2014 wrote:scifiguy wrote:In terms of emnployemnt, does Michigan lag a signifcant enough amount behind other non-GULC T14's too warrant a distinction?
Michigan's biglaw seems noticeably lower than the other non-GULC T14s. It made me wonder about
this :
acrossthelake wrote:I mean, I've had lawyers at biglaw firms who either currently are, or were before, tell me straight to my face that ties matter a lot to them, and that they favor local schools. They could be lying, but considering the placement of, say, SLS and Berkeley in NorCal over our (HLS) ability to place there (not that well), I believe it.
Michigan's placement isn't pretty, it suffers from a lack of a good backup market and doesn't dominate NYC by any means.
Rayiner had a good post somewhere that basically pointed out that Michigan only clings onto T14 status in large part because of inflated reputation scores from its days in the top 5 that feed themselves but will eventually diminish.
It's definitely odd, because Michigan is ranked 10th in USNWR above Duke, Northwestern, Georgetown, and Cornell.
Also, from the earlier posts in this thread, people argued that the ranking tiers within the T14 were:
TOP: YS>H
MIDDLE: CCN (possibly Penn)
BOTTOM: P>BVMDNGC
Here's Michigan's 2011 biglaw placement in the NLJ 250 from here:
http://www.lawschooltransparency.com/tag/nlj-250/
Rank | School | NLJ 250 Grads | Total Grads | % of Class
#1 university of pennsylvania law school: 156 | 274 | 56.93%
#2 Northwestern University School of Law: 149 | 286 | 52.1%
#3 Columbia Law School: 235 | 455 | 51.65%
#4 Harvard Law School: 285 | 583 | 48.89%
#5 Stanford Law School: 87 | 181* | 48.07%
#6 University of California, Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall): 140 | 305 | 45.9%
#7 University of Chicago Law School: 92 | 203 | 45.32%
#8 Duke Law School: 89 | 219* | 40.64%
#9 New York University School of Law: 187 | 466 | 40.13%
#10 University of Virginia School of Law: 150 | 377 | 39.79%
#11 Cornell Law School: 72 | 188* | 38.3%
#12 University of Southern California Gould School of Law: 68 | 207 | 32.85%
#13 University of Michigan Law School: 119 | 378 | 31.48%
#14 Georgetown University Law Center: 198 | 637 | 31.08%
#15 Yale Law School: 61 | 205 | 29.76%
Just based on (2011) NLJ 250 biglaw placement, Michigan is almost
9% points lower than most other T14 schools other than Georgetown. I read in another post people arguing that Georgetown was the "riskiest/worst" of the T14 in terms of job numbers. But could we place Michigan next to GULC? Would the tiers then be:
TOP: YS>H
MID-1: CCN (P?)
MID-2: P>BVDNC
BOTTOM:
MG
Is there something I am missing? Does Michigan, for exmaple, place well in federal clerkships and public interest firms to make up for the lower biglaw placemenet? The lack of a home market theory makes sense, but I think people argued here there wasn't concrete proof that firms discriminated that way with the T14.
And why is USC so good with biglaw placement?