to respond to the virtual format, needing to respond to the accelerated timeline, needing to kind of do all of those things to make sure that their students were responsive.
The other thing I would say is, in terms of whether it's only applicable if you're interested in big law, I think no—especially for those people, I don't know about folks who are listening, but I was a first-gen student, and I didn't really know what big law was. I didn't understand the qualitative differences between different practice areas. And so, when I was, especially as a 1L, searching for my first summer job, I applied across sectors, right? I applied to some public interest, some government, some law firm, and I had the luxury of being able to kind of entertain those options simultaneously. And the changes with recruiting on big law don't really give you those same options. I mean, the timing of those different sectors, the hiring timelines, have always been out of sync to some extent. But there was a little bit of space to kind of consider options. And now it's sort of, you really have to kind of commit early, if you're going to go big law. And that may mean you end up not even talking to a single government employer, let's say, because everything's happening really fast in the private sector, which I always thought was really challenging when you're kind of coming in and you don't have prior experience or knowledge of the legal industry more broadly to know that fit piece, not even fit with a particular law firm, but is a law firm right for you?
[9:36] Rob: One call out is, you know, the downstream effects on other employers. Even if they are trying to move their timelines up to match big law, it's going to be hard for them to do that completely, to Kristen's point. And so, how does that look for talent going to those places and getting those experiences? And then two, calling out the equity point about people just not as prepared as others for a variety of reasons. I share the first-gen background, and I think it may be more acutely felt for some of the people in that population, but not always. So calling those out, sort of things to think about for people listening.
And then the one point I'd make about why the scope is a little broader than you might initially think, due to the pace of recruiting, so much activity is now happening in the first semester in terms of firms coming on campus. Yes, if you're at a big school and the firms want to have a presence and they're spending money to be there, but even if they're not coming to your campus for whatever reason, if you're going to entertain positions in this field, you probably want to be going to them, trying to find events that they're hosting elsewhere, networking heavily. So it's probably claiming a lot of your time and mental energy, because you don't yet know if you're at the top of the class in terms of being able to recruit at one of these places from outside these super top schools. So it's almost like, I have to play as though I might be if I'm interested. And that just takes time and energy. So it's having an effect on a lot of folks even before we know what grades are.
[11:04] Anna: Yeah, absolutely. Those are all very helpful notes. I hope that we can help demystify this process for people earlier on. So, thank you both again. I do have a slight disclaimer, which is that, if you hear us and when you hear us talking about things like "T14" and "T20," I just want to note that we are not meaning to say the rankings are super rigid and the schools that are within this particular year's top 20 are super different from the school that is 22 or whatever it might be. We're really using that as shorthand and as a way of talking about things that, among law schools and students and people who are legal employers, they sort of understand what you mean when you say things shorthand like T14 and T20. And that does not actually translate to the exact T20 or T14 that happened to have been in the last edition of the rankings. Mike Spivey likes to talk about how his whole job was going around the country and meeting with law firms, meeting with employers, and he likes to say that he never met a single big law hiring partner who could accurately name the current top 10 law schools in the most recent edition of the rankings. So this is more vague. This is shorthand. Just as a general disclaimer.
So let's move forward to the topic at hand. Rob, maybe you can give us sort of a top-level, how did things used to be in terms of law school hiring, especially during 1L, and how have things developed over time such that they have gotten to where they are now, and how are law schools feeling about all of that?
Rob: Sure. I will make reference to the show notes here that has a really good article on basically how we got here. And I promise if you read it, it'll be worth your time and is frankly just too short even to put in ChatGPT and summarize. So I just encourage you to read it on your own. It's that short. But broadly speaking, these employers, big law, which has an outsized, I think, impact on just how recruiting tends to work on many campuses that we've outlined, have always wanted to get to talent, and their model's always been, let's hire a little bit more in advance of the needs. So instead of just-in-time hiring, which most employers do, "Hey, we have an opening, let's hire for it"—that's sort of maybe a logical, sensible way—they recruit classes in advance. And for some amount of time, Kristen was outlining this when she was a student, when I was a student around the same time, this was true. This would happen at some point, maybe at the beginning of 2L, maybe fall of 2L, those firms would be kind of content to be looking around then. You had a year of law under your belt, you had some grades to show for it, which is helpful for sorting for these employers. You might have had a sense of practice area, a 1L experience that you could speak to, and maybe direct what you want to do. And so these large firms that still wanted to hire classes, and this happens in other industries like banking and consulting, they were going to hire early, but not in our view, maybe, radically early.
A variety of external events happen over time. Causation is hard here. But things like the financial crisis left some schools and firms concerned that they weren't getting to talent in the right time. That the timing of the financial crisis some years ago left some schools flatfooted as summer class sizes shrank because of, "Oh, my gosh, where'd all the money go?" Some schools that were waiting longer felt, "Oh, our people got hurt here. There were no more jobs by the time the hiring happened. Let's not let this happen again. Let's move up." So whether that's a school or a firm, blame is hard to sort of say here, but suffice it to say that sort of comfortable fall hiring, I mean, I think I did my callback when I was in law school, you know, 2006, 2007, 2008, around in October, that sort of backed up to August. We still had time to have two semesters of grades, run a recruiting process, and hire people.
COVID sort of opened things wide up if we're going to try to attribute causation. I'm being careful here on the history, you know, I have a history background. Causation is hard, but COVID opens things up, because now we can do everything on Zoom. We don't have to have employers come out to a campus and do a regimented hiring on campus. We can sort of cut the middle person out, the schools, frankly, and we can just have talent and firm unite directly because we can do this all on video. We've gotten a lot better at doing that. And so over time, what you see is firms saying, "Yeah, I could come to your OCI, but I kind of have a pool of people right here that I'd like to talk to."
And if you're still with me, this is a sort of shift here, too, because it means the schools have less market power to leverage and say, "No, no. In order to interview any of our people, you have to interview all of these people, too," because now talent and employer can go directly. And so this sort of kept backing up and backing up, schools trying to put themselves in a good position to have all their students succeed, firms wanting to get to the right talent. And with an economy of time and money spent, what we've started to see now is some schools and firms recruiting with just one semester of grades.
So once that time limit was crossed that we don't have to wait until June to get the second semester of grades, well, okay, now we can go in May. And I would expect that to keep backing up, frankly. This is me prognosticating. I'm not speaking on behalf of Georgetown. That is a very high-level decision that will be yet to be made. But I'd expect this to keep going back, because this last cycle showed a lot of firms that hiring on one semester of grades is something they were at least comfortable with in the short term. Let's think about those long-term matches.
But so we've gotten to this point where it looks like one semester of grades, it looks like a lot of direct interaction between student and employer versus sort of a school-structured process. And in case there are any budding antitrust attorneys out there, one interesting maybe note to make, why doesn't everyone just get together and agree to do this differently? Well, these are all competitors nominally. All the firms are competing with one another for talent, and the schools are all competing with one another. And so any agreement on this to say, "Oh, we'll just make recruiting happen in August," is potentially an antitrust violation.
So what I like to say to folks, the start line keeps getting earlier, and that's problematic in a lot of ways.
[16:15] Anna: So what impact has this had on students? If someone is going into law school, maybe right now, it's almost August of 2025. Someone is getting ready to go into law school. What can they expect as a result of this sort of new environment?
Rob: 10 years ago, if you came in saying, "I'm not sure what I want to do, I want to think about it, I thought I'd explore when I was here," I'd say, "We can work with that. Let's get you to some practice area presentations that we are going to host as a school. Let's get you some employer-based practice area presentations. There's some stuff online you should probably look at to research and think about how they match your skills, values, and interests. You should be talking to lawyers, too. And maybe we can think about how classes are impacting your interests. You might have some more code-based classes, like Civ Pro, versus some more common law classes, like torts. And maybe you start having an attraction to one type of law or another, or you like the contracts work, so maybe that would indicate something like transactional." We would have time for research for an iterative process of self-reflection, getting inputs, making some decisions. You might even have summer work that you can build off of, 10 years ago, before you started making decisions.
Now, with recruiting happening with, you know, increasingly one semester of grades, it puts more pressure on the grades. And what has happened as well is that the 1L hiring for firms, most of the stuff we're talking about has been 2L hiring, as I articulated in that maybe too long history a moment ago. The 1L hiring process that tends to happen in January is looking more and more like a preview for 2L hiring. So a lot of students are saying, "Wow, to be in the game effectively here, I need to be a competitive 1L." So it puts pressure on 1L grades.
It also puts pressure on you to be a viable candidate for many of these organizations very soon in your legal career, your law school career, which means what? It means practice area knowledge. It means having a sense of what geographic area you might want to practice in. It means networking heavily, because I can't simply rely on the school to create chances anymore in a structured, on-campus interview type way.
So we have just ratcheted up the time and pressure on all of the necessary career readiness pieces. And when I say we, as I said about the antitrust concern, I don't mean—certainly, I don't mean me, Rob, I don't mean Georgetown. I don't mean one party or another. It's just this very challenging labor market means that there's not very much time to be career-ready anymore.
[18:21] Kristen: So one of the things that was unique about the school where I spent most of my time as a dean of admissions is that we historically just attracted a particularly diverse student community, racially, ethnically, first-generation students. So a lot of people who did not necessarily have either in their family or their own personal background experience with professional settings, like I didn't have a huge number of former consultants or I-bankers or kind of people who had that work experience or even knowledge of those sectors through friends or family members. Roughly like a quarter of our student body were first-generation college grads, and close to half were first-generation grad/professional school students. So, it definitely acutely affected our first-gen college students, but what I actually saw a lot of, I did a lot of mentoring through—we had a first-gen program that matched students with faculty and deans to give them, you know, advising through their first year.
And so as these changes were happening over the past few years, what I was seeing with a lot of my students is, they would come in and they were just so overwhelmed. They were just trying to figure out how to acclimate to law school. And these were bright students who actually had a decent amount of professional experience, you know, in the form of internships and things like that, but they were better than some peers, right, in terms of having tried to be as proactive as they could. But because there were so many other things about law school that are challenging and hard to acclimate to, sometimes people have a steeper learning curve and they really benefited—I was one of those people, I definitely benefited from having all of 1L year, pretty much, to focus on acclimating to law school, the change in academic environment, what was being asked of me in the classroom, what is being asked of me on exams. And they still have to do all those things, but now they're simultaneously having to make decisions about their life in three years when they're just trying to figure out today. And it's just a lot of different skill sets that there is a demand for them to master all simultaneously. And particularly for those students who are really high achievers, you know, they're striving for making big progress for themselves, right? They're really seizing their opportunities in terms of coming from a family of, their parents are farm workers, and they want to be at an AmLaw 100 type firm, that's a huge delta to cover in, you know, as Rob was saying, essentially like a semester, right?
So I see that the stress level was just exponential in trying to figure out how to balance it. And I will admit, as a mentor, I was a little bit at a loss because, for one thing, I couldn't totally relate, because I did have the luxury of time, which at the time, 1L year felt fast to me. You know, it felt like it was all happening at the same time then. So for them to be going on it to so much less time, I really felt for them and wasn't sure exactly how to best support them. I could empathize, and I could certainly be a space for them to talk it out. But in terms of like concrete tips, all of us, I felt like even though my job is admissions and financial aid, it was really kind of incumbent on all of the different departments at the law school to be aware that this is a major change for our students, and it's a stressor. And for some of our students, it's a really big stressor, right? Like, they're not just mastering figuring out different practice areas. They're also figuring out some of the really basic parts, like how to network, how to write a professional email. How do I connect with these people? How do I have a conversation? What's an elevator pitch? All of these kinds of things that it's challenging to try to learn them all at a really fast speed and at the same time acclimate to law school. I don't think the curriculum necessarily, the 1L curriculum is designed to help you figure those things out. It's designed to help you think, right?
But it's hard to find the luxury of time to think through and kind of learn how to adapt your skills at the same time that you're having to make these rapid-fire decisions that feel very consequential, and are consequential. I mean, they are, but there's a sort of a heightened feeling, even if it's not necessarily ultimately what you end up doing or doing long term. It's just, you know, that's sort of the nature of law school too, right? You kind of hear what's going on with everybody else, and even if it wasn't important to you in the beginning, it starts to feel important, or at least like you should know about it. You know, if you're going to pass on it, you should know what you're passing on. So that's a challenge. Like, do I know enough about it to be able to say, I'm not going to opt into that, I'm going to stay in my public interest world or whatever, right?
I had students like that that were like, "Well, I don't really know if I want to do it. So, should I start going to these things and taking advantage of these events and these virtual programs, and when the firms come, should I go to the lunchtime program?" And I'm like, "I mean, I don't want to tell you to not participate in those things if you don't even really feel like you know what they are." So I just felt like it was a lot. Suddenly everything about law school is coming at these students at once, and it was really challenging to figure out what's the best strategy.
It's very individualized, is what I found, you know, in terms of kind of figuring out the right balance of how to think about these things and prioritize things. But to me, that was the thing that I saw that really struck me was like, "Gosh, it's just not a lot of time to even figure out law school before having to figure out some other things that are a lot more complex and make big decisions about your future very fast."
Rob: The point about overwhelm is well taken. I was talking about how it's accelerated on the career side, but it's not as though things are really easy and comfortable on all sorts of other acclimating and, you know, first-gen as well, but for folks who have this background, it's just accelerated. I think part of the overwhelm is the bigness that certain folks feel. Like this is an environment that feels different than undergrad, where people didn't use the career services office very much. We have data on that. Also, there was a, for a lot of people, "I'm going to go to grad school anyway, and so this is sort of about me figuring out what I like within undergrad, but I always have grad school." Now we're sort of looking out for many on what feels like, at the time, the rest of my life. We know, I think, folks in the podcast here, that it doesn't have to be that, but the sense of the bigness of it, and there's not a lot of scaffolding always in 1L learning in these classrooms. So a lot of that is self-directed.
Law school career services are trying to build scaffolding around the career process, but a lot of that has to be self-directed as well in the sense of, to Kristen's point, it's really hard for me to say, if you should "do this or that." Go to this lunch and learn, try this practice area. So we get a lot of, what should I do? What is the best route? Because I think a lot of folks are not comfortable yet with the self-directed thinking that has to be done around what they want. So a big piece of what I tell folks is, may sound obvious, but don't think about going to law school as like you've gotten to the top of the mountain. There's more to climb. And the thinking really has to be the self-assessment of what lights me up in a professional sense? What might I want here? Because as much support as we can give you on the career side, we can't make those decisions for you, and that's going to steer a lot of it.
Anna: Yeah, absolutely. It's such a fast timeline and can be so overwhelming. I think part of what we're trying to do is help extend that timeline out a little bit for the thinking things through and trying to go in with a little bit more preparation. All of that cannot be done beforehand, but you know, to the extent that we can be helpful, that's what we're going to try to do. There's also the admissions side.
So, Kristen, thinking back, you are running an admissions office, as you are seeing all of these changes happen, you are speaking with the students who you're mentoring, you are speaking with the career services folks who are in your office suite, and learning about all these changes and everything that's going on. How is this impacting how you approach your role in admissions?
[25:07] Kristen: Yeah. So I think for me, the awareness of what was sort of changing in the career services world hit me in a couple ways. So one was the most obvious that you might think about is, there have been exceptions, but generally speaking, law schools are very happy to take very young kids straight from undergrad, without a lot of sense of the world, no professional experience to speak of, maybe no even paid work experience, just sort of research assistant type internships and things like that. Very happy to have those folks and know that career services will take care of them when they get there and help them sharpen up their skills. They'll have a 1L summer before they're really interviewing for their job that's going to become their job after graduation.
You know, we sort of had this luxury of being able to take these kids who are very green, in a sense, to life outside of being a student. There were some schools that really favored a little bit of professional experience, but it wasn't the norm. It's still not the norm, to be honest, in admissions because, for a lot of reasons, we're trying to balance a lot of needs in a particular class, and so schools can't always take the benefit of only having people with professional experience, because it leaves out a chunk of people that might serve other things that admissions is trying to achieve with their class.
But it wasn't always necessarily the biggest focus. And so one of the changes that I saw was really kind of looking at students from the perspective of like, if I was interviewing them, you know, essentially in like a year from now, how would I think about it? Because I'm basically going to have maybe one semester of grades, maybe two, or like one semester and a handful of grades from the second semester, right? This is what I'm hearing from career services, you know, everyone else, right? And, a Zoom interview, right, or a Flo Recruit interview, right? That's not a lot to go on when so much of that initial hiring is your on-paper credentials for law firms.
And then it's the fit piece. It's like, how are you clicking with our lawyers and our culture? And I have worked at a law firm in professional development, so I also kind of saw when you'd gotten the fit guess wrong and you had an associate who was maybe struggling a bit with some of those pieces. Like it wasn't their legal skills, it was more sort of the other part. I started finding myself being a little more concerned. Did I see indicators that this person understood, like, basic professionalism? Because I knew if I bring in those people and they're not ready for that, career services has an even heavier load now. They have to teach them sort of basic professionalism and help them get up to speed with all these other changes.
So I started being a little more discerning about looking for people with, in some way, a cultivated professional experience, even if they were straight from undergrad. Had they done like a summer internship in a law firm or something, where they had gotten some exposure to that type of world, where they might be able to handle interviewing, being in more corporate sort of culture? Right? Those things started to become pluses when I would review an application, because I knew that would make the process smoother and, in turn, would make our outcomes stronger.
The other thing that was a little bit trickier, I was at a school that didn't do interviews as part of our admissions process, and so we really had to go with what was on the application. And one of the things that I also knew from hearing from career services, like, how these interviews would go, especially when they first moved online. Because for some people, the nonverbals are not the same. They're there, but there are some differences. Just kind of things like, what do you have in the background? And, you know, some of those kinds of things, they realized they had to talk to them about. Right? And so it's sort of this emotional intelligence or a sense of maturity. And that's really hard to get from the written application. That's a hard thing to judge. And so I really kind of would try to find proxies for things that I could guess probably suggested that this person had some level of insight, intelligence, emotional intelligence, awareness, maturity, whatever you kind of want to call it.
And also at the same time, kind of thinking more seriously about, like, how can I convince everyone at my school to maybe think about trying to move to an admissions model that did incorporate a little more of interviews or videos, something to allow us to get some sense of that EQ factor. Because I didn't want to sort of load in these students with, make their already steep learning curve even steeper. And that was tricky because we weren't sort of set up to be able to gauge that in a great way. So we had to really kind of think about how we looked at the pieces of the application for insight.
Even like what topic did they pick for their personal statement? Do they have good judgment? Do they have sense to know I shouldn't write about a certain topic or write about it in a certain way? Would give me some sense of how their maturity level was, how they had an ability to sort of understand another person's perspective and respond appropriately. Right? Those things that are really important if you're going to dive right into the employment process very early on, and you want to be successful. So you want to set them up for an environment where they're—maybe they need a little more time to ripen, so to speak.
That was challenging for me over the past five years as an admission dean, because we don't have the same set of information, and you're kind of having to guess, but at the same time, I want to bring in students and set my colleagues up to be successful. So it did shift a bit what we looked at and what we were looking for in applicants.
[29:48] Anna: Those are all such good points. I think your point about the interviews also is one where, absolutely, we have seen an increase in schools looking to interview applicants or asking for videos, as you brought up. And I think that this is a huge driver of that, is the fact that they know that these students, these applicants, are going to be interviewing with employers pretty quickly after they enter law school. So this is something they need to be assessing already at this point.
Something that we've talked about on our podcast in other episodes a few times is how personal statements have shifted somewhat over the years. When Spivey Consulting first started out, I think we were able to be looser with personal statement topics. People could talk about some formative experience that has had some impact on their personality that doesn't necessarily logically quite connect with why they want to go to law school or practice law. And that has really developed in the direction of needing to be clearer about your "why law." Do you think that these developments in hiring in law school have impacted the degree of clarity of purpose that you're looking for in an application?
Kristen: I definitely think so, and I think you can even see it sometimes in some of these supplemental essays. Some of these questions are very reminiscent to me of kind of like behavioral interviewing type questions, where it's like, can you describe a time when you had a difference of opinion with someone and how you resolved it, right? Like those kinds of questions where I've been asked that in an interview, you know? And I think from an admissions perspective, it's trying to get at understanding the person more holistically, but there is the secondary motivation, I think, to understand, I can also sort of think about this applicant in the context of, okay, what is the product that is going to be coming into the school? What's the level of development they already possess? Right? And so I do think you see that change. Some of it was also the changes around the law around affirmative action. But I do think that that is part of it. It's a more precise, or more specific part of the holistic assessment that I think, as admissions folks, there's always a drive to try to be more holistic, right? And trying to balance those things.
So there is sort of a larger, you know, non-specific kind of motivation, but definitely, it was very helpful in the sense of kind of thinking about, are these people that are ready for the types of decisions and the types of actions that they're going to have to make, it really became leaning into the professional part of professional school. I mean, I think law school wasn't always—it's always been considered professional school, but it was different in some ways than, say, like business schools, right, in terms of the skillset and sort of the things that schools looked for in students, that you were asked to do early on. And law school had this sort of more academic vibe, and that has shifted over time, and it shifted significantly in a very short period of time, very recently. So, I think the leaning into professionalism is something that you're going to see in every part of what law schools do, including, and importantly for people thinking about law school in the admissions process, you're going to see more attention focused on trying to get at that information.
[32:35] Anna: Absolutely. The changing timeline of course is being talked about all the time in law school career services offices. Of course. How prominent is this phenomenon in conversations between admissions officers? I know you personally, of course, were very aware of this stuff. You're constantly talking to career services, but law school admissions is a pretty small community. There are fewer than 200 ABA-approved law schools. I know you're in touch with tons of admissions people all the time. How much do you think that this is on the minds of admissions officers generally throughout the country, throughout law schools?
Kristen: I think it's pretty high on the radar. I mean, to be honest, the one thing about students in the modern era is, I won't always say it's 100% accurate, but they have access to a lot of information. And so admissions folks always got questions about employment. That's a major piece of the decision-making process. But I was surprised, frankly, a little bit, at how soon I started getting questions about when interviewing was moving to like June and it was—had various names, you know, it was like pre-interviewing and kind of had these different monikers, but this idea that like, they may want to talk to you before you even have all your grades from the spring semester. That shift happened so quickly, and I was surprised at how quickly applicants, like people who weren't even yet in the world of law school, were asking, "Well, what is your school doing? How is your school responding? Do you guys offer that?" And so I would get these questions, and I was like, "I feel like I just heard about that. How are you already knowing about that?"
And so it sort of forced us to be more in sync, everyone on my team. So not just me, right? I was like, "Okay, you guys, gotta make sure we're ready for these kinds of questions, because you always want to be competitive on being able to speak to these really promising prospective students, and be able to address their legitimate concerns about, is your school responding to the changing times?" So yeah, I think it's having a big impact. They're asking about it, even if they don't really totally understand what they're asking about. They want to make sure that the school knows what's going on and that you're going to help them get through it.
I think people are very aware because, frankly, they were getting the demand from applicants, as well as from internally, hearing from your colleagues, like, "Hey, you know, if you have to pick, I'd really love someone with some work experience in the class," or, you know, like those kinds of things that you always hear feedback from the other departments in admissions about what they'd love to see in the next group of students. I was hearing those, but then I was also hearing it from the other side, which I wasn't necessarily expecting them to know as much about those things.
Anna: Yeah.
Kristen: Yeah. Information is much more accessible.
Anna: Yeah. All of that makes sense to me. It's on the radars, it's on the minds of folks who are in admissions. It's something that they have to be ready to answer questions about and talk to career services folks about.
[34:50] The one other thing that I want to flag that you didn't mention is that I think the substantive benefits of getting your students jobs are very obvious. Everyone wants the students to get jobs out of law school. Applicants want students to get jobs, they care about employment outcomes. Inherent value, of course. There is the other component, also, in that the rankings have shifted significantly in the last few years. They used to emphasize admission statistics a lot more heavily. Median LSAT and undergraduate GPA used to be a much more significant component of the rankings. U.S. News has since decreased the weight of those metrics and pretty much put them into outcomes. So bar passage was one big component of that, and then the other component is employment outcomes. So, if you're looking at it on the substantive value level in terms of wanting your law school to be a better law school for your students, you want your students to get jobs. And then also from the angle of, okay, we're looking at rankings and wanting to go up in the rankings, that is also pointing toward this employment piece. And admissions officers are very aware of that also.
[36:04] I want to take a step back for a moment and revisit something that both of you have mentioned, which is this sort of "fit" component. And Rob, I imagine that this is something that is very much on your radar on a day-to-day basis. I'm curious how the developing timeline and nature of recruiting is impacting that fit component. And can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Rob: Yeah. The fit component is often thought to be the sort of tutored judgment, sometimes tutored, sometimes not tutored, that this person will match with our company culture—I should say organizational culture; it's often a firm, but it may be a whole variety of organizations—and we'll be able to suss that out through a formal interview if you get to that stage or through networking. And as the acceleration period has increased here for hiring, it has put, in some sense, a little bit more of an emphasis on fit because employers are scared about bad matches. They're quite expensive for any type of employer. If you hire a person and they end up wanting to leave shortly, it's not good for anybody involved. And so we want to make sure that this is a sticky hire. And so maybe they index a little bit more on fit, on work experience as a proxy for readiness, professionalism as a proxy for fit. But it can mean that people who aren't used to the language of talking careers are a bit behind. First-gen, people from underrepresented backgrounds who don't match exactly with everybody in the target organization are a little behind as they sort of find their people inside an organization.
International students it may be a little bit more challenging for in some ways, because these law firm interviews tend not to be highly structured. They're often resume-based, fit, feel conversations. And if there aren't the same cultural touchstones or assumptions, then it may be a little bit harder for someone from a different background. So there's an equity piece in the process, and there's an equity piece in sort of the outcomes here that keeps career services offices awake at night for sure.
I don't know if anyone's going to go out and read this book, but this might be one to ChatGPT. But Lauren Rivera, Pedigree is really fascinating on this topic to think about the sort of fit aspect of interviewing and networking.
[37:50] Kristen: Yeah. No, I think the fit is challenging. I think it's also like, imagine you're a 22- or 23-year-old student. When I was a 1L, I thought it was hard to make a decision about what I would want in three years' time. Like, is this the place I'm going to want to be at when I didn't even really know what it's like to work at a firm, you know? And so I thought that was challenging. And now these students are—the challenge is really magnified from their perspective, too, because these decisions have to happen quickly.
One thing that used to be in place was some guidelines or best practices around the timing of offers and how long it had to stay open, and kind of these sort of things that would at least have some rules of the game. And a lot of that is not really present anymore. And so it's very—you're honest, sincerely trying to make the best decision for yourself, and you don't have a lot to go on either. Maybe you've never even been to the firm in person. Like you know, one of the things they always used to tell you is when you go on your callback like, observe how people talk. Do people say hi to each other in the hallway? Do they acknowledge support staff? Those sort of things.
And you may not have the luxury of having all that many data points on that side as a student. That's a big decision, and a hard piece to know whether a particular firm is a good fit for you. And so, I started to see, especially with students who didn't have that in their personal or family background, that oftentimes, they were more likely to kind of go back to the same place for their 2L to accept that offer, right? Because at least they knew that firm, and that at least helped them cope with the speed and the complexity of the new environment.
I don't know if that's universally true or just sort of in my anecdotal experience, but I think it is challenging from the student side, too, to be able to assess that, and make decisions that, in the moment, it feels much more consequential than it is. Like it feels so permanent and so important what you decide. And it is. Like, if you make a bad choice, that can be hard to dig out of later on, but it's hard to understand that until you're kind of off the other side of it. Right? And you can have the perspective to say, "Well, you know, it'll be okay. You can move around early in your career." It doesn't feel like that. When you're a student trying to make those choices, it feels like your whole career in this one tiny decision. And that's a lot. That's a lot of pressure. It's a lot to kind of put on a very small amount of data.
Anna: Definitely. So let's get down to practical advice. If I am someone who's getting ready to apply to law school, maybe I'm about to start applying. I'll be in law school in a year, maybe I'm a couple of years out. What advice do you both have for both the admissions process and getting ready for fall of that 1L year so that you can try to mitigate some of the negative impacts that this all has had on students?
[39:54] Rob: Just to consolidate some of the points, I think at one point there was a decision tree. Should I go to law school? Do I want to go to law school? And then there was the second question of, okay, what do I want to do? And I think those essentially have collapsed just due to sort of timing. And so a lot of my takeaways that I'm going to speak to in a moment, I think, are going to be around getting ready for those two questions to be collapsed. That we really should almost be thinking with an outcome in mind for a variety of practical reasons, on the admission side, the employment side, but just to manage the process.
We talked about this being for big law, but it's not as though the public interest realm is immune to some of these realities. To get a job at a nonprofit where they're hiring very, very few entry-level lawyers, you often have to show a clarity of purpose and a wealth of experience. That means you're essentially majoring in something pretty early at law school. And it's not a wonderful hiring climate as we speak now, due to lots of defunding and other concerns around just the bandwidth to hire. The government, especially the federal government in an obvious crunch given certain political realities now.
So choosing those paths, it's not as though you're immune from some of the bigness and overwhelm we're talking about. And I know that Kristen and I, we're not talking about this to be doom and gloom and say, "Don't go to law school." It's just, know what you're getting into.
So all that preamble out of the way, a few tactical things I would be doing is, doing some kind of self-assessment, as structured as you'd want to be. You can ChatGPT what's a self-assessment for my values, my interests, and my skills? There are free resources like SkillsFinder, but sort of know what you want, what you're good at, know where the gaps are as well. Try matching that to practice areas. I'd love for you to go to law school with three practice areas in mind that seem interesting. Summer Associate Hub is great free website for research. Chambers Associates, a great free website. On the public interest side, PSJD has a really good resource center. Start poking around and seeing how the realities of those practice areas match with what you're saying you want out of a career. What interests you, what lights you up? I would say get comfortable. So those are sort of one suite of things. We can do a self-assessment and matching to practice areas.
I would love for you to go to law school with a trimmed-down one-page version of your resume. The two-page, how many hours you worked, is not going to work. If you can get comfortable with a shorter version, less work you have to do at law school.
Finally, let's get comfortable talking to lawyers. Let's get comfortable writing an email to an attorney who went to the same undergrad as you went to, subject line "Future Georgetown student interested in capital markets work," and then asking them for a few minutes to talk about their practice.
Getting comfortable, learning more about practice areas, but also building relationships. Those really matter for the job site. So, those are some takeaways I would want the incoming law student to think about.
[42:58] Kristen: I totally echo everything Rob said, especially the last bit that was about sort of like actually starting to talk to some of these people. Right? My biggest thing that I've always said to applicants is, like, informational interviews are your best friend, because lawyers love to talk about themselves, and so you can learn an incredible amount. And even more than that, if you spend a half an hour talking to a lawyer and 25 minutes of it was the lawyer talking, I guarantee you almost probably 9 out of 10 times, that lawyer will walk away from that meeting saying, "God, that was a really smart kid. God, I really like them." You know, you probably said hardly anything. And so it's a very low-risk kind of thing to do. You don't actually have to be that skilled yet to have a very successful informational interview, because it's really just about getting information from that person. So I always tell students, especially at these schools, like big seed schools or schools with traditionally really very strong alumni networks, I didn't really go to career services when I was an undergrad. I will admit it. That was dumb of me, because I had tons of lawyers that I could have probably accessed and learned about some of these things before I got to law school. It's not really optional anymore. It gives you a major edge if you can sort of get some exposure to that. Hear some of the words, the terms they use, some of the things, and then honestly just hear the personal experiences, right?
The second thing I would say, as soon as you are admitted and you start committing, start asking those admissions offices. I mean, once you're admitted, the power dynamic completely changes, right? We are trying to woo you hard. We have committed an offer to you, we want you to come. You can be a little more hungry, I guess, or, you know, greedy, I guess, about information and access to folks. So, not just the people in career services, but can you talk to alumni who are doing things that sound interesting to you, or different sectors? Don't wait til you get to law school to start accessing that alumni. You can do that as an admitted student and certainly once you're committed, because then law schools consider you part of the family then even though you haven't actually started, right, you're a few months away from starting. And alumni think of you that way. They will give you the same level of generosity of their time, networks, all of those things. So I think you want to, once you have that leverage, right, really use it to gain exposure.
And that summer before you start law school, like after you pick a school and before you start, is a great time when you don't have the other stuff going on yet, and you can do some of that. So I really encourage applicants and then admitted students, you know, matriculating students to use those schools, both your undergrad and then the law school that you choose to gain access to people in the profession who can give you insights, all the different practice areas, different types of firms, different cultures, what you should even be looking for, all of that stuff. It's a weird world, and exposure helps a lot.
So if you can start doing it before there's any real consequences, if you make a goofy faux pas, like I say, low-risk opportunities are not necessarily plentiful, but there are some. So take advantage of them and use that time really wisely, and use admissions. You know, they're there to serve you once, you know, they have taken you in, right? The school has taken you in. They want to make sure that you're happy and that if you get an offer from another school off a waitlist that you're not going anywhere because you've already connected with a whole bunch of alumni and you have plans to have chats about all the different practice areas and you've already got, they've invited you to some local bar association thing, right? Like, you can really kind of embed yourself very early. And like I said, it's—the biggest benefit I see is that you don't sort of have as many other concerns competing for your attention in that time. So it's a great opportunity. But it is a rather small window. It's just the summer, right? So, take advantage of that unique kind of power dynamic and the fact that you don't have as many competing demands for your time and attention.
[46:18] Anna: I think that's a great place to end. Thank you both for giving that practical advice as well as all of this context that I think is so valuable to understand. I think this is going to be very helpful for prospective law students. And thank you both again for your time.
Kristen: Yeah, it was great.
Rob: Great to be here. Take care.