Correction, 9/26/2012, 10:05 a.m. EDT: An earlier version of this story misstated the number of first-year associates who received offers at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr. It has been corrected in the eighth paragraph below. We regret the error.
The number of law students who spent their summers working at major law firms inched up between 2011 and 2012, and for the second straight year, nearly all those students’ efforts were rewarded with offers of full-time employment.
The related findings come from two recent American Lawyer surveys: the magazine’s Summer Hiring Survey, which asked firms for general information about their most recent summer associate classes, and an informal Am Law Daily poll that queried some two dozen national firms specifically about what percentage of their 2012 summer associates had received job offers.
All told, 21 firms responded to The Am Law Daily‘s inquiry, and 1,314 of the 1,361 of their summer associates, or 96.5 percent, received job offers. For those 21 firms, the 2012 rate is virtually identical to last year’s, when 1,234 of 1,280 summer associates, or 96.4 percent, were offered jobs. (As was true last yearwhen The Am Law Daily‘s survey of 17 national law firms yielded on overall offer rate of 97 percent for the summer class of 2011 compared to the 91.4 percent rate reported by NALPthe firms surveyed by The Am Law Daily this year may prove to be slightly more generous than some of their peers.)
