How We Recruit

Named in memory of our late senior partner Bill Coleman, a tireless advocate for equality throughout his 50-year career, our fellowship program provides law students with a demonstrated commitment to diversity and inclusion the opportunity to participate in O’Melveny’s summer associate program.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE 1L FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM>>

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE 2L FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM>>

O’Melveny considers beyond the traditional metrics of resumes and grades and focuses on your true potential to succeed.

We are achieving this through Pymetrics, a game-based recruiting tool that helps us assess a candidate’s social, cognitive, and behavioral features, such as attention, planning, flexibility, and memory. It evaluates future success by comparing a candidate’s results to a unique, debiased O’Melveny success model built for the associate role. The games are very different from other online assessments. You cannot win or lose the games. There are no right or wrong answers. What matters is how you play the games—generating the behavior-based data that is collected and analyzed.

Pymetrics then provides the degree of match each candidate has to our associate profile. Candidates’ results are generated without taking into account race, ethnicity, or gender. This new additional data point offers information about candidates’ potential for success at O’Melveny, while also helping to override the implicit biases that naturally occur during the recruiting process.

The Pymetrics match band is one of four components of our application (resume, transcript, and interview feedback being the others).

If you’d like to learn more about Pymetrics and how we are using it in the application process, you can listen to the O’Melveny Podcast episode on Pymetrics.

Our comprehensive recruiting approach includes partnering with campus affinity networks to present mock interview programs, career panels, and networking events. We support these efforts with specific programs for law students like O’Melveny’s William T. Coleman Diversity Fellowship for 1Ls and 2Ls, and the PracticePro Diversity Scholars Program.

Strategically recruiting diverse lateral attorneys is also essential to our diversity goals, particularly at the partner level where they serve as important role models. As one step in achieving that goal, we have adopted the Mansfield Rule, a simple and immediate way to make women and minorities more visible and powerful in their law firms. Under the Mansfield Rule, at least 30% of candidates for lateral midlevel associate, counsel and partner hires must be women, LGBT or attorneys of color. The 30% requirement applies to leadership positions and equity partnership as well. O’Melveny is proudly Mansfield Certified. We have also earned the distinction of “Mansfield Plus,” a designation given to firms that, in 50% of the Mansfield categories, have a composition of 30% or more women, minorities, and LGBTQ+.

O’Melveny's professional staff members and the talents and contributions they bring are vital to our success. Our hiring processes are designed to ensure we consider a diverse range of candidates, and we strive to involve our current staff across various levels in evaluating candidates.

We believe that fostering the success of diverse and underserved populations has to happen long before law school. Toward that end, we invest nearly half a million dollars annually in scholarship programs at both the elementary and high school level in underserved communities in several cities. Learn more about our global scholarship program.