Lawyers: Ardent Courtships

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As a Rhodes scholar, a graduate of Yale Law School ('68) and a Negro, Attorney Stanley Sanders is a prime target for recruiters from the nation's most eminent law firms. No fewer than four of them have been courting him for months, and none more assiduously than Wyman-Kuchel, the California firm of former Republican Senator Thomas Kuchel. Last week Senior Partner Eugene Wyman himself squired Sanders to lunch at The Bistro, a modish Beverly Hills restaurant. They had hardly looked at the menu when some of Wyman-Ku-chel's more or less celebrated clients just happened to stop by the table for a drink. Before finishing a main course of broiled breaded crab legs, Sanders had a chance to chat with Comedian Milton Berle, as well as Actresses Jill St.John and Janet Leigh.

Wyman's firm, which needs 15 new lawyers this year, is finding men of Sanders' caliber increasingly difficult to hire. So are many other large, well-established firms. Money is not the problem. Like many of his contemporaries, Sanders is more interested in pro bono publico service; in his case, that means working full-time for a Ford Foundation project that brings lawyers' services to the poor in the Watts ghetto.

Generous Offers. Firms in New York are paying their new attorneys as much as $15,000 to start, and the rate in other cities is not far below. But growing numbers of the nation's brightest law students are ignoring such generous offers and instead are choosing to teach, clerk for a judge, take a fellowship for further study, or work in a poverty pro gram. Some are drawn to such work be cause it offers a better chance of escaping the draft. But many are motivated by a genuine desire to help others. The fact that increasing numbers of senior partners are inclined to look on a year-long clerkship or work in a poverty program as excellent training is further encouragement to men who want to wait a while before deciding where to settle down.

None of the nine graduating officers of the Michigan Law Review, who are among the top students in their class, plan to plunge directly into practice next year. Only three of the 34 senior members of the Harvard Law Review are starting work with law firms. Of the rest, 19 have accepted clerkships, which are easier to find this year be cause each federal judge is now al lowed two clerks instead of one. At Yale, six of the 36 graduating members of the Law Journal hope to get a Ford Foundation grant to study a wide-open field: the legal problems of environ mental pollution.

To those law firms accustomed to having their pick of the graduating elite, the shortage of new recruits is a very serious concern, to say nothing of a blow to their pride. A large firm in Manhattan reports that only one-third of the students to whom it offered jobs in the past two years ultimately accepted them (v. about one-half in previous years). Wyman-Kuchel has found that many A students do not even bother to show up for campus interviews any more. Says Wyman: "Sometimes our recruiters come back and say, 'We didn't even see the top men because they weren't interested.' "