Tuesday, August 07, 2007 7:51 AM
Bruce McEwen, writing atAdam Smith, Esqq., wondered about the potential value in reexamining the law firm associate hiring process in his post Associate Moneyball.
I found Mr. McEwen's post very interesting, especially as I just mentioned yesterday [see Opportunities in Today's Legal Employment Marketplace: PROSUMÉS Model] a new company taking aim at the legal recruiting marketplace, as well as my own belief [MoneyLaw and My Alma Mater's New Dean, LawBall... MoneyLaw by Another Name?] that many of the principles outlined in the book Moneyball can be applied across verticals outside of baseball.
After first acknowledging the challenges facing (especially large) law firms in finding, hiring and retaining enough associates, Mr. McEwen writes about the changing face of the recruiting process itself. From an expansion of the number of law schools visited to the types of interview questions asked, a reemerging focus on finding the best candidates for a given firm is leading to people looking at the recruiting challenge from different angles.
While I recommend you read Mr. McEwen's entire post, Associate Moneyball, I wanted to highlight his final thoughts:
Several months ago, I proposed to a few AmLaw 50 firms that we try to develop our own version of "Associate Moneyball," looking through firms' data about associates' backgrounds, who left and how soon, who made partner and who went inhouse, etc., to attempt to derive our own portfolio of characteristics that might predict success in BigLaw—assuming that hiring "the top 10% from the top 10 schools" is an exhausted strategy. What if, just to make up some hypothetical's, we were to discover that taking one or more years to work between college and law school correlated with lower attrition? What if coming from inherited wealth correlated with the reverse? Were JD/MBA's a better or worse bet than plain old JD's? What if moving across the country from one's home town roots [did/didn't] increase a propensity to stay? What if... You get the idea.
This may be one of those potential insights that is simultaneously self-evident once you think of it, immensely desirable of pursuit, and impossible to execute in reality. Among the obstacles we encountered were anti-discrimination issues (you might want to know the answers to questions you're not allowed to ask), and, perhaps more fundamentally, the difficulty of finding a real "counterfactual group" of law students at these top AmLaw firms who did not come from the top of their classes at the very best schools. Since the firms weren't hiring sub-median students from sub-median schools, the data as to how those people might stack up doesn't exist—and in all likelihood never will.
Project Associate Moneyball, however, remains deeply intriguing to me, and if anyone has suggestions for how to surmount the practical obstacles to doing serious analysis, please let me know.
Moneyball applied to legal recruiting. Hmmm. It certainly follows the "think different" model. There might be something there.