1L Recruiting at WashU Law

Anna Donovan:
We’re back for another episode of Applying Yourself, a law school admissions podcast from Washington University School of Law. I’m Anna Donovan, a director in the admissions office, and today I’m chatting with Emily Gardner. She’s the assistant dean for placement and a lecturer in law here at WashU Law. Emily heads up the crew center, and we’ll be chatting about what prospective students need to know about 1L recruiting and how Washu, how the WashU Law Career Center team helps prepare our students for success.

Emily Gardner:
Thanks, Anna. As you just said, I’m Emily Gardner, the Assistant Dean for Placement at WashU Law. I lead the career center team, which supports and advises students as they build their professional experience in law through internships, externships, and post-grad employment. I am a proud Saint Louisan and I’ve lived here for most of my life. I did go away for undergrad.

I went to Duke and focused on math and science, and then returned to WashU Law in the early 2000 to pursue a career in intellectual property law. I so I am a WashU Law alum, and and I spent about 18 years out working in healthcare related fields and in intellectual property. And I have been back at the law school for about eight years, long enough to have experienced the full range of changes in legal recruiting that everyone’s talking about these days.

Anna Donovan:
Yeah, and we will get to that in just a minute. Starting kind of really with the basics. Can you share what the function of a career center is in a law school? And specifically, what is the 1L involvement with your office and what does that look like?

Emily Gardner:
Okay, I do want to level set about how the career center looks different than in undergrad. In undergrad, it often involves developing application materials and connecting you with resources like job boards and that kind of thing. In law school, it is much more. It has much more to do with professional development. So we are looking for full employment in the summers and post-grad for all of our students. And we’re also looking to see them develop and explore and gain contacts and networks out there in the legal industry. 

WashU Law has a relatively large and well-resourced career center. Most of our students come from outside the Saint Louis area, and head back out to major legal markets worldwide after graduation. So we need a lot of hands on deck. To be paying attention to all these different legal markets and types of legal employers. We meet with students one-on-one throughout the year, starting this summer before law school and continuing well into the alumni years.

We maintain relationships with employers of all kinds, and we ensure that students are prepared for the opportunities that they pursue. One thing I especially love about this work is getting to support students as they explore the many paths to a successful career in terms of what an incoming 1L can expect from involvement with our office. We start working with 1Ls one-on-one as soon as they commit to WashU.

So our structured program starts at the very beginning of the summer, around the beginning of June, and we start getting to know the students. We’re learning about interests, experiences, geographic preferences, any questions or uncertainties or like restrictions around their job search. We want to help them understand the full range of legal careers, including work they may never have encountered or where they don’t know anyone in those particular spaces.

We work on all the concrete pieces of the preparation for the job search in the summer before 1L, so we develop application materials. We do some interviewing practice and start introducing students to, to our network of alumni so that they can start building professional relationships and start developing a search strategy.

Anna Donovan:
Excellent. So I know, definitely, over the last couple of years, a lot of chatter regarding the one recruiting landscape, the change in timelines. Can you talk a little about what specifically has changed over these last couple of years? 

Emily Gardner:
Yes, most of what has changed involves big law firms. Because most, though certainly not all, of our students pursue opportunities in big law. This shift has significantly affected our approach. So what we’re really seeing change is we’re seeing earlier recruiting, earlier decision-making from law firms.

So many big law firms are recruiting students directly, not necessarily through the career centers, but direct from firm to students. During the 1L fall and winter terms, even for the summer after  2L year. So at this point with our 1L’s, we are evaluating job postings for the 2027 1L summer and the 2028 2L Summer for them.

There are also more routes into the process. Students, I think, need to understand how direct applications work and also how school-based recruiting tends to work. You’ll see a lot of information online still about the more traditional approaches. It’s usually called OCI or on-campus interviewing. And OCI is more focused these days on smaller firms, public interest and government opportunities where the employers really benefit from the efficiencies available through OCI. But big firms really are working directly with students. 

Anna Donovan:
Interesting. We get this question in emissions all the time, but, how students can prepare themselves for law school. But could you talk a little about how students could prepare themselves for not only starting law school, but specifically starting this summer, job networking and application process, since it’s happening so early?

Emily Gardner:
Yeah, I think it’s important to have enough experience, whether that’s work experience, academic experience, to be able to evaluate questions, having to do with what a work environment is. So, so for incoming students, you want to know not only what areas of law are interesting to you and probably available to you based on your prior experiences, but also, what do you want work to look and feel like?

Do you want to be in a smaller firm? Do you like a big, institution kind of experience, that you might find more in one of the big global law firms? Do you want to be in public service or in government? Those are really important questions to be able to answer. Also, having an idea of how you would how you would learn about different practice areas, I think is really important.

That is an area where the career center can really help students as their first getting started directing students towards alumni or toward other contacts in our networks who can answer questions in a in a maybe more frank way than you would see, maybe information just being available on a big law firms website. 

Anna Donovan :
Excellent. So, could you share a little bit kind of kind of inclusive information about how not just 1L’s work with the career center, but sort of how the support continues through the entire program. And I know you mentioned post-grad as well. 

Emily Gardner:
Yeah. For one else, we are we’re working with the whole class and everyone is getting started at the same time for 2Ls and 3Ls, everybody’s in a different place. So we have some 2003 L’s. We’re not very actively working with, because they’ve accepted jobs. We have others that we are working with very, very actively, maybe working through a pivot in direction.

Maybe one direction that they’re trying hasn’t worked out great, or they have a summer experience that they didn’t necessarily want to replicate by going back to the same employer, the same type of practice of law. We also have 2Ls and three ls in externships. They’re actively leaving the law school on a regular basis to work either part time or full time with legal employers in various areas.

I would say we have about 100 students out in externships every semester, and so they’re gaining experience to that is really influencing those pivots, those those additional decisions about what direction they might want to take their career. So they might have come into law school thinking they were all transactional. And then they get into a an externship where they’re in court all the time and they really fall in love with litigation.

And so then we want to switch up their job search. We also support students really heavily through the clerkship application process. So WashU handles most of the administration and the mailing around clerkship applications. And I think that makes a huge difference. 

Anna Donovan:
Absolutely. I know we’re appreciative and we boast a lot about both employment stats but clerkship stats that come out of your office. So that is always wonderful. I think you did a great job of explaining how WashU Law supports our students here, but what should prospective students or prospective applicants be asking other schools? And what data do you think they should be looking at to determine if a law school aligns with their career goals and and sort of how a candidate could determine, like what support another school is going to provide to them.

Emily Gardner:
Yeah. I think for there are some pieces of information that can be gained that can be gleaned online. Just from the like the employment disclosures that are available on law schools websites, you can get an idea of what is their overall employment rate. Are they expecting everyone to be graduating with full-time, long-term bar-required employment, or do they do they have a lesser percentage of full employment at that point?

But I think if you are asking, a representative from a law school, the questions that I would want to ask are things like, where have recent graduates gone? Who wanted the kind of work and location I’m considering? The more specific you can be in your questions, the better. Another question is when does individual career advising begin and what does it look like during the 1L year?

This is an area where law schools diverge substantially. When those initially initial career advising appointments get started. And whether they are occurring right. So some law schools are working with students primarily through workshops and in larger group settings. I certainly believe that that individual advising is is really important to the way that we approach things. Another question that I would ask is how have you changed your preparation as recruiting has moved earlier?

I think you could ask about how the career center has shifted its approach to to respond to early recruiting, to technological changes, to changes in the legal industry overall. This is a time of such heavy change that if you encounter a career center, I think as a prospective student that is pretty locked in to old practices. That’s something that you would want to know.

Anna Donovan:
Yeah, absolutely, I completely agree. Okay. At the end of most of our podcast episodes, if I can remember, we like to ask our guests to share our favorite thing to do or see in Saint Louis. And as a Saint Louisian, what could you share that might entice some of our listeners to come visit us here at WashU and in Saint Louis?

Emily Gardner:
Okay, so I think about this pretty often because this is something I get asked, but, I mostly I love to get out and walk and just see what’s going on. Something that I really love about Saint Louis is that people are good at gathering here and the city is so good at having lots of free, fun stuff to do.

So you can often just take off into Forest Park or Tower Grove Park or the Botanical Gardens, or head downtown in Kirkwood or Webster Groves, and you’ll come across a festival or live music, neighborhood gatherings, movies on Art Hill. There’s just so much that’s going on out in the open so often that you can just go walking around and join whatever’s happening.

Anna Donovan:
Excellent I agree. Very walkable city. And I think something that people don’t necessarily expect about Saint Louis. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Emily. Hopefully, some time maybe we’ll have you back if things continue to change. But we appreciate you coming on today. All right. Thanks, Anna.