How to Get a 2L Summer Associate Position

Earlier than most students expect, and the date keeps moving. NALP withdrew its old timing-and-offer rules in 2018 and replaced them with the Principles for a Fair and Ethical Recruitment Process, which contain no binding calendar. The result was a race to the front. What used to be an August on-campus interview week became, at many schools, a June or July 'pre-OCI' window, and in the 2023-24 and 2024-25 cycles several large firms began interviewing 1Ls for 2L summer as early as December and January.

Because of that, your school's calendar is the authority, not any national norm. Ask your career services office three questions in your first month of 1L spring: when does the school release your class to employers for 2L recruiting, when do pre-OCI screeners open, and when is the OCI bidding deadline. Most schools still enforce a policy that employers may not contact 1Ls before December 1, but the enforcement of anything after that is weak.

Practical consequence: your resume, transcript, writing sample, and firm list should be finished before your 1L spring exams end. Students who plan to 'start looking in June' routinely find that half of a firm's class is already filled.

For large firms, the screen is grades first and almost everything else second. The relevant cutoff is not a national number but a percentile relative to your school. At a top-five school, most of the class gets multiple screeners regardless of grades. At a school ranked in the 30s or 50s, the practical BigLaw band is often roughly top 10-25% of the class, and at schools outside the top 100, national firms may recruit only a handful of students, if any. Your career services office publishes or will tell you the actual historical bands. Ask for them.

After grades, the tiebreakers in rough order: law review or a competitive secondary journal, moot court or a trial competition, prior work experience that suggests you can function in a professional setting, a technical degree if you want patent prosecution, and demonstrated ties to the market. 1L summer employment matters less than students think as a credential, but it matters a lot as interview material, because it gives you something concrete to talk about.

Write the resume for a partner who will read it for forty seconds. One page. Grades and honors listed explicitly if they help you. Bullet points describing what you did and what came of it, not what your office generally does. Interests at the bottom are not filler; they are the most common source of interview rapport.

Most schools run bidding through Symplicity or 12Twenty, and many pre-OCI screeners run through Flo Recruit. Bidding usually lets you rank a fixed number of employers, and the allocation is typically a lottery weighted by your preferences, not by your grades. That means two errors dominate. The first is bidding only at firms whose historical hiring profile is above your grades. The second is bidding all in one market.

Build a list of 25 to 40 employers before you bid, sorted into three tiers: reaches, targets based on your school's actual placement history, and firms where you would be a comfortably strong candidate. Fill your bid slots across all three. Then apply directly, outside the bidding system, to every firm on the list that is not coming to your campus. Direct applications submitted in the same window as OCI are normal and expected; they are not a sign of desperation.

Market choice deserves real thought. If you are applying to Dallas, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Denver, or any secondary market, firms will ask why. A cover letter that says you grew up there, went to college there, have family there, or are licensed to take that state's bar is worth more than a paragraph about the firm's 'collegial culture.' Absent a tie, expect to be screened out in favor of a candidate who has one.

A screener is typically 20 to 30 minutes with one or two attorneys. A callback is a half day: three to six interviews of 20 to 30 minutes each, often with a lunch or a hiring-partner conversation at the end. Conversion rates vary wildly by firm and student, but a callback-to-offer rate somewhere in the 25% to 50% range is a common experience, so plan on needing several callbacks.

Prepare four things and you will outperform most candidates: a 90-second answer to 'walk me through your resume,' a specific and honest answer to 'why this firm and this city,' two or three questions per interviewer that could not be answered by the website, and a short story about something you actually produced in a legal job or clinic. Read each interviewer's bio the night before. Send short thank-you emails within 24 hours.

On offers, the old NALP 28-day and 45-day rules are gone. Firms now set their own deadlines, and short or 'exploding' windows are legal and increasingly common. If you need more time to complete pending callbacks, ask for it politely and in writing; many firms will extend, and your career services office can sometimes intervene. Do not accept an offer you intend to renege on. Reneging is a small legal market's version of a permanent record.

This is the ordinary outcome for most law students nationally, not a catastrophe, and there is a well-worn second path. Start it in August, not November.

Mass mail: assemble a list of 100 to 300 firms in your target markets, drawn from NALP Directory listings, state bar directories, Chambers and Legal 500 rankings by practice area, and firm websites. Send a tailored cover letter and resume to the recruiting contact or hiring partner. Response rates are low, but volume works, and mid-size and boutique firms often hire summer associates on a rolling basis into the fall and winter.

Job fairs and programs worth knowing: the Loyola Chicago Patent Law Interview Program in late July for students with a technical background, the Equal Justice Works Conference and Career Fair in the fall for public interest, Lavender Law's career fair, and various regional diversity job fairs. The Department of Justice Summer Law Intern Program takes applications in the late summer with an early-fall deadline for the following summer, and many other federal agencies, U.S. Attorney's Offices, and state attorneys general run their own summer programs with fall or winter deadlines.

Also consider judicial internships, in-house programs at large companies, district attorney and public defender offices, and paid research assistantships with faculty. A 2L summer in a courthouse or a DA's office is a legitimate credential, and it is far better than an empty summer if you intend to pursue litigation or a clerkship.

Most students who strike out did something correctable. The list below covers the recurring ones.