State Supreme Courts Can Resolve Early Legal Recruiting Mess

Mark Lemley

(Originally published by Bloomberg Law on June 23, 2026.)

A first-year law student will sit in the library this November preparing for exams, after having ceded study time applying to law firms for a job two summers away. She will miss classes for interviews in January, then accept an offer that will shape the rest of her career. She will have barely completed a semester of law school and may not yet have a single grade. She has no law firm experience and no lawyers in her family to guide her. She doesn’t yet know what type of law she’d like to practice, having completed only four courses. Yet she has no real choice, because the offer won’t wait.

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