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&lt;p&gt;As a follow-up to yesterday&#39;s post, &quot;Law Schools and Law Firms: Change is Coming,&quot; I&#39;d like to post some more excerpts from Anu Rao&#39;s excellent article, &quot;Do top law schools really breed top lawyers?&quot;, posted on Vault&#39;s Law Blog.  Rao focuses on the student--and associate--qualities that predict future success.  Since law firms know the predictive &quot;soft skills,&quot; why not stress them when recruiting first-year associates?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;i&gt;An October 2008 study of a top 25 law firm questions if these factors are really the best predictors of future success.  Researchers compiled a list of 200 different attributes, attempting to identify which qualities were shared by the firm&#39;s highest performers.  The results indicate that the type of law schools the lawyers attended was less significant than were other factors--e.g., whether someone had been a college athlete, performed well in specific law school classes, or enjoyed &quot;group hobbies.&quot;  Other factors, such as fluency in a foreign language, were inversely correlated with career success (though, as globalization accelerates, this finding could well be turned on its head). &lt;p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://content.screencast.com/users/cwisevault/folders/Default/media/281fd7a8-5b00-40ac-93af-e04d666e4b1e/HLS.gif&quot; alt=&quot;HLS Classroom from HLS Website&quot; align=&quot;right&quot;&gt;Now, we can safely assume that the adjective &quot;dim-witted&quot; does not apply to the vast majority of people in the nation&#39;s top-rated law schools.  &quot;Slothful&quot; is not an apt descriptor either.  But law is not moot court.  It&#39;s not getting an A on an eight-page, one-inch-margined, double-spaced paper on a topic of your choice. &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Studying law is intellectually engaging, difficult, rewarding, inspiring, enlightening.  Practicing law is work.  It&#39;s long, hard, oft-boring work.  One of the &quot;soft skills&quot; that law firms claim they are looking for: an acceptance of not just doing long, hard, boring work for many years in a row, but real comprehension that there will be points in associates&#39; early careers where they hate their job. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Law firms are correlating students&#39; academic success to certain &quot;desirable traits&quot; (not the least of which is a willingness to bill lots of hours).  Law firms are not correlating academic success with &quot;will be happy in this career.&quot;  The fact is, firms don&#39;t want every associate to be happy in the job.  In their not-so-secret hearts, law firms want and need large portions of associates to walk away.  While firms need significant numbers of lower levels to do the grunt work, mid-tier and senior associates are expensive, and they don&#39;t want more than they need. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;According to NALP stats published in 2007, 80 percent of large law firm associates left their positions within five years.  In 2008, however, the picture is dramatically altered.  Take White &amp; Case: one of the reasons White and Case gave for its layoffs was unexpectedly low attrition rates.  Bucking tradition, associates were hanging onto their jobs. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Increased associate retention and nervous law students unsure about their prospects (remember the manifesto Law Students Building a Better Legal Profession emailed to AmLaw100 hiring partners back in 2007?  What&#39;s the news on that, guys?) means that the recruiting arena is for the first time in years a buyer&#39;s market.  Now that there is both a chance and a financial necessity for firms to scale back on their recruiting budgets, will law firms rethink their hiring metrics in response?  It won&#39;t cost them as much to experiment. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

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