Accept Your Offers: All of Them

Accept Your Offers: All of Them

Last recruiting season, Above the Law was the first publication to warn law students to accept their offers for summer employment as soon as possible.

This year that advice is so obvious that even law school career service professionals are telling students to accept offers quickly. William A. Chamberlain, assistant dean for law career strategy and advancement at Northwestern, wrote an article for the National Law Journal this week, strongly urging students to make decisions rapidly:

Our message to students about how to handle offers has been straightforward -- accept your offer quickly. The key is to get a job for next summer. Smart students will not rely on NALP's 45-day guideline but rather accept their offers as soon as humanly possible. [W]e have dealt with all sorts of reactions by firms to the economy and are urging our students to be risk-averse. Any sense of entitlement will be fatal this fall.

Relying on NALP guidelines = fatal?

You know, when the career services dean is directly warning students not to rely upon the NALP rules, I am forced to ask why students should heed the NALP rule limiting the number of offers students can accept.