Tool for those considering school and/or practice in CA Forum

[csc2law]

Hi everybody.

If you've ever looked at the California Bar Association's Attorney Search feature, you know that it is surprisingly useful. You can find info on current and former Bar members, including where they work(ed), where they went to school, etc. But only on an individual basis.

I was inspired to build another tool (anybody using the automated status checker?) that could glean some interesting information from all that data.

If you are at all considering school and/or practice in CA, feel free to check it out at http://californiabar.globl.org/

Among other things, you can do different types of searches that can't be done on the Bar site (e.g. by law school or undergrad), and also generate reports on things like:

• Which schools (including non-CA schools) have the most graduates in a given city (including cities outside CA) or law firm/organization. For example, it may be no surprise that Harvard is tops at Latham & Watkins, but did you know that little California Western is #3 in the DA and public defender offices?
  http://californiabar.globl.org/stats.ph ... orgschools
• Which schools have the most members in a given interest section (e.g. intellectual property). If you have an idea of the kind of law you want to practice, see which schools most feed that interest in the CA Bar.
  http://californiabar.globl.org/stats.ph ... secschools
• The undergraduate schools that feed particular law schools the most. If you've ever suspected that law schools have favorite undergrad programs, well, go see for yourself:
  http://californiabar.globl.org/stats.ph ... undergrads

There are also general statistics available (e.g. most-represented schools), and a manual search engine. So if you want to, say, look up people who went to your undergrad school and your prospective law schools, you can: e.g. http://californiabar.globl.org/results. ... olytechnic

Hopefully the site can withstand use by the many TLSers out there. I figured it might be useful to you. If it gets a lot of use, please be prepared to wait a few seconds for things to show up. I might be able to improve performance if things get hairy.

By the way, I'm still pulling data from the Bar site, and will be doing so for the next few weeks. So keep in mind that it's an incomplete data set. It should be fairly representative at this point (>10,000 members), but do be aware of that.

Also, let me know if you experience any problems/bugs with it, or have suggestions for improvement.

-csc2law

[It'saPeaceLily]

Pretty cool. Thanks dude. It really needs to list a favorite beach to go surfing or tanning IMO.

[Stephx52]

[csc2law]

Thanks, glad you can you use it.

In response to OperaSoprano, yes, I'm sure the school relationships have a lot to do with locality and convenience on the part of students, especially at the state schools. Resident tuition here isn't as cheap as some other states, but it's still a deal if you can go to a "good" school. I'm sure Berkeley could just swap its undergrads with the Ivies if it wanted to, so it's good to see that Harvard and Yale grads are at least in among the group of UC grads, and not obviously above them. Though I'm not sure how the population sizes compare...

I do think there are some interesting outliers. For example, look at Hastings. At the moment, 23 of its top 25 undergrad schools are in CA. Not surprising, and on balance not a bad thing. Of the two others, one is Univ of WA, also not surprising. But Dartmouth all alone there at #14? Strange.

And some schools do show their character a bit through these numbers. Check out Stanford's top ten for a dose of discouragement .

[csc2law]

Ha, no kidding. I wouldn't mind having my Stanford application fee back.

It may not help too much until the database is better filled, but you can do a search for your undergrad and see if anything comes up:
http://californiabar.globl.org/results. ... +undergrad

[csc2law]

Am rethinking this:

I'm sure Berkeley could just swap its undergrads with the Ivies if it wanted to, so it's good to see that Harvard and Yale grads are at least in among the group of UC grads, and not obviously above them.

I find it disappointing that Boalt takes lots of UC students but almost completely shirks graduates of the CSU (California State University) system:
http://californiabar.globl.org/results. ... te+univ*CA
http://californiabar.globl.org/results. ... california

Especially considering that the CSU has 450,000 students, compared with UC's <200K.

Maybe Berkeley leaves CSU students to the "lesser" UCs.

And yes, I did graduate from a CSU .

[csc2law]

By the way, I added another report: Top organizations/firms per law school. See which firms hire the most from a particular school.

http://californiabar.globl.org/stats.ph ... schoolorgs

This should be much clearer as the database fills up.

[csc2law]

Over 20,000 members in the database now. Stats are getting more interesting.

Thanks for the feedback.

-csc2law

[csc2law]

Over 35,000 Bar members added now.

If you're interested in working with a specific organization, it's pretty easy to tell whether your potential school(s) have a presence. Among other things.

Anybody have ideas for other stats/reports to generate from this stuff?
http://californiabar.globl.org/

[charliebear]

Thanks csc. This is tremendously helpful!

[teege]

.

[bella16]

Thanks!!! As someone who really wants to return to CA someday, and is not attending law school in Cali, it was nice to know whether or not the school I will attend is represented at all lol. UGA had a nice showing of 18 attorneys, and Miami had 68. So, I see it'll take a lot of hard work to get back over there, but it is possible. Thanks again for the information!

[csc2law]

Sure thing, no problem. I also added a note on the General Statistics report that indicates what percentage of the total Bar database has been added so far. As it stands right now, it's about 1/4 done. So UGA and Miami might have significantly stronger showings as the data become complete.

[Mr. Matlock]

A HUGE thank you! Outstanding new site now added to favorites.

[pany1985]

Damn... 40,000 lawyers and you're only a quarter of the way through

[csc2law]

Damn... 40,000 lawyers and you're only a quarter of the way through

No kidding. >160,000 may be the most troubling thing I've found out during this entire process

[LawandOrder]

I was fully anticipating this thread to be about Surfboards.

[csc2law]

Well who needs surfboards when you have pie charts? Now that's lawyerin'.

Speaking of which, you can now generate your own reports (complete with pretty pictures):

http://californiabar.globl.org/report.php

Examples:

Which schools lead the state in disbarred graduates?

Where not to work if you want to avoid Harvard grads

[csc2law]

Thanks for the messages, fixed a couple bugs. Let me know if anybody else has problems with the chart generation stuff.

By the way, up to >50K (or about 1/3 of the entire Bar) is in the database so far.

[csc2law]

Closing in on 70,000 members / 45% of the total Bar now.

This one's interesting: Places people work when they can practice in CA but don't live there.

[D Brooks]

.

[csc2law]

No problem. Have to do something with all this 0L decision-making anxiety.

Funny thing is, I'd probably make more money writing PHP code than I'll ever make in the kind of law that interests me. Gotta follow the heart.

[csc2law]

Update:

• Over 100,000 member records as of last night; roughly 2/3 of CA Bar membership.
• 329 different law schools represented. Seriously. How would it feel to be the only licensed graduate of Larry H Layton School of Law?
• Reports like these are getting more interesting: Where MoFos go to school. Really, what better way to advertise your philosophy than choosing mofo.com as your domain name?

Good luck everybody.

[pany1985]

That 160,000 includes both active and inactive memberships, right?

So it's actually not quite as daunting for those who might want to practice in CA and are scared of competing with that many other lawyers

[csc2law]

Yeah, so if the remaining records trend the same, the total active membership should be somewhere around 120K.

Slightly better, I guess.