Fighting Hierarchies in Hiring
January 19th, 2014 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Law students quickly learn the hierarchies that govern the legal profession. Top employers, especially in BigLaw, prefer students from elite law schools. High class rank, law review membership, previous work experience, and personal connections matter, but the status of a student’s degree sends a strong workplace signal.
We deplore this fact in academia, and many employers rue the practice as well. Over time, employers have learned that graduates of the elite schools aren’t necessarily the best lawyers. Still, the preference continues. Just as no one ever got fired for buying IBM, no one will lose face for hiring graduates of Harvard, Yale, or Stanford law schools.
But now one BigLaw firm has decided to fight back–against its own biases. Clifford Chance, a global law firm headquartered in London, has devised three novel hiring practices. All three techniques aim to widen the firm’s talent pool by reducing its dependence on lawyers trained at Oxford, Cambridge, and other elite institutions. The Clifford Chance innovations are smart hiring practices: perhaps we can persuade U.S. firms and other legal employers to follow them.
Credit for All Work Experience
Clifford Chance has started explicitly scoring candidates’ work experience. That experience includes law-related work, as well as positions “working full-time in retail to cover the cost of tuition fees.” The firm has not released details on how it counts the latter positions, but it is promising that recruiters explicitly focus on this work. Rather than gloss over the assorted jobs that low-income students perform to pay their way through school, the firm will acknowledge the necessity of this work–and perhaps even recognize some of the skills learned through tuition-supporting jobs.
CV-Blind Final Interviews
Even more intriguing, Clifford Chance has adopted a system of CV-blind final interviews. Staff members conducting these interviews don’t know which law school each candidate attended; they know only the candidate’s name.
The firm hopes that this approach will eliminate unconscious attitudes that might bias interviewers in favor of applicants from elite schools. Rather than assume that an Oxford graduate is more sophisticated, articulate, or intelligent than one from a lesser school, the interviewers judge the candidates based on their words and manner.
The CV-blind approach reduces the halo effect created by elite school attendance. Employers can weigh the substance of an applicant’s academic record (including the nature of the school attended) during screening stages of the employment process. There is no compelling reason for interviewers to know the applicant’s school when judging the interpersonal skills displayed during an interview.
Eliminating academic pedigree from final interviews does have one drawback: It reduces the opportunity for firms to recruit candidates based on common bonds. Interviewers will no longer be able to reminisce with candidates about favored (or dreaded) professors and classes. Candidates may come away from these interviews feeling a less personal connection to the prospective employer.
These very connections, however, give elite-school graduates yet another advantage in the hiring process. If a firm has hired primarily elite-school graduates, students from lesser schools will feel less connection with their interviewers. Those students, in fact, may feel more comfortable in interviews where no one’s alma mater plays a role.
Intelligent Aid
Clifford Chance’s most ambitious program is its Intelligent Aid competition. Each year the firm fills twenty of its summer slots with students chosen through this process. The students submit a 500-word essay on a designated topic, then defend their ideas orally before a panel of judges. The twenty best competitors obtain summer jobs; the top competitor also receives a £5,000 scholarship and £1,000 to give a favorite charity.
Intelligent Aid has become a major pipeline for students aspiring to work at Clifford Chance; the competition fills half of all openings in the firm’s summer program.
Outcomes
Clifford Chance’s innovations seem to be working. Last year the firm hired lawyers from forty-one different schools. That number represents almost a thirty percent increase from the number of schools represented the previous year.
The firm has also succeeded in attracting more first-generation students to its ranks. The Intelligent Aid program yielded one-third more of those students than the traditional hiring route did.
Clifford Chance is betting that its innovations will yield a better group of lawyers than conventional hiring practices have done. The firm isn’t running a charity for students enrolled at non-elite universities; it’s seeking the best possible workers. So far, the results suggest that it’s both possible and productive to combat elitism in hiring.
Wide World
May 11th, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt
QS, a British company that supports international study, has published a ranking of law schools worldwide. Like all other rankings, this one undoubtedly has flaws. The method, however, seems at least as plausible as the one used by U.S. News for our domestic rankings. The QS ranking for subjects like law focuses on academic reputation surveys, employer surveys, and measures of scholarly productivity and impact. Let’s see what the results of the survey tell us about the place of U.S. schools in the wide world of law.
First some good news for our home team: Harvard Law School tops the QS list, and four other U.S. schools (Yale, NYU, Columbia, and Stanford) appear among the top ten. These United States similarly dominate the top fifty, with fourteen American schools in that group. The United Kingdom is our closest competitor, with nine schools listed among the top fifty. Next comes plucky Australia, with six law schools in the top fifty. If this were the Olympics, we would win; we have the most medals and that’s that.
American students and professors, however, may be surprised to find the glory spread among schools from so many different nations. In addition to the U.K. and Australian schools, the top fifty includes law schools from France, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Canada, Singapore, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Japan, China, Chile, and Italy. The top U.S. schools have a strong global reputation, but so do schools from many other nations.
Some of our dominance, furthermore, stems from our size. The United States has a population of 313.9 million residents. The United Kingdom is just one-fifth our size, with a population of 62.6 million. Australia is even smaller, with a population of just 22.6 million. A nation our size has many more educational institutions–and more opportunities to make a top-fifty list–than smaller countries do.
To adjust in a very rough way for size, we can compare the QS showing for California, with a population of 38 million residents, to both the United Kingdom and Australia. California’s population is about three-fifths as large as the population of the United Kingdom. Puny Australia, in turn, is about three-fifths the size of California.
California fares quite nicely on QS’s ranking of law schools: It has one school (Stanford) in the top ten and two others (Berkeley and UCLA) among the top fifty law schools worldwide. But the United Kingdom triples that showing, with three schools in the top ten and six others among the top fifty. The U.K. achieves that record with a population that is less than double California’s size. Tiny Australia, meanwhile, trounces California: It has two schools in the top ten and four others among the top fifty. That’s double California’s performance at just over half its size.
What does this mean for U.S. law schools and their graduates? The most lucrative forms of practice, serving corporate and financial clients, are now global practices. U.S. law matters, but so does the law of the European Union, China, and dozens of other nations. Large corporations obtain counsel from lawyers around the world, and many of those lawyers received their training outside of the United States.
To get a sense of this, scan the lawyers associated with Baker & McKenzie. For 2012, the latest year available, Baker grossed more money than any other law firm in the world. Baker is headquartered in the United States and it hires plenty of U.S. law school graduates. According to a search box on the firm’s site, it employed forty-six Harvard Law School graduates to help accomplish that end. The firm, however, also employed twenty-three lawyers educated at the University of Melbourne. Nor did those Melbourne lawyers stick to Baker’s Australian offices; they also practice in Chicago, Washington, DC, London, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur.
Examine the leading law firms headquartered outside of the United States, and you’ll find even more lawyers from all of those non-U.S. schools on the QS list. Clifford Chance, the U.K. mega-firm, has thirty lawyers in its Hong Kong office. Only two of those thirty have a law degree from a U.S. school, and one of those is an LLM earned to complement a Hong Kong degree. United Kingdom degrees predominate at Clifford Chance, but degrees from Hong Kong, Switzerland, Singapore, and Australia also appear among the Clifford Chance lawyers in Hong Kong.
Graduates of U.S. schools, in other words, are competing against a wide world of lawyers. That competition is one of the forces reducing the number of BigLaw positions for graduates of our schools. Corporate clients hire law firms located in many parts of the world. Those firms, in turn, hire lawyers from many countries–and often show little interest in U.S.-educated lawyers. As BigLaw positions contract, displaced U.S. lawyers move into positions more focused on the domestic market, placing pressure on those positions as well.
The United States enjoyed such global dominance during the last half of the twentieth century, that I fear many legal educators, law students, and prospective students don’t grasp the impact of global competition on jobs in our profession. BigLaw is no longer our playground; it’s a busy marketplace that we share with the rest of the world.
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