Startup aims to give promising law grads another way into BigLaw
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A startup called Legal Innovators is hiring and training law grads who show promise and is offering them to law firms and corporations at reduced rates.
Legal Innovators is hiring lawyers who can be competitive in BigLaw despite being overlooked by law firms focusing on first-year grades or students at top law schools, report Law.com, Bloomberg Law, LawSites and a Dec. 5 press release.
Diversity is important to Legal Innovators. Its first-year class of 16 lawyers includes eight women and eight minorities. About one-third of the lawyers in the first class have been placed with employers.
Law firms and companies hiring Legal Innovators lawyers would make a one-year commitment, with the expectation that the lawyers would be kept on board for a second year. At the end of two years, the hope is that the lawyers would be directly hired by the employers.
Legal Innovators will charge employers effective rates that are between $200 and $250 per hour.
Legal Innovators partnered with three law schools for its initial hires: Georgetown University Law Center, George Washington University Law School and Howard University School of Law.
The co-founders of Legal Innovators are former Shearman & Sterling partner Jonathan Greenblatt and former Shearman associate Bryan Parker, a tech entrepreneur.
Parker told LawSites that he is a “big data guy,” and he hopes to collect data to help understand the characteristics that make a good hire.
“If you take a statistically relevant data set and look at the determining factors in that, then you can move beyond the top law schools, you can look at the data and identify the students who are likely to be good lawyers,” he said.
The data could also be used for customers to use in their own decision-making, he said.
