NLJ 250 Placement for C/O 2012 Forum

[Robespierre]

Columbia U.s NLJ250 placement rate ranks number 3(53%), but they have such a large student body(460 people!!). I bet many of them are jobless.

From the fact that 53% got jobs with the nation's 250 biggest firms, how do you get to the conclusion that "many of them are jobless"?

[guano]

Columbia U.s NLJ250 placement rate ranks number 3(53%), but they have such a large student body(460 people!!). I bet many of them are jobless.

From the fact that 53% got jobs with the nation's 250 biggest firms, how do you get to the conclusion that "many of them are jobless"?

Many > 1

[JamesDean1955]

Columbia U.s NLJ250 placement rate ranks number 3(53%), but they have such a large student body(460 people!!). I bet many of them are jobless.

From the fact that 53% got jobs with the nation's 250 biggest firms, how do you get to the conclusion that "many of them are jobless"?

Many > 1

He said jobless though. Not "many don't have biglaw jobs" or "many don't have market paying salaries".

Also, while the formal logic definition of many is many > 1, the colloquial meaning is "a significant amount", which any rational person would say is greater than 1 out of 460 (personally, I'd say at least 50).

[Rahviveh]

Columbia U.s NLJ250 placement rate ranks number 3(53%), but they have such a large student body(460 people!!). I bet many of them are jobless.

From the fact that 53% got jobs with the nation's 250 biggest firms, how do you get to the conclusion that "many of them are jobless"?

Many > 1

He said jobless though. Not "many don't have biglaw jobs" or "many don't have market paying salaries".

Also, while the formal logic definition of many is many > 1, the colloquial definition is "a significant amount".

TC term is "some"

YESSS LSAT quantifiers coming in handy for once

[JamesDean1955]

^^ Yessir

By the way, the dude in your new tar is a bad, bad man

[guano]

Poe's law

[JamesDean1955]

Poe's law

BOOM.

That just blew my mind.

[megagnarley]

Is there any way to tell if hiring has stayed even?

Using SC as an example, C/O 2015 is 180 rather than 220. Would have a big impact is summer classes stand.

[pissantvache]

I posted this a couple of weeks ago in the legal employment forum. Don't know why I didn't think to post it here, where people would probably care about it more. But anyways, it tries to take a serious look at placement "quality" (as determined by vault). I'm happy to extend this for more schools, but only if a few people on here are interested in seeing it. As it is, I only posted on T14.

So, since the National Law Journal decided to release a treasure trove of data (on how it computed its go-to law school index), I decided to review the Vault Rank-weighted placement statistics as a means of evaluating the average quality of a school's placement. That is, I assigned a score to each firm that was inversely proportional to the firm's Vault rank (Wachtell got 100, Cravath 99, Skadden 98, and so on), multiplied that by the number of graduates each school placed at that firm, added those scores up, and divided by the total placements that school effected, to determine the average quality of a school's placement.

Without further ado, here are the results (I've also added the name of the firm closest in Vault rank to the score for comparison purposes):

1. Yale (80.02) (Arnold & Porter)
2. Harvard (71.80) (Cadwalader)
3. NYU (69.91) (Fried Frank)
4. Columbia (69.43) (Baker & McKenzie)
5. Boalt (69.08) (Baker & McKenzie)
6. Chicago (67.00) (Proskauer)
7. Stanford (66.92) (Proskauer)
8. Georgetown (64.28) (Goodwin Procter)
9. Northwestern (63.67) (Goodwin Procter)
10. Cornell (59.41) (Winston & Strawn)
11. Penn (57.48) (Fulbright & Jaworski)
12. Duke (56.59) (Fulbright & Jaworski)
13. Michigan (56.39) (Dechert)
14. UVA (53.44) (McDermott Will & Emery)

Obviously, there are a lot of problems with this ranking: First (and somewhat inexplicably), I'm not sure that the NLJ data is all that good. Davis Polk only, apparently, has 6 2012 grads. This doesn't make sense. Paul Weiss isn't even included in the list. Less inexplicably, the magic circle firms also aren't included. This probably did affect the rankings somewhat. For example, Columbia does very well with DPW, and many law review students there select PW over higher rated firms. The fact that NYU has a huge number of grads go to Cleary (included) could, thus, be corrupting the data as between Columbia and NYU.

Second, this ranking--unlike the NLJ's--doesn't account for the number of grads who don't go to Biglaw. So Penn ends up looking emphatically not great in this ranking, but when coupled with its higher placement rates (~60% according to NLJ data), could still be competitive with a higher ranked school like Berkeley (~45%).

Third, and most obviously, the Vault ranking has a lot of problems too, as has been well documented here.

I think the biggest surprise here is Berkeley's strong result, especially vis-a-vis Stanford. I expected NYU/CLS/Harvard/Yale to do well compared against Stanford due to the NYC focus of the Vault rankings, but that Berkeley would maintain nearly the same placement rate as Stanford (a little bit over 47%, compared with 45%), but do so much better in vault placement is a surprise. I suppose one possible mechanism by which this could happen is that lots of Stanford grads pursue prestige boutiques like Keker and Susman, while Berkeley students have less access? I suppose clerkships could have an effect as well, but there my expectation would be that Stanford would look more like Yale where (by hypothesis) the easy availability of clerkships means that inadequate job offers lead students to jump to a clerkship to trade up. But given their similar size and rank, and the divergence between the two, I'm being led to conclude that in fact stanford students don't have anywhere near the clerkship access that Yalies do.

Thoughts?

[law2015]

I posted this a couple of weeks ago in the legal employment forum. Don't know why I didn't think to post it here, where people would probably care about it more. But anyways, it tries to take a serious look at placement "quality" (as determined by vault). I'm happy to extend this for more schools, but only if a few people on here are interested in seeing it. As it is, I only posted on T14.

So, since the National Law Journal decided to release a treasure trove of data (on how it computed its go-to law school index), I decided to review the Vault Rank-weighted placement statistics as a means of evaluating the average quality of a school's placement. That is, I assigned a score to each firm that was inversely proportional to the firm's Vault rank (Wachtell got 100, Cravath 99, Skadden 98, and so on), multiplied that by the number of graduates each school placed at that firm, added those scores up, and divided by the total placements that school effected, to determine the average quality of a school's placement.

Without further ado, here are the results (I've also added the name of the firm closest in Vault rank to the score for comparison purposes):

1. Yale (80.02) (Arnold & Porter)
2. Harvard (71.80) (Cadwalader)
3. NYU (69.91) (Fried Frank)
4. Columbia (69.43) (Baker & McKenzie)
5. Boalt (69.08) (Baker & McKenzie)
6. Chicago (67.00) (Proskauer)
7. Stanford (66.92) (Proskauer)
8. Georgetown (64.28) (Goodwin Procter)
9. Northwestern (63.67) (Goodwin Procter)
10. Cornell (59.41) (Winston & Strawn)
11. Penn (57.48) (Fulbright & Jaworski)
12. Duke (56.59) (Fulbright & Jaworski)
13. Michigan (56.39) (Dechert)
14. UVA (53.44) (McDermott Will & Emery)

Obviously, there are a lot of problems with this ranking: First (and somewhat inexplicably), I'm not sure that the NLJ data is all that good. Davis Polk only, apparently, has 6 2012 grads. This doesn't make sense. Paul Weiss isn't even included in the list. Less inexplicably, the magic circle firms also aren't included. This probably did affect the rankings somewhat. For example, Columbia does very well with DPW, and many law review students there select PW over higher rated firms. The fact that NYU has a huge number of grads go to Cleary (included) could, thus, be corrupting the data as between Columbia and NYU.

Second, this ranking--unlike the NLJ's--doesn't account for the number of grads who don't go to Biglaw. So Penn ends up looking emphatically not great in this ranking, but when coupled with its higher placement rates (~60% according to NLJ data), could still be competitive with a higher ranked school like Berkeley (~45%).

Third, and most obviously, the Vault ranking has a lot of problems too, as has been well documented here.

I think the biggest surprise here is Berkeley's strong result, especially vis-a-vis Stanford. I expected NYU/CLS/Harvard/Yale to do well compared against Stanford due to the NYC focus of the Vault rankings, but that Berkeley would maintain nearly the same placement rate as Stanford (a little bit over 47%, compared with 45%), but do so much better in vault placement is a surprise. I suppose one possible mechanism by which this could happen is that lots of Stanford grads pursue prestige boutiques like Keker and Susman, while Berkeley students have less access? I suppose clerkships could have an effect as well, but there my expectation would be that Stanford would look more like Yale where (by hypothesis) the easy availability of clerkships means that inadequate job offers lead students to jump to a clerkship to trade up. But given their similar size and rank, and the divergence between the two, I'm being led to conclude that in fact stanford students don't have anywhere near the clerkship access that Yalies do.

Thoughts?

To the person who did this, great job!

[09042014]

I posted this a couple of weeks ago in the legal employment forum. Don't know why I didn't think to post it here, where people would probably care about it more. But anyways, it tries to take a serious look at placement "quality" (as determined by vault). I'm happy to extend this for more schools, but only if a few people on here are interested in seeing it. As it is, I only posted on T14.

So, since the National Law Journal decided to release a treasure trove of data (on how it computed its go-to law school index), I decided to review the Vault Rank-weighted placement statistics as a means of evaluating the average quality of a school's placement. That is, I assigned a score to each firm that was inversely proportional to the firm's Vault rank (Wachtell got 100, Cravath 99, Skadden 98, and so on), multiplied that by the number of graduates each school placed at that firm, added those scores up, and divided by the total placements that school effected, to determine the average quality of a school's placement.

Without further ado, here are the results (I've also added the name of the firm closest in Vault rank to the score for comparison purposes):

1. Yale (80.02) (Arnold & Porter)
2. Harvard (71.80) (Cadwalader)
3. NYU (69.91) (Fried Frank)
4. Columbia (69.43) (Baker & McKenzie)
5. Boalt (69.08) (Baker & McKenzie)
6. Chicago (67.00) (Proskauer)
7. Stanford (66.92) (Proskauer)
8. Georgetown (64.28) (Goodwin Procter)
9. Northwestern (63.67) (Goodwin Procter)
10. Cornell (59.41) (Winston & Strawn)
11. Penn (57.48) (Fulbright & Jaworski)
12. Duke (56.59) (Fulbright & Jaworski)
13. Michigan (56.39) (Dechert)
14. UVA (53.44) (McDermott Will & Emery)

Obviously, there are a lot of problems with this ranking: First (and somewhat inexplicably), I'm not sure that the NLJ data is all that good. Davis Polk only, apparently, has 6 2012 grads. This doesn't make sense. Paul Weiss isn't even included in the list. Less inexplicably, the magic circle firms also aren't included. This probably did affect the rankings somewhat. For example, Columbia does very well with DPW, and many law review students there select PW over higher rated firms. The fact that NYU has a huge number of grads go to Cleary (included) could, thus, be corrupting the data as between Columbia and NYU.

Second, this ranking--unlike the NLJ's--doesn't account for the number of grads who don't go to Biglaw. So Penn ends up looking emphatically not great in this ranking, but when coupled with its higher placement rates (~60% according to NLJ data), could still be competitive with a higher ranked school like Berkeley (~45%).

Third, and most obviously, the Vault ranking has a lot of problems too, as has been well documented here.

I think the biggest surprise here is Berkeley's strong result, especially vis-a-vis Stanford. I expected NYU/CLS/Harvard/Yale to do well compared against Stanford due to the NYC focus of the Vault rankings, but that Berkeley would maintain nearly the same placement rate as Stanford (a little bit over 47%, compared with 45%), but do so much better in vault placement is a surprise. I suppose one possible mechanism by which this could happen is that lots of Stanford grads pursue prestige boutiques like Keker and Susman, while Berkeley students have less access? I suppose clerkships could have an effect as well, but there my expectation would be that Stanford would look more like Yale where (by hypothesis) the easy availability of clerkships means that inadequate job offers lead students to jump to a clerkship to trade up. But given their similar size and rank, and the divergence between the two, I'm being led to conclude that in fact stanford students don't have anywhere near the clerkship access that Yalies do.

Thoughts?

1) Vault is a pretty bad indicator. It's mostly about NYC based corporate work
2) Even if was, the last V100 isn't 100 times less prestigious than WLRK.

[pissantvache]

1) Vault is a pretty bad indicator. It's mostly about NYC based corporate work
2) Even if was, the last V100 isn't 100 times less prestigious than WLRK.

1) Agree that Vault is not a great indicator. Disagree that it's all about NYC Corporate, or that it's irrelevant, especially at these schools, and especially when we have almost no other means of comparing schools along a metric that almost everyone agrees exists and uses to a greater or lesser extent (prestige). Also, after V10, the focus on NYC corporate is way diminished. And I think this criticism is also mooted since no school that I can think of has a practice area focus (all these schools can get you into corp, lit, tax, etc., and that's what these firms do), and also the schools that don't have a regional focus on NYC (Georgetown and Berkeley) score almost comparably to NYU/Columbia. Cornell, Penn, UVA, not so much, even though theoretically at least many of those graduates are shooting for NYC or DC.

2) Fair enough. I also tried it according to "bands" but that introduced a level of my own judgment that I couldn't back up. This was an easy heuristic, and... well, I also thought it was nice inasmuch as it would give directional indicators of placement quality, which I think it does, and, as above, in a remarkably geography-neutral way (except, admittedly, for strong niche practices).

[pissantvache]

Actually, I'm going to go one further. Vault is not a great indicator for individuals. For statistically significant groups of individuals, which is what law schools are, it's a great indicator, especially since Vault is constructed based on prestige by large groups of attorneys.

Your point about WLRK is still fair, but--as I mentioned above--dealing with it in tiers doesn't lead to radically different results.

[guano]

I posted this a couple of weeks ago in the legal employment forum. Don't know why I didn't think to post it here, where people would probably care about it more. But anyways, it tries to take a serious look at placement "quality" (as determined by vault). I'm happy to extend this for more schools, but only if a few people on here are interested in seeing it. As it is, I only posted on T14.

So, since the National Law Journal decided to release a treasure trove of data (on how it computed its go-to law school index), I decided to review the Vault Rank-weighted placement statistics as a means of evaluating the average quality of a school's placement. That is, I assigned a score to each firm that was inversely proportional to the firm's Vault rank (Wachtell got 100, Cravath 99, Skadden 98, and so on), multiplied that by the number of graduates each school placed at that firm, added those scores up, and divided by the total placements that school effected, to determine the average quality of a school's placement.

Without further ado, here are the results (I've also added the name of the firm closest in Vault rank to the score for comparison purposes):

1. Yale (80.02) (Arnold & Porter)
2. Harvard (71.80) (Cadwalader)
3. NYU (69.91) (Fried Frank)
4. Columbia (69.43) (Baker & McKenzie)
5. Boalt (69.08) (Baker & McKenzie)
6. Chicago (67.00) (Proskauer)
7. Stanford (66.92) (Proskauer)
8. Georgetown (64.28) (Goodwin Procter)
9. Northwestern (63.67) (Goodwin Procter)
10. Cornell (59.41) (Winston & Strawn)
11. Penn (57.48) (Fulbright & Jaworski)
12. Duke (56.59) (Fulbright & Jaworski)
13. Michigan (56.39) (Dechert)
14. UVA (53.44) (McDermott Will & Emery)

Obviously, there are a lot of problems with this ranking: First (and somewhat inexplicably), I'm not sure that the NLJ data is all that good. Davis Polk only, apparently, has 6 2012 grads. This doesn't make sense. Paul Weiss isn't even included in the list. Less inexplicably, the magic circle firms also aren't included. This probably did affect the rankings somewhat. For example, Columbia does very well with DPW, and many law review students there select PW over higher rated firms. The fact that NYU has a huge number of grads go to Cleary (included) could, thus, be corrupting the data as between Columbia and NYU.

Second, this ranking--unlike the NLJ's--doesn't account for the number of grads who don't go to Biglaw. So Penn ends up looking emphatically not great in this ranking, but when coupled with its higher placement rates (~60% according to NLJ data), could still be competitive with a higher ranked school like Berkeley (~45%).

Third, and most obviously, the Vault ranking has a lot of problems too, as has been well documented here.

I think the biggest surprise here is Berkeley's strong result, especially vis-a-vis Stanford. I expected NYU/CLS/Harvard/Yale to do well compared against Stanford due to the NYC focus of the Vault rankings, but that Berkeley would maintain nearly the same placement rate as Stanford (a little bit over 47%, compared with 45%), but do so much better in vault placement is a surprise. I suppose one possible mechanism by which this could happen is that lots of Stanford grads pursue prestige boutiques like Keker and Susman, while Berkeley students have less access? I suppose clerkships could have an effect as well, but there my expectation would be that Stanford would look more like Yale where (by hypothesis) the easy availability of clerkships means that inadequate job offers lead students to jump to a clerkship to trade up. But given their similar size and rank, and the divergence between the two, I'm being led to conclude that in fact stanford students don't have anywhere near the clerkship access that Yalies do.

Thoughts?

are youretarded?autistic?

[longlivetheking]

i've looked up the nalp directory and it seems for v10 and v15, hiring is nearing pre-recessionary levels (nyc firms) while firms outside of that range (roughly of course) seems to be still in recession levels. any truth in this?

is it credited that nyc top firms have more or less recovered to boom times (nearing boom times)

[Lasers]

i've looked up the nalp directory and it seems for v10 and v15, hiring is nearing pre-recessionary levels (nyc firms) while firms outside of that range (roughly of course) seems to be still in recession levels. any truth in this?

is it credited that nyc top firms have more or less recovered to boom times (nearing boom times)

i don't think v10 or v15 firms really suffered all that much during the down years. the elite firms have done pretty well; the recession really hurt the rest of the top but not elite firms (i.e. rest of v100 outside maybe the top 10-20). pretty sure a quick amlaw search for the top firms would confirm their numbers barely dipped, if at all. they may have hired a bit less just as precaution, but i'd imagine they're operating and hiring pretty close to pre-ITE levels.

[longlivetheking]

i think if you just check up on jones day or cadwalader it seems that they're still in recessionary mode, hiring wise. but if you look up skadden cravath, davis or simpson, it seems that they are very close to what lawfirmaddict posted in 06 and 07.

i've also heard different schools say different things, ppl at columbia said co 2012 was a bloodbath while cornell and nyu said they were the best since the great apocalypse. anyone care to verify or just tell me to shut the fuck up?

[09042014]

i think if you just check up on jones day or cadwalader it seems that they're still in recessionary mode, hiring wise. but if you look up skadden cravath, davis or simpson, it seems that they are very close to what lawfirmaddict posted in 06 and 07.

i've also heard different schools say different things, ppl at columbia said co 2012 was a bloodbath while cornell and nyu said they were the best since the great apocalypse. anyone care to verify or just tell me to shut the fuck up?

It's hard to judge recruiting by small sample sizes. So nobody really knows without objective numbers leaking. And different schools do better or worse year to year.

For example, TLS was talking about how c/o 2013 was getting no offered in high numbers, but when the NALP report came out, the number no offered was virtually identical to last year.

[UVAIce]

UVA has been DC centric for awhile. LST's geographic data for 2011 is 23.9% in DC, 19.4% in Virginia (some of these are people practicing in NOVA, by DC), 12.5% in NY and 5.6% in California. I think historically the placement rates for UVA between NYC and DC was +/- 2%, but the NYC numbers have been going down since 2008. I'm not exactly certain why this has been happening, but it has been an accelerating trend that less UVA grads are going to NYC compared to DC. I'm also certain that's why UVA's NLJ250 numbers have been hurting; we just don't send all that many people to NYC anymore.

[09042014]

UVA has been DC centric for awhile. LST's geographic data for 2011 is 23.9% in DC, 19.4% in Virginia (some of these are people practicing in NOVA, by DC), 12.5% in NY and 5.6% in California. I think historically the placement rates for UVA between NYC and DC was +/- 2%, but the NYC numbers have been going down since 2008. I'm not exactly certain why this has been happening, but it has been an accelerating trend that less UVA grads are going to NYC compared to DC. I'm also certain that's why UVA's NLJ250 numbers have been hurting; we just don't send all that many people to NYC anymore.

Makes sense to me.

[LRGhost]

i've looked up the nalp directory and it seems for v10 and v15, hiring is nearing pre-recessionary levels (nyc firms) while firms outside of that range (roughly of course) seems to be still in recession levels. any truth in this?

is it credited that nyc top firms have more or less recovered to boom times (nearing boom times)

i don't think v10 or v15 firms really suffered all that much during the down years. the elite firms have done pretty well; the recession really hurt the rest of the top but not elite firms (i.e. rest of v100 outside maybe the top 10-20). pretty sure a quick amlaw search for the top firms would confirm their numbers barely dipped, if at all. they may have hired a bit less just as precaution, but i'd imagine they're operating and hiring pretty close to pre-ITE levels.

I don't think it's near pre-ITE. If you want to post numbers, go ahead, but I think there used to be class sizes of over 100. And every firm suffered, really. Latham pushed out like 400 people? Other firms cut huge sizes too but they just did it en masse and laid off first years which didn't bode well for their PR.

[Bronck]

i've looked up the nalp directory and it seems for v10 and v15, hiring is nearing pre-recessionary levels (nyc firms) while firms outside of that range (roughly of course) seems to be still in recession levels. any truth in this?

is it credited that nyc top firms have more or less recovered to boom times (nearing boom times)

i don't think v10 or v15 firms really suffered all that much during the down years. the elite firms have done pretty well; the recession really hurt the rest of the top but not elite firms (i.e. rest of v100 outside maybe the top 10-20). pretty sure a quick amlaw search for the top firms would confirm their numbers barely dipped, if at all. they may have hired a bit less just as precaution, but i'd imagine they're operating and hiring pretty close to pre-ITE levels.

I don't think it's near pre-ITE. If you want to post numbers, go ahead, but I think there used to be class sizes of over 100. And every firm suffered, really. Latham pushed out like 400 people? Other firms cut huge sizes too but they just did it en masse and laid off first years which didn't bode well for their PR.

I think the WSJ numbers may be helpful: http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2012/07/02/law ... teractive/

[longlivetheking]

i've looked up the nalp directory and it seems for v10 and v15, hiring is nearing pre-recessionary levels (nyc firms) while firms outside of that range (roughly of course) seems to be still in recession levels. any truth in this?

is it credited that nyc top firms have more or less recovered to boom times (nearing boom times)

i don't think v10 or v15 firms really suffered all that much during the down years. the elite firms have done pretty well; the recession really hurt the rest of the top but not elite firms (i.e. rest of v100 outside maybe the top 10-20). pretty sure a quick amlaw search for the top firms would confirm their numbers barely dipped, if at all. they may have hired a bit less just as precaution, but i'd imagine they're operating and hiring pretty close to pre-ITE levels.

I don't think it's near pre-ITE. If you want to post numbers, go ahead, but I think there used to be class sizes of over 100. And every firm suffered, really. Latham pushed out like 400 people? Other firms cut huge sizes too but they just did it en masse and laid off first years which didn't bode well for their PR.

i would like nothing but the god honest truth so i'm not trying to make myself sleep better at night. but i'm going to just list a few of the v10s, according to both law firm addict and nalp. NALP figures would be for 2012 while law firm addict (LFA) would be 2006

cravath - 82 (NALP); 105 LFA
simpson NY - 83 (NALP); 135 LFA
DPW all offices - 129; 132 (excluding DC but including menlo park and NYC)

i'm lazy. but obviously we aren't at the boomtimes i guess going from these figures. and these are only v10 once you go outside of that range its definitely still recessionary hiring numbers.

[colonelnerd]

Thanks for this, excellent resource

[Robespierre]

I posted this a couple of weeks ago in the legal employment forum. Don't know why I didn't think to post it here, where people would probably care about it more. But anyways, it tries to take a serious look at placement "quality" (as determined by vault). I'm happy to extend this for more schools, but only if a few people on here are interested in seeing it. As it is, I only posted on T14.

So, since the National Law Journal decided to release a treasure trove of data (on how it computed its go-to law school index), I decided to review the Vault Rank-weighted placement statistics as a means of evaluating the average quality of a school's placement. That is, I assigned a score to each firm that was inversely proportional to the firm's Vault rank (Wachtell got 100, Cravath 99, Skadden 98, and so on), multiplied that by the number of graduates each school placed at that firm, added those scores up, and divided by the total placements that school effected, to determine the average quality of a school's placement.

Without further ado, here are the results (I've also added the name of the firm closest in Vault rank to the score for comparison purposes):

1. Yale (80.02) (Arnold & Porter)
2. Harvard (71.80) (Cadwalader)
3. NYU (69.91) (Fried Frank)
4. Columbia (69.43) (Baker & McKenzie)
5. Boalt (69.08) (Baker & McKenzie)
6. Chicago (67.00) (Proskauer)
7. Stanford (66.92) (Proskauer)
8. Georgetown (64.28) (Goodwin Procter)
9. Northwestern (63.67) (Goodwin Procter)
10. Cornell (59.41) (Winston & Strawn)
11. Penn (57.48) (Fulbright & Jaworski)
12. Duke (56.59) (Fulbright & Jaworski)
13. Michigan (56.39) (Dechert)
14. UVA (53.44) (McDermott Will & Emery)

Obviously, there are a lot of problems with this ranking: First (and somewhat inexplicably), I'm not sure that the NLJ data is all that good. Davis Polk only, apparently, has 6 2012 grads. This doesn't make sense. Paul Weiss isn't even included in the list. Less inexplicably, the magic circle firms also aren't included. This probably did affect the rankings somewhat. For example, Columbia does very well with DPW, and many law review students there select PW over higher rated firms. The fact that NYU has a huge number of grads go to Cleary (included) could, thus, be corrupting the data as between Columbia and NYU.

Second, this ranking--unlike the NLJ's--doesn't account for the number of grads who don't go to Biglaw. So Penn ends up looking emphatically not great in this ranking, but when coupled with its higher placement rates (~60% according to NLJ data), could still be competitive with a higher ranked school like Berkeley (~45%).

Third, and most obviously, the Vault ranking has a lot of problems too, as has been well documented here.

I think the biggest surprise here is Berkeley's strong result, especially vis-a-vis Stanford. I expected NYU/CLS/Harvard/Yale to do well compared against Stanford due to the NYC focus of the Vault rankings, but that Berkeley would maintain nearly the same placement rate as Stanford (a little bit over 47%, compared with 45%), but do so much better in vault placement is a surprise. I suppose one possible mechanism by which this could happen is that lots of Stanford grads pursue prestige boutiques like Keker and Susman, while Berkeley students have less access? I suppose clerkships could have an effect as well, but there my expectation would be that Stanford would look more like Yale where (by hypothesis) the easy availability of clerkships means that inadequate job offers lead students to jump to a clerkship to trade up. But given their similar size and rank, and the divergence between the two, I'm being led to conclude that in fact stanford students don't have anywhere near the clerkship access that Yalies do.

Thoughts?

Thanks for this. Very interesting. Why do you think GULC outperformed its ranking?