Where Education and Commodification Merge

[F]law School Episode 8: Selling Harvard Law Students

Flaw School

December 7, 2024

Summary:

In this episode of [F]law School, guest Samara Trilling joins hosts Reya Singh and Sam Perri to pull back the curtain on big law recruitment at Harvard Law School. Samara describes the commodification of law students access to whom is sold by the law school and purchased by  Big Law firms. Meanwhile, many students feel unduly pressured to move toward career paths they never signed up for. From the white shoe law firms that pay Harvard thousands of dollars for access to the student pipeline to the recruitment timelines that have been moved up so early that students barely know what a tort is, this episode dissects how the system sets students up to serve corporate interests—not justice.

Editors:

Very special thanks to Madeleine Kapsalis and Giovana de Oliveira for production and editing assistance.

Guest Bio:

Samara Trilling is a 3L at Harvard Law School interested in strengthening anti-monopoly law, building worker power and regulating AI. In her seven years as a software engineer prior to law school, Samara built anti-eviction tools at Justfix, city master-planning software at Sidewalk Labs and tools addressing the digital divide and supporting democratic news reporting at Google. Samara has a degree in computer science from Columbia University with a specialization in AI and a concentration in history.

Music:

Our theme music is “I Been Waiting” by Crystal Squad, and you’ll also hear segments of “Palms Down” by Blue Dot Sessions.

[F]law Resources: 

Additional Resources: 

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Transcript 

Sam Perri, Reya Singh, and Samara Trilling
“Selling Harvard Law Students”

 (This transcript was created by an automated process and contains errors.)

Reya Singh Welcome to Flaw School, a podcast that explores the flaws in our legal system. We’re today’s hosts. I’m Reya. And I’m a second year in undergrad. 

Sam Perri I’m Sam. And I’m a public defender. 

Reya And we are so excited to be hosting this week’s Flaw school episode. 

Sam Every two weeks, we interview law students to uncover the role of corporate actors in producing many of our most urgent social problems and the troubling tale of corporate actors shaping, bending, capturing, and breaking the law in their favor. In this episode, we’ll be discussing the evolution of big law recruitment at Harvard Law School, the process by which some of the largest private corporate law firms in the country swoop in and gobble up law students. I mean, their future employees. 

Reya Today, we’re joined by Samara Trilling, a 3L at Harvard Law School, interested in strengthening anti-monopoly law, building worker power and regulating A.I.. In her seven years as a software engineer prior to law school, Sam   ara built anti-eviction tools at Just Fix City Master Planning software at Sidewalk Labs and Tools, addressing the digital divide and supporting Democratic news reporting at Google. Samara has a degree in computer science from Columbia University with a specialization in AI and a concentration in history. Welcome to Flaw School, Samara. Class is in session. 

Samara Trilling Thanks so much for having me. 

Reya Samara, please tell the listeners about yourself. What do you intend to do after law school and what do you like to do in your free time? 

Samara For sure. So, as you mentioned, I am a former software engineer and a big tech exile. I worked at Google and other related companies for seven years after undergrad. And ultimately I went to law school because I was really tired of working for billionaires. I was working at Google and realizing that the products that we were making kept getting worse over time as there was less competition amongst them in the marketplace. And, I was actually working for Sidewalk Labs doing this big project in Toronto when I was leading their accessibility work. This is sort of making a new potential future city physically accessible and digitally accessible, and was doing a lot of co-design with the accessibility community in Toronto. And people sort of started saying to me, this was sort of around the time of a tech clash, “maybe it’s not such a great idea for a huge corporation to own a big part of our downtown.” And I was like, “you know what? That’s kind of right. This seems like actually maybe not the greatest idea.” So I that sort of started me on on reading more about the history of monopoly power and corporate power in America and learning more about antitrust. And once I understood what the role of the DOJ and the FTC were in in curbing corporate power, I figured they had a lot of lawyers. And that’s probably what I should go do, is get a law degree so I could go help out. And when I came into law school, I had sort of three different focuses on how to make sure big tech companies could have less power. So you can work on anti-monopoly stuff–that’s the antitrust laws, and sort of broad market deconsolidation in general. You can work on labor law to make sure that employees from within companies–employees have such good ideas, and especially in really consolidated industries, those ideas don’t bubble up to be used in a corporate setting–so giving workers more power, I think, is really good to curb the power of big tech companies. And finally, algorithmic regulation, which we’ve heard a lot about recently, is a way that you can regulate the specific products that big tech companies are making that have a lot of control over our lives. 

Sam That is so impressive. I just had to stop and take that all in. I’m wondering how, with all of that background, what inspired you to write about the abolition of big law recruiting at Harvard Law School? And for those who don’t know what big law is, can you explain that a little bit? 

Samara Absolutely. So big law is essentially this group of pretty large law firms. You’ve probably heard of a white shoe law firm. They’re sort of elite law firms. So these are really big law firms that are employed by corporations to defend against lawsuits that are brought by consumers, by employees and workers. And they are protecting the resources and the assets of those big law firms. So, if you think about going to law school in order to help people and maybe you want to be like Erin Brockovich, you want to do work on environmental law, maybe you want to be a civil rights lawyer. Usually you’re on the side of the plaintiff. If you are using the law as the person bringing a claim, this is on the defense side. So this is on behalf of big pharma, on behalf of big oil, on behalf of big tech. And these law firms are some of the biggest employers of law students coming out of law school. And it’s much easier for students to go work in big law than it is for them to do almost anything else because of a bunch of different incentives that have been developed, as law schools, especially the most elite law schools, have developed over time in conjunction with, and in partnership with, these really big defense side law firms. So in writing this article, I was talking with my friend and we were talking about how we’re both in public interest. We’re both deciding to go into public interest careers after law school. And we were talking about how Saturdays with so many of our friends who wanted to go into public interest careers instead felt like they had to go into big law. And she said, “yeah, and, you know, did you know that big law firms pay Harvard to interview us?” And I said, “what? I did not know that.” And that was sort of an offhand comment from her that really sparked my interest in this, because we know there are so many reasons why people go into big law. Law school is incredibly expensive. People have to pay back their loans. There’s a lot of prestige associated with going to big law. People say they’re going to get trained well in big law. Then they can go off and work in public interest later. But in reality, most people actually stay in big law after starting there. But this was pretty specific–Harvard gets paid by big law firms based on the number of interviews that students do. And anecdotally, I was hearing from other students that they felt both pressured to go into the big law EIP, which is the early interview program that we’ll talk about more later, and that they felt like they were being pressured to take more interviews as part of that program. And this was a potential explanation for that if there was an incentive. So I wanted to do the full research and not make any assumptions. But that was what kicked it off. 

Reya Thank you, Samara. I think it’s a powerful way to start. Just getting a general idea of, wow, like a lot of these things are really shocking. But it’s how Harvard Law and a lot of just schools, law school, a lot of it is run. The question I have for you is how was it pursuing this topic knowing that many of your sources wanted to remain unnamed? And can you explain why they wanted to remain anonymous? 

Samara I think doing research about the institution that you work at or going to school at is always a tightrope walk. I think it actually makes for some of the most interesting research to do. When I was in college, I went to Columbia University undergraduate, and I wrote a piece on the history of slavery at Columbia and how the university’s assets and founders were so closely intertwined with the slave trade. And that involved going to look at a lot of primary source documents from a lot of founders of the university in the library. And this felt like something sort of similar. You get to interview people who work at the university or students who go to the university. You get to read about the history of the university, and Harvard is kind of easier to do research on than other law schools because it’s so heavily covered in things like Above the Law and other law school blogs. So I was really excited about the idea of being able to do research into the place that I’m currently going to school. And I think it also has a pretty personal dynamic, right? This actually affects me. I personally didn’t participate in big law recruiting because I knew that I didn’t want to do that going in. But I definitely felt the pressure to do that. And I remember thinking as a 1L, should I do this? Should I just hedge my bets and get a big law offer just in case? And I think that the Flaw has posted a lot of beautiful articles from students who’ve examined this dynamic in the past. And this felt like just my contribution to this long history of students explaining their own material conditions and understanding how they got here and what are the pressures and forces that they are subjectively feeling and what are those based on in the world. 

Sam I love that explanation. As someone who went to HLS and you know, really what you described is so real for so many students at this, you know, pressure, like everyone’s talking about it and you’re like, am I missing out on some, you know, am I not in the know of like why I should be so attracted to this process? Because I remember I always deleted the emails as soon as they popped up from like the Office of Career Services was like, “don’t care, delete.” And other people who read them are like, “I should, maybe I should do this.” But I get where you’re coming from. I do have another question for you, but I was just thinking and listening to your answer. Do you mind explaining what above the law is for those who have like no sense of it? I feel like it could be just some helpful context. 

Samara Absolutely. So Above the Law is essentially a blog about law schools. It’s sort of a rag that reports on what decisions law schools make, not just schools, actually, but also firms. They’ll report like what is the new salary that all the big law firms are paying, which honestly needs its own Flaw article because all the big law firms pay the exact same starting salary. And as somebody who’s interested in going into antitrust, this is a classic price fixing problem. I’m sure they would argue that this is an individual. Kirkland & Ellis will raise their salaries and then the other people will go match it. But it does mean that you essentially have the exact same salary, whichever big law firm you go to. But, above the law is essentially a blog that reports on the business of law, who is getting sanctioned as attorneys. It’s a bit gossipy, and they have individual reporters that are assigned to report on law schools. So, for example, when Harvard and Yale and Stanford or some other schools decided to change their recruiting deadlines, Above the Law will report on that. So rude with care. It’s not necessarily you know, it’s a little bit you’ll get the dregs of what the–read with care. I think it has definitely a lot of sort of gossip on it, but it can be really helpful for understanding what the most recent news is with regard to law schools and big law firms especially. 

Sam That was such a good way to describe it. Read with care. I love that. That needs to be, like, put on a shirt. I do want to kind of take us a little bit into the article that you wrote itself, which was brilliant. I love the imagery that you started off the piece with, and I do want to read the first paragraph of your piece and kind of then go from there. So you write, “My Aunt Meredith recalls walking into her first day of 1L at Harvard Law School in September 1979 and seeing students wearing suits. She asked one student, why? Was he solemnizing his first day with formal fashion? No. The student said, ‘I’ve got an interview with a firm today.’ Wow. What imagery. Especially with the timeline of what you talk about later in your piece. The National Association for, is it Legal placement? I feel like, yeah, it is legal placement. Great. Of how they promulgated their first set of guidelines for the recruitment process in 1979. So just that timing itself is quite interesting. But I’m curious, like, what was your first day at Harvard Law School like? Did you have that same experience where you walked in? You’re like, why is everyone dressed like this? Do you people know more information about this recruitment process than I do? And I ask this, knowing that like, I felt like my first day of law school, I don’t know if it was that day exactly, but like quite early on, I immediately was like, oh, there’s this thing called big law that I didn’t know about before coming to law school. And did, you know, your experience, like the early days of law school and seeing the, like, beginnings of this recruitment process, do you feel like they were shaping your views or perspectives like reflected in the piece that you wrote? 

Samara So I actually got cold-called first my first class in law school the first day of 1L, and that was my first day of law school in legislation and regulation, which is about how Congress writes laws and how the Supreme Court interprets them. So my first day of law school was a little nerve wracking, but I do recall people kind of dressing up for it a little bit. People were not wearing suits. I think people would have gotten laughed at if they did that. But people definitely were in their law school chic. And I actually had a pretty good orientation experience. And I give a lot of credit to one of my friends who very early on sat down the entire section. A section is like a group of 80 people that all the the 1Ls, the first-years at Harvard Law School, take all their classes with. It’s kind of like high school. You walk around between all your classes together with all the other 1Ls in your section. And she sat everybody down, and she said, “we haven’t had an opportunity to talk with each other about group norms and how we’re going to treat each other as part of orientation. And so voluntary. But we’re reading at this time we’re going to set some group norms together. We’re going to be nice to each other. We’re going to share notes with each other. We are going to support each other when people have cold calls and that’s going to be what we do.” And she took suggestions from the group and we created a group set of norms. And I think that was really great. I think it really stifled a lot of the latent sense of competition that sort of was already bubbling up by that point. And I do recall people talking about their LSAT scores, for example, on the first day of law school, which is the most toxic thing ever. But this kind of competition really can seep in because of who Harvard Law School recruits and because of who law schools recruit in general. So I personally, on my first day, do think that we would have had a lot more of this competition had it not been for my excellent friend who sat us all down. I will say as a 1L, I don’t have a lot of other lawyers in my family, just my Aunt Mary. And I didn’t know anything about the differences between the different law firms. I knew which law firm she worked at. I didn’t know what each of the big law firms were called. I didn’t know what they were known for. I didn’t know which companies they represented. And that is honestly a huge part of the ambient knowledge that you absorb from being in law school that’s super necessary to figure out where you want to work after law school, even if it’s not a big law firm. I didn’t know any of the plaintiffs’ law firms. I didn’t know any of the small nonprofits that people went to work at for civil rights. So I do think people with lawyers in the family start with a higher level of knowledge about that. And I think that for this particular piece, I. 

I think that I came into law school knowing that I wanted to do a public interest job. I wanted to work in government working on antitrust. And yet, I think there were so many opportunities after that to get off that path that it was really important for me to connect with other people who also wanted to go into public interest. And I think, knowing how difficult it was to form that community and keep that community, to keep my vision set on what my personal goals were when everybody was telling me that it was more prestigious to get a clerkship and go work in big law, and you can get such a huge bump in pay if you go to a big law firm after getting a clerkship, if you get a Supreme Court clerkship, and then you go to big law, you get like a $500,000 bonus or something. In fact, check that. But I’m pretty sure it’s really huge. And so, I do think that my personal experience and understanding how people talk about big law firms affected this piece for sure. 

Reya Samara, that was great. You touched on this a little bit, but I guess if you have more perspective to share, that would be wonderful. Do you think you could tell us about your experience at HLS so far in regard to recruiting, and what have you noticed on campus? What have you heard on campus? 

Samara One funny thing about the way recruiting happens now is that a lot of it happens over the summer, and so, students actually aren’t all together when they’re applying for jobs. I was working at DOJ during my 1L summer in the Antitrust division, and one of my co-interns was going through big law recruiting at the time, and he just seemed so stressed. He was constantly on the phone. He was constantly having to juggle meetings, to make interviews. He was trying to negotiate, or try to figure out which job to get, while he was also trying to do his work. And it seemed really isolating and kind of lonely. But I do think that people definitely talk about which law firms they’re applying to. People swap stories about law firms. I think that people, again, who have lawyers in the family end up knowing a lot more about which law firms are known for which sorts of things. And often, a lot of people, is what I heard, can get jobs through those family connections. So, I think that recruiting is a big topic on campus. You get an email from the Office of Career Services when recruitment signups are happening. I think you get that email before you get emails necessarily about how to get public interest jobs or when the public interest recruiting fairs are because public interest jobs tend to recruit later than big law. But I think that the atmosphere on campus around recruiting is really stressful. And often this is 1Ls who are not sure, they haven’t even gotten their 1L grades yet or even their first semester grades. They’re trying to figure out how to read case. They’re trying to figure out how to write a brief for a writing class. And people are already talking about what kind of job they might want to do after. And people will ask you, “what do you want to do after law school?” And I think that pressure is something that people feel, especially as students who’ve been told that we always have to know what’s next, that we are students who know, that we’re driven students, that we’re type-A students. So that affects people a lot. 

Reya Samara that is so insightful. I thought that finance recruiting was crazy in undergrad, and now I’m hearing this, and I’m like, “holy smokes, what? What could I possibly be in for if I were to go to law school?” You touched on how some of your friends were going through recruitment even during the summer. Your article sheds light on how big law firms have moved their recruiting timelines earlier and earlier. What led you to focus on this trend and what do you think the implications are for students and firms alike? 

Samara I think one of the reasons that it’s really hard for students to contemplate doing anything except for big law is that the recruiting deadlines are so early. So you have to make decisions about whether you’re going to participate or apply for big law firms, usually in the winter or spring of your 1L year, which is so much earlier than it used to be. And I was really curious about why that happened. So, recently, there’s actually been a major shift in when big law firms recruit. And in 2018, the National Association of Legal Placement, which is a group of law school administrators and representatives from the biggest law firms in the country, they coordinate recruitment through this group. And NALP, as it’s called, had a rule that says that you can’t start recruiting 1Ls until a certain date in the fall. So it’s meant to give you a little more breathing space to focus on your schoolwork and to think about what you might want to do in the future and allow yourself time to process rather than constantly be thinking about the next thing. And in 2018, NALP sent a letter to all of its law schools that were affiliated, and law schools paid to be part of NALP, as do big law firms, in order to, I think–big law firms pay to be part of NALP in order to get access to students to recruit. And NALP said, we are no longer going to set a date for when people can start recruiting. We actually think it’s an antitrust concern that it might be considered collusion for all of the big law firms and law schools to get together and decide on when recruitment can start. And that meant that recruiting could get earlier and earlier. So I noticed that my 1L year, it used to be that you could get a job, I think toward the end of the summer, maybe it was August. But there is this new thing called EIP preview, Early Interview Program preview, which allows you to start applying to a handful of law firms, maybe your top choices, in June. And so this is June of, after your 1L year. You had to sign up for it in the spring. And I was really intrigued to learn that this was an antitrust concern that pushed the deadline earlier because students, and administrators, and a lot of law firms, actually agree that it’s bad for students, it’s bad for all of them to recruit so early before students even have gotten a chance to choose a single class of their own choosing. There’s a 1L curriculum. In the 1L curriculum, all of your classes are chosen for you. You don’t get to choose your first class until the spring of your 1L year, and you don’t get to choose a full semester’s worth of classes until your 2L year. So people are asked to make choices about where they might want to work before they’ve even taken a single specialized law class. And you have to rely on what you thought you wanted to do before law school in order to do that. There is one elective in the spring that you get to choose, but it’s pretty limited what your selection is from because there’s only a certain amount of slots after all the upper level students have chosen their classes. And usually because you have such a large course load, especially at Harvard, where 1Ls actually take one more class than almost every single other law student takes. And Harvard applies for special dispensation to get to require 1Ls to take one extra class. Usually, you want to pick a class that’s not going to be super taxing in your 1L spring–doesn’t stop people from trying. Let me tell you, I have seen people take five credit classes in their 1L spring, and that is wild. 

Sam I really do want to ask you, though, about–I know you mentioned, like, you have to rely on what you knew coming in. That really bothers me. Like, it just hits a nerve of kind of like, so if you’re in the know, like, great for you, but also if you’re in the know about, like, about things I mean.  What? I feel like there are some probably some biases, perspectives that you got in the first place. Like, where did you get them from? Who are the people who are in the know? And I guess I’m also curious, have you felt like in law school there are a lot of people that came in and, like, seemed to know and do you feel like they actually had a sense of what was going on around them, or they were just, like, pretending they did? I feel like there was a lot of imposter syndrome that I notice, like in law school myself, but I’m curious your perspective on that. 

Sam I definitely think the loudest people are not always the people who know the best. But I will say that I think it tends to fall along class lines. If you have a parent who works in law, if you have a parent, especially who works in big law, which comes with a pretty sizable salary, then you’re probably going to have your parents’ friends that you know who are going to tell you about what the good law firms to work at are, and what law firms you should kind of think twice about, because that one guy’s a little creepy or something. And those are pieces of information that you just don’t get to know if you don’t have family in that. And I think this goes to one other piece of advice that I have for anybody thinking about going to law school, which is that it’s so important to go into law school with an idea of why you want to be a lawyer. If you don’t, you will get pushed into big law because that is the path of least resistance and you will end up doing something that might be completely different from why you thought you wanted to go to law school in the first place. And you might have financial stability, but–and that might be exactly what you’re seeking, which is totally fine if that’s your reason for going to law school, be very clear about that, get yourself a number that says, “this is how much I want and how much I need to have financial stability for myself, my family,” everybody has different financial circumstances–but if you’re going to law school for a reason, like pursuing justice or trying to make change in the world, surrounding yourself with people who will remind you about that goal is one of the best things you can do for yourself and kind of a prerequisite, I think, for being a justice oriented law student, because law schools are not in the business of creating justice. They’re in the business of creating lawyers who will make a lot of money, who will donate that money back to the law school. 

Sam No one can see me nodding vigorously to your responses. I have so much to say on it, but I feel like we could have a whole other podcast episode on it. So I’m gonna reel myself back in and actually give back to things you specifically mentioned in the piece, kind of speaking on the like, this law firm has this like kind of creepy guy, maybe stay away from that firm, right? I felt like it was pretty creepy that they had EIP hosted in hotel rooms. Like I felt so deeply uncomfortable hearing that I was like, that sounds disgusting on so many levels to me. But now EIP is online, right? Like since 2020, it’s been online, and yet these firms are still paying their way in, even though, like Harvard doesn’t need to, like, cover the cost of these hotel rooms anymore; they’re covering the cost of the zoom rooms, which I’m sure they have this huge stupid deal with Zoom and get a really good deal on, you know, covering all these rooms, whatever. It doesn’t matter. But I’m curious if you could walk us through a bit about like the money trail, right? Like, how much do we really know about the money trail of, you know, Harvard is getting all this money from these firms? Like where does it go? It feels like in your article you’re saying, we don’t really know. But I guess I’m curious, like I’m sure you’ve been talking to more and more people about the topic even after writing this piece. I’m curious if there is any new gossip on that. And also just kind of why the lack of transparency in this budgeting and the money trail is concerning. 

Sam Yeah. The story about students interviewing in hotel rooms with beds is so wild. That was one of the funniest parts of talking with folks at the school was hearing them talk about how there were these three different hotels they had to rent out. They were–you had to rush between hotels. People were in their suits, in their heels. And if it rained, your suit would get ruined. And then you show up with like a wet blouse in a room with a bed in it. And then you’ve got, you know, breakfast, lunch and dinner are all covered as part of these fees. So you’re having meals with the people that you’re interviewing with, but maybe not at the same time. And they talk so much about how they tried to stand the beds up on their end to see if that was going to make it better. Then you’re looking at the underside of a bed, kind of like a Murphy bed situation on the wall. They tried to pay the hotels to take the beds out, but then it was too difficult. And a lot of the people who flew in, the interviewers were still staying at these hotels. So they needed the beds in the nighttime, but that it was an entire mess. And I actually heard that parody had a pretty good skit on this issue. For several years I tried in vain to find the video online, but parody is the musical review. At the end of every law school year at Harvard, there’s a group of students–plenty of other law schools have similar productions–and it’s sort of a, it’s a send up, it’s sort of a skewering of all of the jokes that happened on campus over the last year. It’s quite high production value. I think it’s excellent. But, you know, you write new lyrics to existing songs and sort of make jokes about the law school. But following up on this wild situation with all these hotel rooms. So it used to be a big headache for administrators. And in 2020, when COVID hit, all of us went online, and it has remained online throughout the last four years. So the hotel bills used to be astronomical. I think it’s got to be, I’m sure they got a deal, but I think they were probably in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. And now, I do imagine that zoom bills are actually quite minimal compared to that. There’s no physical space that’s necessary. Nobody has to travel also, which makes it a lot cheaper for the firms because they don’t have to pay for partners’ time to be flying out to Boston. And the amount of money that big law firms pay for these interviews has also gone up, which seems odd over the last year because it stayed online. So in 2023, 20 interviews, which is referred to as a schedule, is basically the 20 pack of interviews that you buy if you’re a law firm. So law firms buy these 20 packs of interviews in 2023. It was $500 per schedule to participate in early interview program. In 2024, it was $1,000 for a schedule. So this is a doubling in the cost of a 20 pack over one year. And it’s sort of unclear to me where that money goes. I asked Harvard and they said they were not comfortable talking about it. And this is not included in any of the school’s financial disclosures. And I asked several folks, part of university, whether they would be able to provide me with more information about that. And they said they were not comfortable talking about it. But the thousand dollars for 20 interviews really puts a price on law students’ time, which I found pretty wild. 

Reya Samara, you suggest that students sometimes feel like a commodity within the system where their participation in EIP serves more to benefit firms and the law school than to genuinely support their career choices. How do you think that this dynamic reflects the broader issues of corporate power in the legal industry? 

Samara So I think you’ll often hear the phrase, if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. And I think this applies exactly to big law recruiting. Big law firms pay for, in this case, your time. This is paying the school for time with students. And that does sort of turn students into a purchasable commodity with an hourly rate based upon the number of interviews and the price of that 20 pack of interviews. So I talked to several students who didn’t know that big law firms pay for their time. And almost universally, people’s response was really, that makes me feel kind of icky. And I think that as Harvard students, we’re often told, that, we have so much power, we are really special. We are the best. All of these really toxic, elitist narratives. And for students who have been told that for so long, it can actually feel like a real switch and really uncomfortable to be told that actually we are the commodity, we are being bought and traded and the law school produces students as inputs to the law firm. That’s what the school as an economic engine is producing. So this is just one really salient–there’s so many ways in which this happens indirectly. And this is such a distillation of that dynamic in a really clear transaction that students don’t even know about.

Sam Yeah. I mean, that kind of touches on the idea of capture, which I want to kind of dig into a little bit more specifically regarding NALP, you mentioned that, you know, the organization involves law firms, law schools, and that’s the case from the very beginning, right? Like when it was founded, I found myself going on a deep dive of NALP, their history pages, so well put together. It almost disturbed me. I’m like, what are you hiding? Either way, the firms are creating the guidelines that they want others to follow. Right. About the recruitment process, even though I understand they withdrew the guidelines in 2018, regardless, like that was their initial goal, right? They’re essentially, their goal is to capture the recruitment system that they themselves were trying to obtain employees through. And it feels, you know, very much capture, capture the recruitment system, capture kind of hiring processes and what people consider are good practices, you know, create the structure you wish to see in the world and then laud yourself for it. And it feels like such a classic corporate bit of like kind of inserting yourself in a situation or process, making it sound like it’s some objective, great, you know, detached thing from the corporation themselves. And then, you know, meanwhile, they’re influencing the process because it gets them their best outcomes. Do you also see it that way, or am I just like kind of getting too conspiratorial about it? 

Samara This is a case where the conspiracy is just the facts. And this is a pretty obvious example of law firms and law schools. Openly working together in order to serve mostly what is the law firm’s needs, but in exchange for money. The law firms just pay to be part of NALP, and the law schools need money. So it’s a quid pro quo. They’re there helping each other out, often at the expense of students. So in this particular case, I do think it is a good example of capture. It’s definitely a corporate self-governance sort of idea. This is where self-regulation, I guess, is the right way of saying that. And, you know, you could imagine these rules coming from regulators instead, in which case you wouldn’t be subject to the antitrust laws because you’d have democratically elected regulators deciding what kind of recruitment across the board could happen from colleges, universities, law schools. But in this case, it really is sort of a, you know, a gentlemen’s agreement between all of the law firms and all the schools about how can we stop competing amongst each other. This is the argument for why this is actually collusion. We should really just stop competing against each other and make sure that everybody can get the students that we need. We’ll divvy up the students properly. Nobody will be unhappy and we don’t have to worry about competing amongst each other on wages, on benefits and that sort of thing. So in one way, I’m somewhat sympathetic to the idea that you shouldn’t have all these corporations making decisions amongst each other about how they’re going to treat students. On the other hand, I think the outcome of abolishing these rules has made it worse for everyone, especially for even for administrators who spend so much of their time trying to help students get a job. That is their number one metric, is how many students at the end of law school have a job. And so they are trying to push students into jobs. Students want jobs, but all the administrators were trying to help students get jobs at the same time. And having to start that much earlier means they’re dealing with 1Ls, 2Ls, and 3Ls at the same time, and have fewer resources to give to students to give them really good advice, which can sometimes mean that students end up getting pushed into jobs that they might otherwise not have chosen for themselves. 

Sam I have to ask, do you buy this like, collusion idea? Like, do you think the threat of litigation is real? I laugh when I say it because I don’t–I feel like it might just be that, like, more powerful firms like, threatened to drop out of NALP and they didn’t want to, like, lose the power and funding that they would provide. But maybe I’m wrong. Like you are, you know, much more knowledgeable about, like, antitrust, anti-monopoly like litigation. So maybe it is. But I hear that I’m like, that kind of sounds like B.S. Do you think it’s B.S.? Do you think it’s legit? 

Samara So I do kind of think this is B.S. As an antitrust plaintiff side future lawyer, I think that it’s actually really hard to prove collusion in antitrust. And if you just decided unilaterally as a law school to pick a date before which people couldn’t recruit, I think that you could get a bunch of other law schools on board with that without ever having to explicitly collude. And that would be better for students. There is an antitrust idea called an independent business response to the same market conditions, which is essentially a defense to collusion and price fixing. So ultimately, I do think this is sort of B.S. I think they should risk the lawsuit. I do want to note that in 2010, Jones Day, which is a particularly egregious big law firm did say that they felt that NALP guidelines were regulating and restricting competition by preventing law firms from competing on how early they can recruit. But I personally don’t know how much of their own resources Jones Day would have really put into litigating this case. So I’m still skeptical that this antitrust threat is real. 

Reya Samara, some critics may argue that recruiting earlier benefits both students and firms by ensuring job security for graduates. How would you respond to that critique, given the potential downsides that you’ve outlined in this article? 

Samara I think if you talk to most students, the thing that really makes you anxious for your future is being behind other students in getting a job. So I think if everybody got jobs at the end of 2L or at the end of 3L, then you wouldn’t end up feeling so much anxiety because that would be when everybody gets a job. The feeling that somebody else is ahead of you in the process is really the thing that gives people anxiety. And I think plenty of students absolutely have major financial considerations and want to get job security as soon as possible. 100%. I think that’s super understandable. But the issue is that you’re worried there aren’t going to be enough jobs for you if, you know all the jobs are still going to be open by your 3L year, then you don’t have to worry about losing out compared to other students. 

Sam Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think that, like you’re saying that I think that was the stressful conversations you hear buzzing about campus of like, have you heard back from this place? And especially with like public interest, completely different timeline. So I think that makes sense. What do you think that law students and members of the larger community can do to help combat this corporate influence on legal education and recruitment? 

Samara The number one problem here is the cost of law school. Law school is approximately 80K a year at Harvard ish. That’s before housing, board, fees, health care, books. So it ends up being about 100K a year to go to law school, all told, in living expenses. And that means that most people graduate with a huge debt burden. And that means they have to find a job that will allow them to repay that debt. And the jobs that help you repay that debt are big law jobs that start at $225,000 a year, as of 2024. And so there is this tacit collaboration between law schools and big law firms to create the demand for big law jobs because students have loans that they have to pay off. So as an individual, obviously, you know, you can get involved in organizing to make the cost of law school cheaper. But personally, if you are going to law school and you think that you want to go into a public interest career and you’re worried about getting pushed into big law, getting yourself on federal loans is one of the most important things that you can do because it allows you to be eligible for loan repayment programs so that you might be able to repay 0% of your law school loans just by working in public service for a certain amount of time. And we can link to more in the show notes about that, but there are several programs that will allow you to work in public service and not have to pay back any of your law school loans, and not enough people know about those. And the university, unfortunately doesn’t provide quite enough information about those, partially because they do benefit from the requirement that students pay huge amounts of money in tuition, and that money is essentially getting sourced from the law firm through the student to the school. 

Reya What advice would you give to students entering law school who might be concerned about feeling like a product in the recruiting process? What can they do to stay empowered in their career choices? 

Samara I say this to everybody who’s thinking about going to law school, but the most important thing you can do is come into law school with a really clear idea of why you’re there. What do you want to do after law school? What is the job that you want? And keep the people close who will remind you of those reasons so that you don’t get blown off course by gold stars or gold rings that people tell you you have to jump for. 

Sam I love that. I also think I would just add, like, keep the professors close who also help you stay on track like that. I think I didn’t realize it back then, but I was lucky that my — what are they called?  Climenkos — people who teach the writing classes for first year students at Harvard. He had us all sit down and close our eyes and imagine ourselves before law school. And then was like, “you get on this boat and you’re like, sailing away and like, look behind and look at that version of you that like, came here in the first place and think about why you came here, and know that like, you are not going to be the same moving forward, but like, hold on to what brought you here.” I think about that, like, way more than I thought I would. I didn’t feel like in the moment I thought I would never think about that again. But I think that was actually like incredibly powerful to have students, like, pause, like actively pause in the classroom, close their eyes–I mean, we were on Zoom during 1L, but still–close your eyes and think about what brought you there and like, hold on to that, even when you let go of so many other things. God, if I was a law professor, I would have all my students do that. I think that’s so powerful. But finally, where can listeners go to learn more about recruitment at HLS? How corporate firms try to attract students in more subtle ways about the more insidious ways about all that jazz? Where can they go? 

Samara So there’s a series of really excellent Flaw articles about this. Actually, it’s a perennial topic of conversation among students because it’s been a problem for so long. And so I actually relied a lot on an article called “In Search of Sunlight: How Corporate Law Careers Outshine All Else at Elite Law Schools.” And this was really helpful for sort of outlining the whole process of what’s called “public interest drift,” where students go into law school thinking they want to be in public interest and eventually get pushed into big law. And part of this is about, you know, you get all these receptions that are catered for you at places like Barcelona Bar, there’s free drinks, there is a whole bunch of piaya all the time. And you are sold the lifestyle essentially if you work at one of those firms, which is unfortunately not one that you get to enjoy that much because you’re working basically 24/7. One of the reasons that big law firms pay so much money is because they essentially have 100% control over your time. I know somebody who worked in a big law firm last summer and said that every Friday at 5 p.m. he got an assignment that needed to be done by Monday and sometimes even by Sunday. And so he said he worked every single weekend as a 2L summer associate at a big law firm. And usually summer associateships are the time when they’re trying to convince you that you do want to work there, so they treat their summer associates really well. Some places fly people for hikes and stuff. It’s wild. So unfortunately, you don’t get the chance to enjoy a lot of this because you’re spending so much of your time at work. And that’s a tradeoff that people sort of maybe know about in the back of their mind, but it’s not made really real until after you’ve graduated, taking your job, and it’s too late. 

Sam I will just–actually, I think that’s such a huge point that I do want to just like highlight because now, having graduated from the law school, I’ve seen, like my friends who are in big law, they are always working. Like, one of them was staying with me for a weekend and was like actively working like while we were having conversation about something, while we were getting ready to go somewhere. Like I had another friend who was visiting who like, you know, were catching up and it turned into like, God, I have to go to this place and I don’t want to go and it’s for work and blah, blah, blah. And like, I’m a public defender, people like, I think that’s one of the biggest things people talk about in law school. Like, I can’t do public interest law because like, of how much work it is, how draining it is, how exhausting it is. Yes, I’m not going to say the work is not emotionally taxing, okay, but I think it’s crazy that there is this fear of, like, if you are not always available for a partner at a firm, like you are doing this wrong and you’re not as committed to this job as you should be, and they do not talk about that during recruitment. So that’s another tangent. But I think it’s just really worth mentioning because it’s so out of conversations on the law school campuses when they’re recruiting. 

Samara One of my friends who initially thought that he wanted to go into public interest, then did EIP, then actually quit EIP in the middle because they realized they really wanted to be doing public interest and they didn’t like talking with firms about how they were preventing consumers from–or, they were defending corporations that were trying to stop drug prices from getting lower. Most of the people that they talked to said that the best part of their job was doing pro bono work, and that it’s something that big law firms will tell you all the time, especially in recruiting. It’s all the amazing pro bono cases that they get to do. And sure, that’s true. That may be a tiny mitigation of the overall impact that they have, but that is not the majority of what associates get to work on. And it’s kind of wild that that’s what they use to recruit people when that is not what the work is really like. And, you know, I’ll just say there’s a whole Alcoholics Anonymous chapter just for lawyers. Lawyering is notoriously a really hard profession. Mentally, emotionally, it can be a lot. It can be isolating. And I think that a lot of students do underestimate what the impact of a 24 hour a day kind of job is going to be on their mental health. And especially if you’ve locked yourself into meeting that money in order to pay back your loans, in order to sustain a lifestyle, it can feel really trapping. And so I think thinking really early on about what your finances are going to be in the different ways that you can make a really comfortable and okay life for yourself without needing to have a job that pays that much money is really huge. And there are ways. There are so many ways that the law school doesn’t tell you about. You can get your loans paid for through loan repayment programs. You can work for firms that pay slightly less, but that have far less hours. You can get jobs with people who really align with your values and that you don’t have to spend so much time on. There’s a whole raft of options out there. You can work in as not an attorney after going to law school. There are so many options. And I think that that’s unfortunately not something that people learn in law school. 

Reya That is all the time we have for today, Samara, it is so sad to say. But we thank you so much for joining us on Flaw School, and we are so happy to talk about the evolution of big law recruitment at HLS with you any day. 

Samara Thank you so much for having me. 

SamI also want to say thank you for such a wonderful conversation. Big law recruitment is one of my favorite topics to rant about, and so this was really cathartic for me and just really great to connect with you and connect with you again, Reya. 

Reya Thank you, Sam. It is always great co-hosting podcasts with you and just hearing your insight and just watching you be so unapologetic about the things you say. But yes, thank you so much, both of you. And I am so glad that we were able to do this. 

Sam You are way too kind to me, Reya. I appreciate you. If you are interested in reading Samara’s full article or learning more about the flaws in our legal system, check out the Flaw Magazine at theflaw.org. Reya If you enjoyed this episode first, make sure to check out the show notes–there will be some awesome links and references there. And make sure to subscribe to our podcast wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can also check out flawschool.org for more content, specifically on legal education and big law. We have a whole special edition on the Flaw about legal education. Thank you all for listening. Looking forward to talking at you in the future. Class is dismissed.

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