BigLaw Recruiting 2026: OCI Is Collapsing

On-campus interviewing was the BigLaw recruiting system that dominated for roughly four decades. Each August, law firms dispatched recruiters to law school campuses — primarily at elite schools — to conduct structured 20-minute interviews with second-year (2L) students for the following summer’s associate class. Schools coordinated logistics through a shared calendar. Students submitted bids through a central portal; firms screened and selected who to interview on the few designated “OCI days” on each campus. Callbacks and offers followed in September and October.

The system had structural advantages for both sides. For firms, it provided access to a concentrated, pre-screened pool with predictable timing and uniform format. For students, it provided structured access to firms that would otherwise be opaque. The school’s involvement also provided a modest equity floor: every enrolled student at a participating school had access to the same portal.

That system has not disappeared — it has lost structural primacy. NALP data for the 2025 recruiting cycle shows that only 20% of 2L summer associate offers came from school-sponsored programs (OCI and early interview programs). The majority — 80% — came from employer-sponsored channels: direct applications, resume collections and referrals. As NALP’s executive director, Nikia Gray, put it in March 2025: “On-campus recruiting will become more of a primary tool for regional and local firms” while the largest national firms use it as a secondary or tertiary channel at best.

For the 2025 recruiting cycle (for 2026 summer positions), NALP reports that 56% of all summer associate offers were made before June of the student’s 1L year. Eighty-five percent were made before July. The modal offer came in May or earlier — from employers, through direct channels, before the student had completed their first full year of law school.

Firms including Jones Day, Davis Polk, Milbank, Paul Hastings and Weil Gotshal opened applications for 2L summer positions in April or May of the 1L year — before spring semester grades were issued. Some firms moved even earlier, opening 1L application windows in October and November 2025, within weeks of the start of the first semester.

The application volume data reflects how students have responded. Bloomberg Law reported that 1L applications to major firms jumped from 841 in November 2024 to 12,082 in November 2025 — an increase of nearly 1,300% in twelve months — with 6,700 firm-conducted interviews logged in November 2025 alone, five times the volume of November 2024. Firms conducted those interviews with first-semester students who had not yet sat a single law school exam.

The structural difference between the traditional OCI calendar and the current reality is stark. The table below maps the key milestones.

The NALP 2018 antitrust settlement removed the binding engagement ban and mandatory 28-day offer window that previously slowed early recruiting. With no floor, the calendar has ratcheted earlier each cycle.

How the channel mix moved, cycle by cycle

Read across one cycle at a time. Every cell is a cited figure; “n/a” means the number was not surfaced in the cited reporting for that cycle, not that it is zero.

The timeline acceleration is compounding a supply-side squeeze. For the 2025 summer program cycle, NALP reports the average 2L summer associate class per office fell to 8 students, down from 9 in 2024 and 10 in 2022–23 — the smallest average since the 2020 pandemic. The median number of offers per office reached an all-time low of 4. At the largest firms, summer classes shrank to their smallest since 2012.

Firms cite two structural forces: economic uncertainty and the anticipated productivity impact of AI on associate work. The implication is a market where the number of seats available each year is declining at the same time as the number of students applying — and applying earlier — is rising sharply. The all-time-low 4 median offers combined with all-time-high acceptance rates (89.4% in 2025) means the funnel is narrower than any previous cycle in living memory.

Recruiting data reflects published NALP research and cited reporting as of June 2026. Individual firm practices change cycle to cycle; verify current application windows directly with target firms. This page is general career information, not legal or career advice.