Will an earlier big law firm recruiting calendar change the market for prospective law school transfer students?

Back in 2018, the National Association for Law Placement loosened some of its calendar and deadlines for on-campus recruiting for law schools and law students. The concern was largely antitrust, coordinating behavior from large law firms that could affect the labor market. Law firms continued the inertia from early practices, but they also began to move recruiting earlier: on-campus interviews (OCI) still happened in fall of 2L, but some were moving to August or flirting with summer dates. The Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 helped accelerate the move: rather than investing in laborious and time-intensive OCI, screening interviews could happen quickly over Zoom, and could be pushed earlier into the summer.

This inevitable unraveling continues. Bloomberg reports that some OCI is moving to spring 1L year. The bulk of OCI will be be complete at many firms by July 1, although many will still have some spots available for later placement, but surely a minority of spots.

This is, on the whole, bad for law students, as one semester of grades, minimal writing samples, no appearance on journal, and the like make for thin resumes. Employers likely will increasingly rely on proxies like undergraduate institutions and undergraduate grades. Relatedly, it can create additional pressure for first generation law students, who may not be as attuned to how early the law firm hiring process takes place and might miss opportunities that students with attorneys in the family might know about. It puts pressure on schools to have additional education and career development awareness (perhaps with more such staff) for students.

But an interesting Reddit thread raised a different concern. How does this change in market affect transfer students?

One of the big perks of students transferring “up,” if you will, is taking advantage of the new school’s OCI. If your new school has more robust OCI opportunities for the fall of 2L year, it redounds to your benefit to transfer and take advantage of them immediately. Students often give up significant scholarships at lower-ranked schools to take on significant debt at higher-ranked schools. Part of that tradeoff is the benefits of OCI.

But what if OCI moves to spring of 1L or that early summer of 1L year—well before transfer applications are accepted and completed? The benefits of OCI would seem to be lost—as would a major reason to take on additional debt, switch schools (and sometimes moving states), and transfer.

To be sure, there are other benefits of a school—the alumni network, the reputation benefits, and so on. There are many reasons a transfer might be deemed beneficial. But if one of the major reasons for transferring disappears, I wonder if we might see a change in student behavior. And for schools that have previously heavily relied on transfer students for budgetary purposes or to keep 1L admissions classes look a certain way for LSAT and UGPA medians, it could be quite disruptive.

This might be why more schools are moving to early transfer applications, too. If schools realize that the benefits for transferring students are moving earlier, they need to incentivize students to apply earlier, accept them earlier, and give them the potential benefits earlier.

It might also be why we see declining transfer applications overall as well. But there are many market forces at work (a good economy for a few years makes the urgency for transferring less, I would assume), and it’s possible this changes as we see softening recruitment.

It’s one interesting relationship between two things I hadn’t thought much about (the moving OCI window and the transfer market), and one I’ll be watching in the years ahead.