Thursday, July 9, 2009

"Lawyer Hiring and the Bursting of the Pedigree Bubble"

The July 2009 issue of the NALP Bulletin, the monthly newsletter of the Association of Legal Career Professionals, contains a great article on, among other things, the flaws in large firm recruiting efforts. NALP recently released the article to the general public because it has generated such interest. NALP's introduction to the article is reproduced below, along with a link to the article itself.

"Much of large law firm recruitment has been based on an ingenious lawyer recruitment and development model devised by Paul Cravath in the early 20th century. In the lead article in the July NALP Bulletin , Professor William D. Henderson, a participant in the NALP/NALP Foundation Roundtable on the Future of Lawyer Hiring mentioned above, argues that a fundamental misconception of the Cravath system is that the firm hired the best lawyers. "In reality," he says, "the Cravath system created them." Henderson outlines the reasons corporate law firms throughout the country developed their own variants of Cravath's "white shoe" brand of recruiting, explains what really made Cravath's lawyer training work, and addresses the flaws in pedigree-based hiring today."

The full article is available here.

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