By Andy Howlett '10
Columnist

These are tough times at the Law School. Ask around the 2L class, and you’ll get a sense of exactly what I mean. Despite a blithe assessment by the Law Weekly a few weeks ago that the OGI process was going great and that the only real problems were students being unaware that they didn’t need to take the full number of interviews to get a job, the truth is that many, many second-year students are struggling in the job search. I’m not privy to any official numbers coming out of Career Services (although I understand such numbers will be available soon), but the UVA Law Blog website (maintained by myself and others) ran an informal poll a few weeks ago that sheds some light on the situation. Of the nearly 100 local responses, nearly a quarter of respondents were voicing some degree of frustration with trying to get a job.

Of course, you can add to this any anecdotal evidence you might have: some was supplied by an anonymous letter to the editor of the Law Weekly last week from “Three Jobless 2Ls,” to wit: “Together [we] had about 60 OGIs, 20 callbacks, and zero offers. Two [of us] are in the top third of the class, the other is on Law Review.” More can be gathered if you listen to any of the murmured, nervous conversations taking place around the Law School: it’s tough out there, for both second and third-year students. And, as far as first-year students go, I would wager the entire balance of my Stafford loan that there just aren’t going to be that many 1L firm jobs to be had, either, and trying to get one is going to be more of an uphill battle than ever before.

What’s happening here? Well, first and foremost, it’s obviously not a great time to be a law student looking for a job at a law firm. The legal market is contracting, large firms are cutting their summer class sizes, and some smaller firms are eliminating their summer programs altogether. When David Lat of Above the Law came to the Law School to speak a few weeks ago, he described the phenomenon as a long-term contraction that marked the “fall” of the legal profession, and indicated that he didn’t think that we would see a return to the legal boom times of mid-2000s any time soon.

As I wrote in a column last Spring, when there is a recession, like we currently find ourselves in now, there’s just less money to go around and less of a willingness or a need on the part corporate clients to pay $500/hr for legal advising. All in all, I think law might be a bit more sheltered than some other professions (read: investment banking), but it’s still been hit pretty hard, and law students—who are primarily financing their educations with ever-increasing debt in the hopes of paying it off later—are being directly affected.

The other problems, like everything else in life, are ones of miscalculation, misinformation, and timing. Many students, based on information and statistics from previous years, thought they could rely on the OGI process to get them a job. One explained to me how in the first round he scored 14 pre-screened interviews, and thought that this would be enough to get him a number of callbacks that would result in at least one offer. The result, however, was no callbacks. Others, also relying on the OGI process, indicated to me that they thought they waited too long to start alternate job search tactics, like mass-mailing smaller firms.

Don’t get me wrong—there’s a lot of anecdotal evidence that OGI did work well for most UVA students, myself included, in getting them the jobs that they wanted. Just not for everyone.

I believe that the primary goal in moving from this year to the next should be an evaluation of recruiting and job search efforts with the aim of making sure that UVA Law’s employment numbers remain strong in an economically depressed climate. I understand, of course, that Career Services is already working hard on this, and do not fault them at all. I do think, however, that the current climate calls for a change in tactics and opens up the possibility that we may have to search for new solutions.

One thing that I would suggest revisiting is the Law School’s policy of “prescreening” most interviews. Virginia is the only school ranked in the top 15 by U.S. News and World Report that continues to use this practice, by which employers select based on resume and grades which students they will talk to at OGI. Virginia’s peer schools have a different system by which interviews are allocated on the basis of student demand: you rank the firms with which you want to interview in order from most to least, and a computer system allocates available interviews accordingly.

Prescreening is loved by employers (and perhaps one of the reasons OGI is so popular) but has questionable benefits for students. A student at or near the top of the class will get most of his interview selections, a student more towards the bottom will not. A partial lottery system in place helps to rectify the situation somewhat, but most interview slots are still prescreened.

Another major problem here is that a student with good grades can take 25 OGI interviews and wind up with almost that many callbacks, even though he’s not really interested in most of the firms. A student with lower grades (who still may have gotten prescreen interviews under the current system) may not get any. A partner who conducted screening interviews at UVA for a large law firm once explained to me that firms typically have “callback quotas” for each batch of interviews that they conduct at a given school; thus, when interviews aren’t allocated by student interest in the firm, it results in a situation where a small group of students (usually the ones with the best grades) are getting a mass of callbacks at the firms in which they have little interest at the expense of other students with lower grades who are interested in these firms. Switching to the system that other top law schools use would help alleviate this problem.

The second thing I think would help would be for Career Services to publish more information about the process. For example, information on the average GPA to get a screening interview is published on LawWeb, but information on the average GPA to get a callback or offer (both of which I believe to be heavily dependent on grades) is not. This is valuable information for students in planning their career search.

Finally, it’s has been widely reported that some firms have actually been rescinding offers in violation of the new guidelines published by the National Association for Law Placement (NALP), to which employers, law schools, and students are all supposed to adhere. Personally, the economic climate and the reasons for rescission notwithstanding, I think the Law School should strongly consider not allowing these firms the privilege of participating in OGI next year, or, at least, explicitly and strongly cautioning students who choose to interview with them.

Overall, the problem is, again, the poor economic climate, and that’s something that is mostly out of our control. That said, I do think the major challenge for the Law School in the coming months is going to be adapting to the current economic client and ensuring that all students are able to find employment.