What do you think of law schools who embargo students’ transcripts?

Virtually all of the Top Tier law schools’ career services offices do not permit their students to share their law school transcripts with firms or other potential recruiters before a certain date during OCI (often the day the student meets the particular firm or recruiter).

On the other hand, students are welcome to share their college transcript, resume, writing samples, other essays, and so on.

The reasoning of the career services offices is basically, “If you got into HighlyPrestigious Law School to begin with, you’re good enough for any firm in the AmLaw 200; so firms shouldn’t be able to discriminate on who they want to see based on the simplistic and misleading criterion of first year grades.”  So those schools require law firms that want to participate in OCI to interview all students the school schedules for them.

What think, dear readers?

There’s no question that this information embargo is, at least theoretically, an impediment to efficient market functioning.  (Markets work better with full disclosure.)

But is this information the wrong thing for firms to look at, and therefore they’re better off not being able to know it in advance? Kind of like the evidentiary objection to information at a trial that’s admittedly true but deemed too “highly prejudicial” to allow the jury to hear?

Tell us what you think: