Entry-level hiring at major law firms is ramping back up from the recession-era doldrums.
Chaloea Williams, class of 2014 M. Scott Brauer
But students with their hearts set on a job at a big firm still face plenty of competition.
The class of 2013 was the largest crop yet, releasing 46,776 graduates into a job market already awash with unemployed lawyers.
"There's the idea that only the top 10% of the class is going to get the big-firm job," said Chaloea Williams, a 2014 Boston University School of Law graduate who will join Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP this fall as a first-year associate. To boost her odds, she pushed herself to network, joining the National Black Law Students Association and getting to know practicing lawyers in the Boston legal market.
The chances of landing a job at a large law firm have improved from the hiring nadir a few years back, when sputtering demand for legal services triggered layoffs and cutbacks. Of class-of-2013 law graduates working in private practice about nine months after graduation, 20.6% landed a job at a firm with more than 500 lawyers, according to the National Association for Law Placement. Such positions accounted for 16.2% of law-firm jobs held by 2011 graduates.