Heller Ehrman has become the latest US firm to push back associate start dates and the firm has also withdrawn from some campuses for its interview process, writes The Recorder.

The start date for new associates has been pushed to 20 January from 13 October with the affected associates - about 50 - to be paid a stipend of $10,000 (£5,384) each, split into three monthly installments from November to January.

They were notified in a series of calls from the heads of the firm's various offices on Wednesday (20 August), said Michael Gotham, the firm's director of attorney recruiting.

Gotham said: "As of what I had heard this morning, every single person had been at least left a message to call us but more than half of them had been reached directly."

The Heller decision involved a number of people including firm management and was made for economic reasons.

Heller has also pulled some schools from its on-campus interview process, as was first reported on Above the Law.

Gotham added: "We are going to the schools where historically we have been the most successful."

That list of at least 20 schools includes Boalt, Stanford, NYU, Columbia, Harvard and Georgetown, but the firm would not comment on how many schools were removed from the process.

In March, Thelen announced that it was pushing its start dates from September to January. Pillsbury made a similar acknowledgment in April, only saying that the firm planned to "stagger start dates throughout the fall."

An Orrick spokesman said its start date is unchanged and most associates will join the firm on 6 October, though some will start sooner. Morrison & Foerster Chairman Keith Wetmore said the start dates for the roughly 80 new associates at his firm have not been changed and the incoming class will start between August and late October.

The Recorder is a US sister title of Legal Week.