The relentless push to move EIP earlier and earlier has a particular effect on transfer students. Transfers are admitted in June, after EIP Preview has already happened. When Sarah Hart, JD’24, transferred to Harvard from University of Washington in June 2022, one of the first emails she got was a note from OCS about EIP later that summer. Hart said she understood the intention was to reassure students: “don’t panic; we will host Q&As right away, to make sure it’s possible [for you to participate in EIP].” Because Preview has already happened, as soon as you’re admitted, Hart said, “you’re behind.”

The timing was brutal. Hart had two months to move her entire life cross-country and prepare for interviews at the same time. EIP fell during the week she was driving across the country. “I kept my suit in a trash bag in the car,” Hart said. “I would go into hotels and pretend I was a guest. ‘Do you have a conference room where I could take an interview?’ They’d take me to their conference room. And I would take my suit out of the bag and put it on. It was kind of a nightmare.”

Despite Hart’s interest in environmental law, she didn’t get advice to skip EIP. The implication, Hart said, was that EIP is “just what you do.”

To a degree, this is true. In 2016, about 80% of Harvard students participated in EIP. Harvard’s well-resourced Office of Career Services makes it incredibly easy to sign up for EIP — a huge benefit for students who know they want to go into Biglaw, to be sure. But for a student who hasn’t decided yet, EIP feels like a foregone conclusion. “I was a naive student,” Hart said, “because I didn’t have a framework for what was expected of me. But it seemed expected.”

50% of incoming HLS students say they intend to go into public interest, but only 14% of 2023 HLS graduates took public interest or government jobs out of law school

Of course, these hasty emails are not intended to take choices away from students. Below the EIP information, there is also information about public interest career counseling. If OCS’s information is more prominent, that’s mostly because OCS is bigger and better-resourced than OPIA and has the capacity to give more comprehensive support. The combination of administrative support to do EIP and a tight admissions turnaround means that for many transfers, the pressure is to lock down a job pronto, and EIP is the most obvious means of doing so.

Another less-obvious casualty of the early firm interview schedule are students interested in public interest careers. Most students don’t enter law school planning to work at a Biglaw firm. More than 50% of incoming HLS students say they intend to go into public interest, but only 14% of 2023 HLS graduates took public interest or government jobs out of law school. 

The rest work at law firms, many of which make the bulk of their money by defending corporations against lawsuits, advising corporations how to make money without getting sued, and helping corporations merge and acquire their competitors.

Out of 554 2023 HLS graduates, 57 got a job in public interest upon graduating. 22 worked in government. 372 worked in law firms, 322 of whom worked in Biglaw (more than 500 attorneys at the firm).

How does this happen? A well-documented confluence of greater counseling resources for Biglaw, law school debt, recruiting timelines, visibility and prestige simply make Biglaw the easiest option. Even OCS, which handles Biglaw career counseling for Harvard students, acknowledges as much. Speaking for a 2016 piece in Harvard Magazine, former OCS head Mark Weber said “The path of least resistance will put you at a firm in New York.”

Biglaw is the most visible entry-level career option. Qualitative studies have found that students often enter with “genuine but vague commitments to public-interest careers” and the law-firm interview process “substantially shapes” students’ conceptions of the professional options available to them. This is not an indictment of students’ naiveté; many students, especially those without lawyers in family or social circles, don’t enter law school with a comprehensive map of legal career options. Law school, specifically the career office, is where they learn about those options. OCS is better-funded and more well-integrated into student life — if you forget to sign up for law firm recruiting, you’ll get an email reminder.

Also to blame is astronomical student debt. Because law school is so expensive ($78,692 annually at Harvard as of the 2024-25 school year, and that’s before $37,308 in healthcare, housing, food, books, and other incidentals) and law firms pay so much ($225k for a new grad as of 2023), picking a public interest career path requires much more thought and careful financial planning – for example, to maintain loan repayment program eligibility – than taking a firm job.

Public interest jobs also recruit much later than Biglaw jobs. Because nonprofits and government employers typically don’t hire new grads until the spring before graduation, public interest students often watch their firm-bound classmates secure postgrad jobs a full year before they can even apply. Add in the scarcity and competitiveness of jobs at the ACLU, the Equal Justice Initiative and similarly popular nonprofits, and public interest students need nerves of steel not to tap out and take a firm job, just to put an end to the uncertainty.

Students report that EIP itself is a stressful experience, with back-to-back interviews over multiple rounds within just a few days. “Some firms really put you through the ringer,” said a 2L who worked at a Biglaw firm during 1L summer, went through EIP and plans to work in Biglaw after graduation. “For one firm, I had three interviews, two coffee chats — there’s a lot of informal stuff, and if you don’t go, it seriously hurts your chances. It’s overwhelming.” Students receive emails from OCS each day asking them to update the tracker that tells the school which students get interviews and offers from which firms.

It’s especially disorienting for students who are less than fully committed to corporate work. One 2L with public interest experience on their resume said they were asked whether they’d be comfortable working for “the other side,” and recalled hearing a regulatory attorney casually discuss their work helping pharmaceutical companies block government efforts to lower drug prices. Other interviewers described their work blocking class actions. Many attorneys said the best part of their job was getting to work on one pro bono project every several years. “The [EIP] process confirmed for me that Biglaw work was overall harmful to the public,” said the student. “Trading off principles wasn’t worth the added feeling of security.”

Of course, that’s partially how the process is supposed to work: if you figure out EIP is not for you, you can leave. But the “EIP is just what you do” mentality means it’s not always easy to leave the process. When the student decided to drop out of EIP, they received an email from OCS asking if they were sure they wanted to leave. “I noticed you chose to only participate in EIP Preview, which I hope means you[r] process is going well! But you have not yet reported any offers in your OCS Interview Tracker,” the email read. “Could you please update your tracker as soon as possible, and no later than tomorrow morning?”

That feeling of grossness unfortunately also extends into the way that EIP is funded.

“It seemed like leaving EIP was an uncommon practice,” said the student. “The default presumption was that I had found a firm job but forgotten to tell anyone” — not that the process made them realize they didn’t want to work in corporate defense.

NALP guidelines may not have always been adhered to, but they did play a slight role in delaying the law-firm interview process enough for students to discover what kind of law topics interested them and to financially plan for career options that might be less lucrative but more meaningful. NALP guidelines also allowed students to choose one Biglaw offer to hold open until April 1, allowing them to keep a lucrative fallback option in case public interest applications didn’t pan out.

Financial pressures mean that there might always be some “public interest drift” from students’ stated intentions upon matriculation, but the NALP guidelines meant students could at least make an informed, unrushed decision after considering all their options. Their withdrawal ushers in an era of no-holds-barred recruiting, where students are shepherded through interviews that several described as “gross.” That feeling of grossness unfortunately also extends into the way that EIP is funded.

In 2012, Columbia Law School asked its alumni for $85 a month to help offset the cost of EIP, exhorting graduates to “give a student the chance at a dream job” for the cost of a mere “6 manicures” or “8 martinis.” Ridicule from Columbia graduates and internet onlookers was swift, both for the tone-deaf insinuation that helping a 1L get a job at Kirkland and Ellis was a worthy charitable goal and for the bourgeois choice of items that alumni might forego to finance this donation.

But the fact remains that EIP is incredibly expensive for law schools. Schools rent out entire hotels to accommodate hundreds of interviews and arrange three meals a day for students and law firm partners who fly out.

To pay for EIP, Harvard’s OCS charges law firms administrative fees to participate in EIP. These administrative fees are based on the number of students the firm wants to interview. Firms decide how many “schedules” they want to purchase, where each schedule grants them 20 interviews with students. In 2024, 20 interviews cost $1000 during June EIP Preview and $750 during July EIP — between $37.50 and $50 per interview. (Smaller firms get a roughly 50% discount.) The difference in price between Preview and EIP could be an attempt to discourage firms from taking the earlier slot, but it also underscores the value of early access to students. Law firms can purchase as many schedules as they want; there is no limit. The more money you’re willing to spend on EIP, the more access to students you get.

This pay-per-interview scheme used to make more sense. Historically, OCS rented out the Charles Hotel for EIP interviews (and before that, EIP was split between three hotels in the area, with students in suits and heels dashing between interviews, sometimes in the rain). The administrative fees covered breakfast, lunch and dinner for law firm attendees and the hotel rooms in which OCS interviews took place. These were not conference rooms, where professional events usually take place, but standard hotel rooms, where students would schmooze with law firm partners inches away from a hotel bed. (The ick factor of this setup was a subject of ridicule in Harvard’s annual parody musical for years.)

Because each interview needed its own hotel room, OCS’s hosting costs scaled linearly with the number of students interviewed. It made sense to ask law firms to pitch in and cover costs based on the number of rooms they needed.

And those costs were high. Firms would routinely spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on these administrative fees, plus the opportunity cost of the billable hours for partners taking time off cases to interview students. There is no available data on whether OCS frequently had money left over after EIP bills were paid during this time and if so, where the surplus would go, but it’s clear the hosting bill was significant.

However, in 2020, the pandemic forced all EIP interviewing online, and it has remained online despite Harvard’s return to in-person classes in 2022. (This development was praised by both OCS and students – no more running through the rain and no more hotel beds – although administrators said it was harder to gauge students’ emotional well-being without seeing them in the hallways between interviews.) With hotel rooms no longer needed, hosting costs presumably dropped, since adding an additional Zoom room is cheaper than renting an extra hotel room. However, when asked whether administrative fees paid by law firms have shrunk correspondingly, OCS declined to comment.

Public information on schedule fee changes between 2019 and 2020 is not available, but fees don’t seem to be trending down: schedule fees for EIP doubled between 2023 and 2024.

If administrative fees have indeed remained the same or risen while the cost of EIP has dropped, OCS would be left with a sizable chunk of those fees – essentially a profit. This would set up a collection of uncomfortable incentives. The more interviews law firms buy, the more profit the school would generate. Maximizing the number of interviews law firms buy would mean maximizing the number of students who go through EIP – and maximizing the number of interviews each student does.

Confronted with risk-averse students already stressed about finding jobs, this incentive would make it just slightly easier for administrators to recommend that an uncertain student go ahead and do EIP to keep their options open (and to keep post-graduation employment high), or to sign up for that extra interview as a fallback, just in case.

Of course, the power of this incentive would be circumscribed. Law firms buy interviews based on their anticipated need before EIP, not based on how many law students sign up for those interviews, so convincing each student to sign up for more interviews wouldn’t translate directly into same-year profit. However, a law firm that overbuys interviews one year is likely to buy fewer the next year — no host likes throwing a party where no one shows up. OCS, as the host of EIP, relies on positive relationships with firms and so would reasonably try to keep firms happy with full interview slates so they’d keep buying more interviews next year.

Secondly, it’s not clear that OCS would get to keep any surplus after EIP costs are paid — that money might go back into the school’s general coffers to be redistributed according to school funding priorities. According to administration officials, both OCS and OPIA receive funding from the law school — despite its proximity to firms, OCS isn’t wholly funded by law firms. However, even if OCS doesn’t benefit directly from the EIP surplus, it benefits indirectly: more money in HLS accounts is more money available for redistribution to all areas of the law school.

When asked, students expressed surprise that law firms pay to participate in EIP. “It feels a little bit like they’re selling your time,” said 3L Sarah Hart. “It feels like we are a commodity of Harvard’s. If the number of hotel rooms that you need is dependent upon the number of interviews you’re doing, I can understand [it], “but it does not seem like those fees have necessarily changed once it went online.”

Understanding the true incentives at play would require a level of financial transparency that Harvard has so far been unwilling to provide. While the school publishes the schedule fees for firms online, there is no publicly available data on the budget for EIP, nor for OCS or OPIA, and the school declined to provide it when asked. 

“I think everyone should do a summer that’s not Biglaw and see what it’s like to not have that pressure of a race to the bottom.”

In an ideal world, how would recruiting happen? One administrator said it worked well during COVID when EIP got moved to January of 2L, six months later than it is now. A former administrator would move it even later. “In my dream world,” they said, “everybody would start their job hunt in December or January of their 3L year, to give you enough time to figure out what you want to do when you grow up.” This would put public interest and Biglaw-interested students on the same timeline. 

One student who has always planned to go to Biglaw because of their career goals and financial considerations, suggested a more drastic change. “I kind of wish there weren’t any 1L summer Biglaw jobs. Money wise, I don’t think it helps low income students since pretty much Harvard steals dollar for dollar,” reducing financial aid in proportion to the amount students make during their 1L summer. “I think everyone should do a summer that’s not Biglaw and see what it’s like to not have that pressure of a race to the bottom.”