Stop Panicking About Big Law

Corporate law is back in Harvard headlines.

Recently, major law firms have pushed recruiting for post-second-year positions — historically conducted no earlier than the summer before a student’s second year — up to the fall of their first year at Harvard Law School. The move carries significant implications for law students’ careers, as students traditionally aim to receive a full-time return offer from their second-year summer work.

Students may, therefore, be setting their first job out of law school in stone just months after entering it as a student. The HLS student government was one of 18 law school student governments to condemn these accelerated timelines because they “compromise the quality of students’ legal education.” Other affiliates have cautioned that students are effectively being pressured into the corporate world of Big Law without time to explore other areas of work.

Despite these fears, though, this change is not worthy of panic. If Harvard law students really wanted well-paying corporate jobs and nothing else, they would have gone into consulting or finance as undergraduates, instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on an additional three years of schooling.

To be clear, I am a freshman at the College, and I would be remiss to tell law students what the right career choice for them is. But some of the criticism of the move seems more motivated by a broader attack on corporate law as a profession. Together with consulting and finance, corporate law has a reputation for forming part of a “Bermuda Triangle of talent” which — while lucrative — may not represent the maximum social good that Harvard students can render.

Moreover, I don’t see corporate law as a current co-equal to consulting and finance in swallowing talent. Unlike their counterparts who snagged consulting or finance jobs right out of college, corporate lawyers rarely stay in their industry for long. According to a report by the National Association for Law Placement Foundation, associates left corporate law firms within four years of hire in 2024, following a pattern of increasingly earlier departures. Departing associates have the opportunity to transition to roles outside of Big Law, including nonprofit, public interest, and in-house work.

By contrast, consulting and finance operate on “up or out” pipelines that often either keep employees wedded to their company or push them into adjacent fields like technology, venture capital, and private equity, or towards further education in business administration.

The difference rings especially true given the financial investment and opportunity cost of obtaining a law degree. Facing exorbitant debt and interest on student loans and having missed out on three years’ income working a job, many graduates treat corporate law positions as stepping stones to build up some financial freedom before shifting into a different area of work. Consultants and financiers are able to leverage their professions into upward economic mobility — why shouldn’t law school graduates do the same, especially if they are motivated by a shorter-term financial pressure?

It is certainly reasonable, though, for law schools to exercise institutional pressure to force Big Law firms to push recruiting later — schools and firms should take student exploration seriously. But we should be cautious about extending this argument into a broader moral critique of Big Law itself. There is a difference between arguing that students should have time to make important career decisions and saying that choosing corporate law is a problem.

The evidence does not substantiate fears of losing an entire generation of law students to high-rises in New York or Chicago. Thus, the goal should not be to stop students from choosing corporate law. Instead, it should be to ensure that — if and when they do so — they have had the time to consider their options, weigh trade-offs, and become sure that that is truly their best option.

Michael Isayan ’29, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Apley Court.