OCI — on-campus interviews — is the law-school-sponsored route into law firm summer associate hiring: employers interview students through each school's career services office for 2L summer positions.
It is one of two channels in NALP's recruiting data: in the 2025 cycle, 20% of 2L summer offers came from law-school-sponsored methods such as OCI and 80% from firms' direct applications.
Here is how the process works, from bidding to offers.
What is OCI?
OCI stands for on-campus interviews: the recruiting channel a law school runs through its career services office, in which employers interview that school's students for summer positions.
It is one of two ways 2L summer associate hiring happens in NALP's data.
In the 2025 recruiting cycle — the cycle that filled 2026 summer programs, which NALP reported on January 26, 2026 — 20% of 2L summer offers came from law-school-sponsored methods such as OCI, while 80% came from employer-sponsored recruiting: the firms' own direct application processes.
That distinction is the cleanest definition of what OCI is.
Law-school-sponsored means the school organizes the event: employers sign up for interview dates, students compete for interview slots through the school's process, and the interviews run on the school's calendar.
Employer-sponsored means the firm runs everything itself — you apply to the firm directly, and the firm screens and interviews you on its own timeline.
What an OCI interview is competing for is a seat in a firm's summer associate class, and the classes are small: NALP put the average 2L summer class at eight students per office in 2025, and at 29 in New York City offices.
Win one of those seats and the rest of the process — performing in the program, converting a full-time offer — follows from it.
The term is also the umbrella for the stages under it: the bid that gets you the interview slot, the screening interview itself, the callback round at the firm, and the offer.
Each stage has its own section below.
When does OCI happen?
The honest answer is that there is no single week anymore, and the timeline sits earlier than the old campus calendar suggests.
NALP's report on the 2025 recruiting cycle found that 85% of 2L summer offers were made before July.
If your mental model has firms circling in the fall of 2L year, that model is out of date for when the offers themselves go out.
Some schools have also moved the interviews.
NALP noted that some law schools moved traditional OCI to spring or early summer in 2025, following the rise of early interview programs — school-run interview rounds scheduled ahead of the traditional calendar.
The two channels run on different clocks, too.
Direct applications are the firm's own process, so each employer sets when it accepts applications and when it interviews.
Practically, that means a firm's posted recruiting timeline deserves as much of your attention as your school's calendar.
First-year timing is its own subject.
The recruiting described on this page targets 2L summer hiring; for 1Ls, NALP's Principles ask employers for particular sensitivity during the first semester of law school and for respect of each school's 1L recruiting guidelines.
What is actually open to 1Ls is set by each school, not by NALP.
There is no national OCI calendar
How does OCI bidding work?
The school's career services office runs the process.
In a bidding system, students submit a ranked list of the employers they want to interview with during a window the office sets; when the window closes, the office runs the matching and publishes interview schedules, and employers interview the students they drew on their assigned date.
How closely any school follows that sketch varies, because none of it is set by a national rule: the number of bids you get, how the matching treats your ranking, and how leftover interview slots are handled are decisions each school's system makes for itself.
Your career services office's guide is the authoritative version for your school — worth reading in full before the bid window opens.
A few practical points make the system work for you.
Rank for jobs you would actually accept, because a bid spent on a firm you would turn down crowds out one you would not.
Treat the bid as the request and the resume as the product: the resume attached to your bid is what gets screened, so the same preparation you would bring to a direct application belongs here too.
And treat bid deadlines as hard deadlines — a missed window can mean a missed employer.
Keep the channels straight as you plan: direct applications have no bid window.
They run alongside your school's process, on each firm's own timeline — and that is where four of every five 2L summer offers came from in the 2025 cycle.
What are screening interviews like?
A screening interview is a first-round interview whose entire purpose is to decide who advances.
In OCI it is the slot your bid won: a structured, resume-based conversation with a lawyer at the firm, held on your school's schedule.
The screen is narrow by design — the firm is deciding whether to spend a callback slot on you, not whether to hire you.
The conversation runs on your materials.
Expect questions that walk through your resume — what you did in each role, why you chose it, what you took from it — plus the questions screeners exist for: why law, why this firm, why this city.
Strong answers tie the specifics of your record to the specifics of the firm, which takes research into its practice areas, offices and summer program before you sit down.
You will also get space to ask questions, and it is worth using.
Ask about the work summer associates actually do, how associates are supervised and trained, and why your interviewer chose the firm — questions whose answers help you evaluate the firm while showing that you are evaluating it.
A screener is a two-way screen: you are deciding whether to spend your callbacks on this firm too.
The output of the round is narrow: an invitation to the firm's next stage — the callback interview — or a decline.
Either way, the screener's scope stays what it was.
It is a filter, not a hiring decision.
Specificity beats rehearsal
What happens after: callbacks and offers
Candidates who clear the screening round are invited to callbacks — the firm's own interview round, run on the firm's side — and the offers that come out of that stage are offers to join the firm's 2L summer associate program.
This page stops at the offer itself; what happens inside callback rounds and the summer program is beyond its scope.
What governs the offer is NALP's Principles for a Fair and Ethical Recruitment Process — suggested best practices, not binding rules.
The current Principles set no fixed hold period for offers.
They leave offer timing and how long an offer stays open to each employer, asking firms to publish their own guidelines rather than rely on fixed deadlines, and they call for reasonable response deadlines and a reasonable amount of time to consider an offer, with no fixed day count attached.
NALP also asks employers to consider reasonable extension requests and to avoid undue pressure on candidates.
And it asks them to make every offer in writing with all terms clear, and to notify both the candidate and the career services office promptly if an offer must be modified or rescinded.
The pressure question is live enough that NALP addressed it publicly: in an April 8, 2026 statement, the organization said some recruiting practices may put undue pressure on students and urged employers to re-examine their approaches against the Principles.
For you, the practical reading is straightforward.
Because no rule fixes how long an offer stays open, the employer's own published recruiting guidelines are your real deadline — read them before you interview so you know the timeline you would be joining.
If offers collide or you need more time, extension requests are exactly what the Principles contemplate employers handling reasonably, and your career services office can help you make one.
What the offer leads to, in NALP's 2025 numbers: 2L summer programs made offers at a 97% rate, and 89.4% of those offers were accepted.
Second-year summer associates earned a median $3,850 per week across all firms, and $4,100 at firms of more than 700 lawyers, per NALP's 2025 Associate Salary Survey.
That conversion is why a summer offer is the outcome every stage upstream — OCI included — is competing for.
Principles are guidance, not law
What if you don't get a job through OCI?
Start with the arithmetic of the market.
In NALP's data on the 2025 recruiting cycle, 80% of 2L summer offers came from employer-sponsored recruiting — direct applications to firms — and 20% from law-school-sponsored methods such as OCI.
The channel without a bid window produced four of every five 2L summer offers in that cycle.
Work that channel deliberately.
Direct applications run on each firm's own process and calendar, so research the firms you actually want — by city, practice and any genuine connection — and apply on their timelines rather than waiting for a school event.
Posted openings are part of the same channel: browse attorney jobs on LawFirmHires to see which firms are hiring right now.
Two other routes bypass the 2L OCI scramble.
A 1L summer job can convert straight into the 2L summer: NALP found 1L summer associates received offers to return for the 2L summer at a record 94.2% rate in 2025.
And the roles adjacent to the summer program — a firm law clerk during the school year, a judicial clerk after graduation — are hired on their own processes, which the law clerk and summer associate guide breaks down role by role.
The inputs screeners read are built before OCI season arrives.
Your 1L grades are on the transcript in every application you submit as a 2L, so first-year performance matters in the OCI cycle too — and so does everything else on the resume your bid carries.
Career information, not legal advice. Recruiting timelines, formats and guidelines change — confirm current dates and rules with your law school's career services office and with each employer's published recruiting guidelines.