First, Manhattan’s Skadden announced that 2009 Summer Associate Program 3Ls, if they are offered jobs, will not begin until 2011.
Now Atlanta’s Morris Manning has said they will not have a 2010 Summer Associate Program at all.
From the memo:
This decision was made because we don’t know when the economy will pick up, we feel that our first obligation should be to making sure that our existing lawyers are productive rather than committing to bring in a whole class of additional associates, and we believe that when and as we need to hire additional lawyers there are very likely to be a lot of well-qualified experienced lawyers available as well as well-qualified third year law students, since so many firms have contracted significantly and reduced or eliminated their summer programs.
This is incredibly bad news for anyone currently in law school, or thinking about law school. For the foreseeable future, law grads will have to compete for jobs directly against legions of more experienced, unemployed lawyers.
Morris, Manning & Martin, LLP, is 175-lawyer firm with offices in Atlanta, Alpharetta, Duluth and Savannah, Georgia; Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina; Washington DC; Beijing and Taipei.