Top Law Schools

These http://placementsummary.abaquestionnaire.org/home.aspx are 14 months out of date (status as of 2/15/2011 for 2010 class) but they'll give you something close to NALP-level numbers for any ABA school (no salary numbers but those are easily extrapolated from national data by job category).

Three things:

(1) Check out what percentage of grads who have firm jobs are with firms of 2-10 lawyers or are solos. This should be a red flag category. These jobs pay mid-five figures assuming they're real and some of them aren't (couple of grads hanging up a shingle).

(2) Pay attention to how many "jobs" are short-term law school funded gigs. This can have a very big effect on the nine month employment rate. For example at UCLA it knocks it down from 93% to 81%.

(3) "Business and industry" means retail. Nobody gets an in-house job out of law school except for maybe the CFO's kid.

You can get the stats for all schools at once off a spreadsheet, or look up individual schools.

For those interested, the above link also provides access to class of 2011 job placement data, and in many cases this is not yet on the university website. I'm interested in Duke's, for instance, and it shows that out of a class of 2011 which consisted of 213 students: a) 6 people were unemployed b) 10 people were employed by the law school c) 14 went in to solo practice or joined a firm with ten or fewer attorneys and d) 102 were employed at firms with 50 or more attorneys. This is not a full reflection of the report but rather an excerpt.

Your assumption under (3) is a little too strong. That category can include a wide variety of outcomes (business jobs, legal non-firm jobs, retail, etc.), so it is effectively useless. However, simply because it's useless doesn't mean that someone should assume the absolute worst.

mmk33 wrote:For those interested, the above link also provides access to class of 2011 job placement data, and in many cases this is not yet on the university website. I'm interested in Duke's, for instance, and it shows that out of a class of 2011 which consisted of 213 students: a) 6 people were unemployed b) 10 people were employed by the law school c) 14 went in to solo practice or joined a firm with ten or fewer attorneys and d) 102 were employed at firms with 50 or more attorneys. This is not a full reflection of the report but rather an excerpt.

I don't think there's any c/o 2011 data. It's 2010 data, but 2011 report year since the reports are issued 9 months after grad.

mmk33 wrote:For those interested, the above link also provides access to class of 2011 job placement data, and in many cases this is not yet on the university website. I'm interested in Duke's, for instance, and it shows that out of a class of 2011 which consisted of 213 students: a) 6 people were unemployed b) 10 people were employed by the law school c) 14 went in to solo practice or joined a firm with ten or fewer attorneys and d) 102 were employed at firms with 50 or more attorneys. This is not a full reflection of the report but rather an excerpt.

The report year is 2011 but from what I can tell the numbers are for the class of 2010.

1 and 3 should be qualified. I know people in both categories who are doing quite well. (One making 90k in a small firm and another working in-house for a corporation, for example.)

Not saying that's anywhere near the norm for those categories, to be clear.

edited for clarification

Tiago Splitter wrote:

mmk33 wrote:For those interested, the above link also provides access to class of 2011 job placement data, and in many cases this is not yet on the university website. I'm interested in Duke's, for instance, and it shows that out of a class of 2011 which consisted of 213 students: a) 6 people were unemployed b) 10 people were employed by the law school c) 14 went in to solo practice or joined a firm with ten or fewer attorneys and d) 102 were employed at firms with 50 or more attorneys. This is not a full reflection of the report but rather an excerpt.

The report year is 2011 but from what I can tell the numbers are for the class of 2010.

Okay, gotcha. I attended Duke ASW where they passed out a spreadsheet of class of 2011 employment (divided by state, and specifying the firm) but I haven't taken the time to aggregate it. I do think it's odd that they haven't posted this or salary information to the website.

--ImageRemoved--

Oh, wow. Awesome find.

At my T2 for 2010 (it is 2010, yes?): 192/223 employed, 57 of those short-term, many of those in public interest, government, and some by the law school. Yuck.

BigLaw percentage: 7%

Aberzombie1892 wrote:Your assumption under (3) is a little too strong. That category can include a wide variety of outcomes (business jobs, legal non-firm jobs, retail, etc.), so it is effectively useless. However, simply because it's useless doesn't mean that someone should assume the absolute worst.

Check out how many people at YSH are going into "business and industry." It's about 3% and at those places people actually do get jobs with big deal consulting outfits and the like. If you're talking about a non-elite school you can safely assume that somewhere on the order of 95% of "business and industry" jobs are non-legal low-paying gigs.

Paul Campos wrote:These http://placementsummary.abaquestionnaire.org/home.aspx are 14 months out of date (status as of 2/15/2011 for 2010 class) but they'll give you something close to NALP-level numbers for any ABA school (no salary numbers but those are easily extrapolated from national data by job category).

Three things:

(1) Check out what percentage of grads who have firm jobs are with firms of 2-10 lawyers or are solos. This should be a red flag category. These jobs pay mid-five figures assuming they're real and some of them aren't (couple of grads hanging up a shingle).

(2) Pay attention to how many "jobs" are short-term law school funded gigs. This can have a very big effect on the nine month employment rate. For example at UCLA it knocks it down from 93% to 81%.

(3) "Business and industry" means retail. Nobody gets an in-house job out of law school except for maybe the CFO's kid.

You can get the stats for all schools at once off a spreadsheet, or look up individual schools.

Lawyers who work for temp agencies are counted as "business/industry" under the ABA guidelines. To be fair, for some schools it also includes JD/MBA's who go into consulting, etc.

A really interesting number is the (# long-term, full-time employed) / (# of graduates). This should be a realistic "unemployed" figure. Some NY-targeting schools:

Harvard: 94%
Columbia: 94%
Penn: 91%
Virginia: 87%
Georgetown: 82%
Fordham: 76%
Cardozo: 61%
Brooklyn: 68%
Touro: 63%
Pace: 50%

rayiner wrote:A really interesting number is the (# long-term, full-time employed) / (# of graduates). This should be a realistic "unemployed" figure. Some NY-targeting schools:

Harvard: 94%
Columbia: 94%
Penn: 91%
Virginia: 87%
Georgetown: 82%
Fordham: 76%
Cardozo: 61%
Brooklyn: 68%
Touro: 63%
Pace: 50%

Looks like NYU is also 94% if you trust my math (which you probably shouldn't)

Made a nice pivot table out of the raw data they provided.

Also included a formula to calculate "biglaw %" using (FT at 51-500+ law firms)/(all graduates at law firms). My intention to get a % of people who want biglaw getting biglaw and the assumption is that everyone who goes into private practice wants biglaw. I know, it's not the perfect indicator, but it's closer than just using total graduates as the denominator (since not everyone wants to do biglaw).

PM me with your email if you want a copy (not sure how else I can transmit this Excel sheet that's more anonymous; open to suggestions).

cactuarX3 wrote:Made a nice pivot table out of the raw data they provided.

Also included a formula to calculate "biglaw %" using (FT at 51-500+ law firms)/(all graduates at law firms). My intention to get a % of people who want biglaw getting biglaw and the assumption is that everyone who goes into private practice wants biglaw. I know, it's not the perfect indicator, but it's closer than just using total graduates as the denominator (since not everyone wants to do biglaw).

PM me with your email if you want a copy (not sure how else I can transmit this Excel sheet that's more anonymous; open to suggestions).

You can upload to Google Docs, then post an anonymous, read-only link.

ETA: You click share, then share publicly or something like that.

Samara wrote:

cactuarX3 wrote:Made a nice pivot table out of the raw data they provided.

Also included a formula to calculate "biglaw %" using (FT at 51-500+ law firms)/(all graduates at law firms). My intention to get a % of people who want biglaw getting biglaw and the assumption is that everyone who goes into private practice wants biglaw. I know, it's not the perfect indicator, but it's closer than just using total graduates as the denominator (since not everyone wants to do biglaw).

PM me with your email if you want a copy (not sure how else I can transmit this Excel sheet that's more anonymous; open to suggestions).

You can upload to Google Docs, then post an anonymous, read-only link.

ETA: You click share, then share publicly or something like that.

Yes please. I would like to see this as well.

Samara wrote:

cactuarX3 wrote:Made a nice pivot table out of the raw data they provided.

Also included a formula to calculate "biglaw %" using (FT at 51-500+ law firms)/(all graduates at law firms). My intention to get a % of people who want biglaw getting biglaw and the assumption is that everyone who goes into private practice wants biglaw. I know, it's not the perfect indicator, but it's closer than just using total graduates as the denominator (since not everyone wants to do biglaw).

PM me with your email if you want a copy (not sure how else I can transmit this Excel sheet that's more anonymous; open to suggestions).

You can upload to Google Docs, then post an anonymous, read-only link.

ETA: You click share, then share publicly or something like that.

can google docs to pivot tables also?

Just wanted to confirm:

these are new ABA standards, and they have not collected information in this detail prior to c/o 2010.

I'm presuming they're not gonna wait another year to post c/o 2011, since they just received that data recently?

IU-B: Long-Term 51-500+ employment = 12.3% 65th worst. That's baaad.

This is great, ty for posting.

Paul Campos wrote:

Aberzombie1892 wrote:Your assumption under (3) is a little too strong. That category can include a wide variety of outcomes (business jobs, legal non-firm jobs, retail, etc.), so it is effectively useless. However, simply because it's useless doesn't mean that someone should assume the absolute worst.

Check out how many people at YSH are going into "business and industry." It's about 3% and at those places people actually do get jobs with big deal consulting outfits and the like. If you're talking about a non-elite school you can safely assume that somewhere on the order of 95% of "business and industry" jobs are non-legal low-paying gigs.

I still disagree. You selected the "cream of the crop" schools to prove your point, and for 99%+ of the students at those schools, not only is level big law their best option for post graduation employment in terms of monetary value, but it's also (historically been) freely handed out to them. However, once you reach schools like Georgetown on down, big law is neither as accessible nor freely handed out. As a result, a mentionable amount of students at these schools will face stronger employment options outside of law than in law (i.e. a $40,000 legal job vs. $60,000 business job).

Great stuff, thanks

cactuarX3 wrote:

Samara wrote:

cactuarX3 wrote:Made a nice pivot table out of the raw data they provided.

Also included a formula to calculate "biglaw %" using (FT at 51-500+ law firms)/(all graduates at law firms). My intention to get a % of people who want biglaw getting biglaw and the assumption is that everyone who goes into private practice wants biglaw. I know, it's not the perfect indicator, but it's closer than just using total graduates as the denominator (since not everyone wants to do biglaw).

PM me with your email if you want a copy (not sure how else I can transmit this Excel sheet that's more anonymous; open to suggestions).

You can upload to Google Docs, then post an anonymous, read-only link.

ETA: You click share, then share publicly or something like that.

can google docs to pivot tables also?

Probably? I don't know.

Would it be right to roughly approximate % of the class wanting Big Law and getting it by #InFirms51-500/(ClassSize - LTGov - LTPI - LTFed - LTStLoc) or is this way too much of an oversimplification?

Not sure why people are including firms of size less than 100 in their calculations.