Jul 17, 2009
Are you kidding, Harvard Law?
According to AmLaw Daily, Harvard Law School is telling its students to consider widening their summer associate job search. To Baltimore.
Bloomberg, which first reported on the story, quotes assistant dean for career services Mark Weber as follows:
“If you are looking in D.C., consider Baltimore or Richmond,” he said. “If you’re looking in Chicago, try Milwaukee and St. Louis, too. You need to be casting a wider net in this market. “
Really? Baltimore? I can’t speak for Richmond, Milwaukee or St. Louis, but I can say that the Baltimore legal market, while probably in better shape than Washington or New York, is hardly immune to recession-itis. To my knowledge, no firms with a major presence here have yet canceled their 2010 summer programs, but there have certainly been layoffs, and several firms have postponed their 2009 first-year associates’ start dates. Where does Harvard think these developments will leave the would-be summer associate class of 2010? Even if no Baltimore firms call off their 2010 summer programs, how many of their summer associates can reasonably expect a job offer come August 2010?
One thing’s for sure: if students from the second-best law school in the country do listen to their dean’s advice and start taking a closer look at Baltimore, our home-grown law students will face stiff competition this fall in their bid for summer associate positions. I’m not knocking the University of Baltimore or the University of Maryland. But increased competition from anywhere would make it a tougher job market, and increased competition from Harvard students, even more so.
Uh, yeah. Good luck with that. My experience many years ago was that the hiring partners did not put much stock in an excellent law school if you didn’t have Baltimore ties. In my experience, the question of: “where did you go to school?” meant “what private high school in the area did you go to?”