Top Students Hold Law Firm Trump Cards
Some Stanford students who compiled diversity rankings for big law firms want their report to have an impact.
The students, who are members of a group called Building a Better Legal Profession, plan to exercise their clout by asking the top law schools to restrict recruiting by firms that did not do well, Adam Liptak writes in his Sidebar column for the New York Times. They also plan to send their findings to the general counsels of Fortune 500 companies.
In New York, Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton got the best grades for diversity. Herrick, Feinstein did the worst; the firm protests that it never asked lawyers if they were openly gay, and its report that no gays were working there does not reflect the reality. ABAJournal.com covered the report’s New York findings earlier this month.
In Washington, D.C., no firm got an A for diversity. Among those that got Ds were Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher; Kelley Drye Collier Shannon; Baker Botts; and Mayer Brown.
Liptak writes that the student’s grading of law firms “pretty much tells you who holds the power in the market for new associates.”
Independent consultant Peter Darling recently made the same observation in his blog, Business Development. He wrote of a friend’s daughter from a top 10 law school who received offers from seven major law firms to work as a summer associate.
He wrote that the law firms likely view the law student as “someone who is going to work like a dog and bill a ton of hours, someone who’s ambitious enough to stay with the firm for a long time, and someone who’s charismatic and driven enough to eventually be a major rainmaker. … If these things are true, then the lockstep $160K base salary they’re offering her is not enough.”
