where are the summers?

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Endless Summer

By Brian Baxter
The American Lawyer
August 1, 2007

        

It's 1 p.m. Do you know where your summer associates are? Probably enjoying a lunch of Chilean sea bass and sorbet. But making sure those lunch tables stay filled is an endless ordeal for firms competing for talent in today's tight legal labor market.

According to The American Lawyer's annual summer associate hiring survey, class sizes of Am Law 200 firms are on the rise. (Information was provided by 124 firms.) Survey data shows that the average size of summer classes grew about 4 percent in the last year and that if these visitors were factored into firm head counts, summers would constitute 20-25 percent of the lawyers at Am Law 200 firms.

Classes are growing because of the need to feed anticipated firm growth, says Ronda Muir, a senior legal consultant with Robin Rolfe Resources, Inc. Patrick Ryan, managing partner of Milwaukee's Quarles & Brady, says that's why his firm increased the size of its summer class. He adds, with a sigh, that "there is an awful lot of competition for summers."

Muir also said that firms need to compensate for higher associate attrition rates, and to offset the lower summer acceptance rates that result from increased competition, as reasons for the growth in class size.

The 321 summers that Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom hired this year are more than the total head count at 72 Am Law 200 firms. Skadden's global hiring partner, Howard Ellin, says his firm's summer expansion was simply the result of seeing more qualified candidates. Does that mean the firm received more acceptances than usual? "I wouldn't even describe it that way," he says. "Unfortunately, it's not like law school. where you get to do rolling admission. It's much less scientific than that."

Skadden may have scads of summers, but finding young lawyers is becoming increasingly difficult. "Part of the challenge for all of us is that the class size of law schools is actually not growing as rapidly as our demands are," says Leigh Ryan, global chair of recruiting at Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker, which enlarged its summer class from 144 to 181 this year.

Ward Bower, a principal with legal consulting firm Altman Weil, Inc., says almost one-fourth of the 40,000 annual law school graduates are hired by the 250 largest firms. Firms "better start to think about what it's going to take to differentiate themselves," says Roger Meltzer, global corporate and finance chair and unofficial associate adviser at DLA Piper U.S. in New York. This year DLA boosted its summer associate class size to roughly 100, Meltzer says, a 14 percent increase from last year.

Since the whole point of having summers is to get new associates, firms could be increasing summer hiring in the hope that more stick around for a few years.

And what better way to seduce prospective employees than the time-tested tactic of lavish lunches and dinners? Says one current summer about his elite New York firm's loose purse strings: "I know that money doesn't necessarily bring happiness, but spending other people's money comes really close."