It’s your first semester of law school at BC Law. It’s been just a few weeks since orientation, and you’re trying to get your footing. Torts makes sense, because slapping someone is obviously a battery. Contracts feels manageable too; you think about your apartment lease, or your brother’s offer to buy you McDonald’s, to think through offer and acceptance. Law Practice is a bit frustrating because you’re expected to learn the Bluebook on the fly. And Civ Pro? You have no idea what’s going on there—but that’s a problem for later.
Meanwhile, you’re figuring out how to be a law student. Do you take notes like you did in undergrad, buy color-coded notebooks to handwrite in class, or type a near-transcript of everything your professor says? When do you start outlining—and what even is an outline? Will you sound stupid if you go to office hours to ask about Twombly? And then there’s the club fair. Should you apply to that 1L Representative position for the Law Student Association? Or for the Business Law Society? Both would look great on your resume. But not too many commitments so soon—you still need time to read your cases, pour hours into over-detailed briefs, and prepare for class. Maybe one club application and casual involvement in the others will be enough for now.
There’s already plenty to keep you busy as a new 1L, including the culture shock of cold-calling and the Socratic method. And then, before you’ve fully settled in, another character enters the scene: the Career Services Office and BigLaw Recruiting.
Have you even thought about jobs yet? Maybe you’re a K-JD, still figuring out your interests. Maybe you paralegaled for a few years and feel confident about litigation strategy or corporate work. Or maybe you’re somewhere in between: curious, but uncertain. Either way, the message arrives quickly and clearly: Think fast, because the BigLaw recruiting timeline has moved up even earlier for your class year.
What does that mean? It means being told, as a three-week-old 1L, that if you’re interested in BigLaw, you must decide now whether you prefer litigation or transactional work.
It means attorneys from Boston and other major BigLaw markets practically live on campus. The student organizations host panel after panel of attorneys discussing real estate law, being a person of color in BigLaw, litigation vs transactional practice, etc. And the CSO hosts firms several days a week, sometimes twice a day, inviting you to “Meet the Firms.” When they’re not on campus, many of these firms host networking receptions downtown—essentially the same conversations, now with hors d’oeuvres and free alcohol.
And don’t forget—amid all this pressure to network, explore practice groups, and show up everywhere—the CSO keeps reminding you that grades are king. A BigLaw Summer Associate position often converts into a return offer. Which means that, even before you’ve had time to explore what kind of lawyer you want to be, a single semester of grades may already shape the next several years of your future. So you internalize that reminder and tell yourself the same thing: Prioritize classes and get the best grades you can.
To be fair, regardless of whether you come from generational wealth or not, a potential $225,000 starting salary right out of law school sounds enormous—life-changing, even. So you engage.
Instead of reviewing your notes during the lunch block, you attend the BigLaw panels hosted by the student organizations. In class, while trying to stay attentive to the discussion, you’re also cold-emailing attorneys at the firms you’re interested in and hoping they reply. Before heading to the library to start your assignments, you stop by the CSO to learn more about the BigLaw firm featured that day. Instead of finishing your readings, you head downtown for a networking event, resisting the free drinks in hopes of making at least one solid connection. Or, you go home early and log onto Zoom to meet the only two attorneys who replied to your ten emails. To wind down the night, you draft thank-you and follow-up messages, scouring firm websites to remember who you spoke with and what you talked about. And then you do it all again the next day and the next week—juggling the demands of being a new 1L with the expectations of being a job applicant at the same time.
All of a sudden, it’s November 1st. Guess what—BigLaw applications are open. Wait, already? Sure. It’s been two months, but it feels like you only started law school a few days ago. That doesn’t matter. Apply the same day applications open or within two weeks to remain competitive, the CSO says.
But finals are around the corner. So which do you prioritize, your grades and finals prep, or your firm applications and networking? Do you refine your Torts outline, or spend the afternoon editing your cover letters? Do you review Promissory Estoppel, or respond to the attorney who finally shared their availability for a coffee chat? Do you attend your Civ Pro review session, or head downtown again for your top firm’s networking event?
As if the fall semester of 1L isn’t hectic enough. You’re adjusting to law school while preparing for a single exam that determines your entire grade after fourteen weeks of firehosed content. So whose bright idea was it to open BigLaw applications and request tailored cover letters right before finals? It makes no sense. But you don’t make the rules, of course. You just play the game.
Let’s fast forward to the start of spring semester. You survived the two-week, 24/7 marathon of studying for finals. You’ve had time to rest and recover after the most consuming three months of your life. With one semester of law school under your belt, you now feel more prepared—more confident walking into class, more excited about your spring courses and your elective.
You also managed to get most of your BigLaw applications out in the fall, or perhaps over winter break. So without the constant hum of BigLaw panels, coffee chats, follow-up emails, and cover letter drafting, this semester should be lighter, right?
You can finally put your feet up. Sit back. Focus. Apply what you’ve learned from last semester. Avoid the mistake of full-page briefs, among other bad habits.
…Right?
Wrong. BigLaw is a multi-act character. And in its second act, it plays a new role: Interviews. Screeners. Callbacks. The same distractions from first semester return—just dressed in a different outfit.
You’re sitting in class, trying to pay closer attention than you did last semester. But wait—a BigLaw recruiter just emailed you for a screener interview! You feel pressured to reply right away. But shouldn’t you be taking good notes during this first week of Property?
Your potential future is more important. So you pause your notes and open your calendar to over-avail yourself for the next two weeks.
Oh look, another BigLaw email! This time it’s for a callback interview. But their office is all the way in the Seaport, meaning you’ll have to miss classes for the day. Oh well—professors have declared interviews an excused absence. You skip class and tell yourself you’ll watch the recordings later. Eventually.
Now it’s the night before your callback. Do you finish your Criminal Law readings and make sure you understand mens rea? Hmm, how about you study your four interviewers instead and lock in your answer to “Why our firm.”
Finally, your long day of back-to-back 30-minute interviews is over. You get home, and it feels like a suitable time to watch that class recording you missed. Instead, while the discussions are still fresh, you draft thank-you emails to send in the morning, hoping to solidify the impression you made.
By now, maybe you’ve had one callback. Or two. Or three. You feel strongly about each. But days pass, and what do you hear? Nothing. You’ve sent your thank-you emails. You’ve done your due diligence. Still, the silence persists.
Days turn into a week. Then two weeks. You feel anxious, hopeful, maybe even a little desperate for an offer. You only need one, and you’ve made it this far. But still—nothing. Just crickets.
You want to focus in class. You want to pay attention. You want to study uninterrupted. But you can’t help but keep your email open, refreshing every few minutes. Each inbox notification is a shot of dopamine, your heart jumping at the possibility. Still, no good news yet. So you keep waiting—email always open—excited, anxious, hoping something finally falls loose from the tree.
I know many of my classmates share this experience to some extent. Some have received offers and can finally take their foot off the gas. Others didn’t make it that far or are still on their way. But regardless of where we are in the process, many of us have endured the same grueling, endless, distracting grind—sacrificing time and focus to give this advanced recruiting cycle our all.
Pouring our hearts out in screeners and callbacks, hoping that we’re saying what the interviewers want to hear. Spending hours—blood, sweat, and tears—on tailored cover letters. And when you add it all up, often devoting more time to researching firms, meeting with CSO advisors, traveling to law offices, and submitting applications than to the library or our assignments. All while trying to eat, sleep, maintain friendships, keep up with coursework, and stay sane. That was certainly my experience.
It’s also worth noting that this pressure doesn’t originate with the CSO. Everyone in the Career Services Office is acutely aware of the stress we’re under and is doing their best to support us within an accelerated timeline largely driven by competition among BigLaw firms.
But what’s the damage? What’s the cost to us 1Ls of this aggressive recruiting timeline, of this rush from the firms to catch the “cream of the crop” within thirty minutes of those crops being planted?
It costs time first, in a setting where we’re already wrestling with its scarcity. It drains focus, energy, and mental bandwidth. It pulls attention away from class lectures, readings, outlining, and studying—away from the very work law school is supposed to center.
It also narrows exploration. We’re pushed to choose a path before we’ve had the space to learn what’s actually the right fit—to commit to a direction of travel before we’re even sure where we want to go. And it creates pressure as well: tension among our friends at different stages of the process, and disengagement from the broader law school experience. If firms are making decisions so early, why invest in Law Review? Why apply for leadership roles in student organizations? Why explore and engage if your future already feels set?
The cost isn’t just stress. It’s the erosion of time, curiosity, and community, long before we’ve had the chance to fully build them.
For me, this advanced recruiting process disrupts the very reason I came to law school in the first place. I didn’t come here just to chase outcomes. I came to law school because I wanted to understand the law—to sit with it, question it, and grow alongside it. That kind of growth requires focus. It requires space. And it’s difficult to cultivate that growth when BigLaw is making noise like the main character of the show.
Maybe this is just the reality of modern legal recruiting. Maybe acceleration is inevitable. Maybe the early noise is something we’ll all learn to live with. But I still find myself wondering what we lose when so much certainty is demanded so early.
What questions go unasked? What paths go unexplored? What kind of lawyer might we have become if we’d had just a little more time to listen—to our classes, to ourselves, to the law itself?
I don’t have the answer. I only know that I came to law school wanting to learn. And I’m still trying to protect that intention, one class at a time.
Dave Sainte-Luce is a 1L student at BC Law. Contact him at sainteld@bc.edu.
BC Law: Impact 