This week, first year students at Georgetown Law were required to submit their final rankings of which law firms they most wanted to interview with—for summer associate jobs in 2026, after their second year. The hiring of summer associates hit an 11-year low last year, but these summer gigs are still highly coveted. That’s because they pay more than $4,000 a week and boost the chances students will snag a Big Law job paying $200,000-plus when they graduate after year three, assuming, that is, they excel in law school and don’t have a prestigious judicial clerkship or a public interest law job lined up.

But this year, the 1Ls (as first year law students are known) are confronting an unusual question: Whether or not to rank Skadden Arps; Paul Weiss; Milbank; and Wilkie, Farr and Gallagher among their choices. These four firms have one thing in common: They’ve bent the knee to Trump following the threat of, or the actual signing of, executive orders that aim to restrict their ability to represent clients with government contracts. All four have agreed, for example, to provide a combined total of at least $340 million in pro bono legal work for causes Trump favors and to swear off any “illegal” programs aimed at promoting diversity.

By contrast, three other big firms explicitly targeted by Trump– Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block and WilmerHale–have sued to block his actions and have won temporary restraining orders keeping most of the orders from taking effect. Meanwhile, the American Bar Association and local bar groups; law school deans; state attorney generals; and more than 1,600 alumni of the Department of Justice have all issued joint statements denouncing Trump’s executive orders.

The controversy has left 1Ls wondering where to apply, both as a matter of conscience and a matter of economics. Which firms are most likely to survive–those that are doing a deal with Trump or those resisting? Will students be able to do pro bono work for causes they care about (which has long been a selling point for Big Law jobs) if they sign on with Trump-accommodating firms?

At Georgetown, some students are using the summer recruiting dance as an opportunity to express their disapproval of firms caving to Trump. “The legal recruitment process is the only leverage that we really have to influence the behavior of law firms,” says Caleb Frye, a 33-year-old second-year law student and copresident of the Georgetown Energy Law Group, which this week nosily cancelled a recruiting event with Skadden scheduled to take place at the firm’s Washington office. (Frye posted the cancellation letter on LinkedIn.) Scrubbing one event might seem like a small gesture, but according to Frye, during each of the last three years, Skadden hired someone from the Energy Group. Students valued the opportunity to get face-time and advice from associates and partners before sending applications and scheduling interviews with the firm.

“I know there are a bunch of frightened first-year students as we head into recruiting season,” says Alanna Belmont, 25, copresident of the Georgetown Law Energy Group. “But as a club leader, I have an obligation to my fellow club members to put on programming that aligns with the values, not only of our organization, but I think of Georgetown Law as a whole.”

Significantly, Georgetown Law has been at the forefront of fighting back against Trump’s DEI rollback. Dean William Trennor defended its curriculum after Ed Martin, the controversial acting U.S. Attorney for Washington D.C. (and Trump’s nominee for the job) said he would not hire students from the school unless it got rid of all its DEI programs. In a letter to Martin, Trennor wrote: “..the constitutional violation behind this threat is clear, as is the attack on the University’s mission as a Jesuit and Catholic institution.”

Indeed, Georgetown is emerging as a locus of student resistance. A self-described “grassroots group of students” at the school has been compiling and updating a Google spread sheet tracker of 375 law firms, with their response to Trump administration executive orders and EEOC investigations. It even lists any changes firms have made on their web sites relating to diversity, equity and inclusion.

“This isn’t coming from a negative place or trying to cancel these firms,” says Sophia C., a third-year Georgetown law student who updates the tracker daily and requested we not use her last name over fear of retaliation against her family. She says over 25 student groups have committed members to update the page daily, with each person taking about 30-40 minutes a day to do so. “We want to provide access to information, both to students and other law firms, to show there’s a diversity of approaches you can take” in response to Trump.

But as Belmont acknowledges, refusing to interview with a prestigious firm or publicly speaking out against one is not an easy choice for all students, particularly those who are graduating with high student debt. A majority of law students who graduated in the last 10 years, or are under 36 years old, took some sort of loan to pay for law school, accruing a median debt of $112,500 by graduation, according to a 2024 study by the American Bar Association.

“Its really hard to turn down the option of making $200,000 right out of law school, especially when I’ve only ever earned minimum wage before,” says a 1L Georgetown law student currently going through the recruitment process, who requested anonymity for fear of professional retaliation. They decided to not rank Skadden in their interview because of the firm’s decision to capitulate to the Trump administration.

Skadden has become a particular focus as a few of its young associates have publicly quit the firm in protest. Most notable is Rachel Cohen, a former third-year associate in Skadden’s finance practice, who announced on LinkedIn–before the firm struck a deal with Trump–that she was putting in her notice because of its lack of support for Perkins Coie and other firms targeted by the Trump administration. She’s since garnered attention on TikTok, and in the traditional media.

Now, she’s encouraging other associates and law students to use the recruiting season to make a statement. This week she launched a student toolkit suggesting a variety of techniques for associates and job seekers to push back. For example, she calls on associates to recuse themselves from recruiting activities, including on-campus interviews and screening calls as part of a recruitment strike, forcing partners whose time is often billed at thousands of dollars an hour, to spend more time actually making screening calls and interviewing on campus. “Law firms view students as replaceable,” she writes. “Our suggested actions are targeted at costing the firm time and money.”

Cohen suggests students who are actually planning to become public defenders or are aiming for public interest jobs, apply to firms that have caved to Trump and then, during their interviews, pepper the firm representative with uncomfortable questions—ask if associates will be required to perform pro bono work supportive of the Trump administration, or if they’ve felt the firm’s core values have been called into question while working on a case. “This creates visibility to the firm that law students are not happy with their actions,’’ she says.

Another way for those interested in working in Big Law to push back, Cohen says, is by asking their schools’ career services offices to bar Paul Weiss, Skadden, Wilkie, Millbank from on-campus recruiting. “What these firms really care about is campus access and the prestige that goes along with that," she observes. “Outside of it, firms don’t care very much about what law students think.”

Barring employers from on-campus recruitment had some success before, she argues, pointing to the decades-long battle between Harvard Law School and the military over its ability to recruit through Harvard Law’s Office of Career Services. For more than 20 years the military had to turn to Harvard’s Student Veterans Association for future attorneys because it would not sign the school’s anti-discrimination policy, which required employers to pledge not to discriminate on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation. (The armed services were allowed back on Harvard’s campus permanently after the Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that colleges and universities had to provide equal access to military recruiters, even if they violated a school’s anti-discrimination policies, in order to receive federal funding.)

But will any student objections really influence Big Law? Nikia Gray, executive director of the National Association for Law Placement, which tracks law student recruitment, is doubtful. About 20% of law school graduates go into these competitive jobs, she notes, and with fears of a recession building, recruiting (and job offers) are likely to drop anyway. The law firms, she says, “may need to broaden their school pools or go deeper into the class, look at the top 20 instead of the top ten students, but it’s not going to hurt them simply because of the amount of interest they gather.”