Extract from Dan Roe’s article “Without OCI, Who Decides Whether a Law Student Passes the Vibe Check? Increasingly, It’s AI”
Prior to the 2020 recruiting season, law students vying for Big Law jobs went into the fall of their 2L year preparing for the types of screening questions they expected hiring partners to ask during on-campus interviews. What are your interests? Why our firm? To what do you attribute your success?
That application process has looked quite different for thousands of 1L students who applied for the same type of 2L summer associate positions this spring. In addition to law students interacting with firms directly, remotely, and sooner than they used to, many students applying to Big Law firms in the post-pandemic era are taking artificial intelligence-backed assessments and quizzes, or having their resumes scraped and fed into AI-powered algorithms.
Some are asked how much they identify with various phrases designed to expose behavioral differences between candidates. In other cases, a candidate’s mention of involvement in a varsity sport or law review could sway their chances with a firm.
“Law review is an interesting one because it almost exclusively performs in a negative direction,” said Evan Parker, founder of Parker Analytics, a company that employs people to input details from candidates’ resumes and cover letters into an AI-backed algorithm that produces a success score (dubbed the Parker Score) based on how well those details correlate with a firms’ self-designated predictors of success. “I’m always willing to give (law review) a chance, but that’s been one where it’s been consistently negative,” Parker added.
