Marionberry wrote:I figure this is probably common knowledge, though probably not to the people to are always GULC trolling, but the Class of 2009 placed 42.8% into Biglaw (NLJ250), with most of the rest of the T14 placing somewhere in the high 40s or low 50s. GULC's placement was a hair better than Cornell's. Given the handful of possible factors contributing to this discrepancy (higher PI/govt placement, grads gunning for saturdated markets) I just don't see where the "OMG, GeorgeTTTTown is teh dregs!" sentiment comes from. I'm open to any evidence that actually indicates that, but I never see any of these claims really substantiated with anything other than second hand accounts of striking out at OCI.
Marionberry wrote:We're not talking about stats published by law schools, we're talking about stats published independently by the NLJ. I haven't seen any discussion about NLJ numbers being inaccurate.
Also, re: Patriot, yeah youre right in that numbers last year were probably worse, and they might not have been much better for this year's OCI crop. I just hear so much hyperbolem similar to OP, that I try to see if any of it is grounded in fact.
NLJ numbers aren't so much inaccurate as they are out of date.
Class of 2009 did OCI in fall of 2007, did their SA gigs (and theoretically got offers) in summer of 2008. How many fewer spots are there going to be this summer than there were in summer 2008? According to
this post that did the math, the big firms in Chicago were down from 809 summer associate positions in 2008 to 256 for this past summer; so there were fewer than a third as many SA gigs as the class of 2009 had.
While 1) That's for Chicago, not for DC or any other market, and 2) things could bounce a bit from then, I think the point is that the numbers, even the most recent ones, will not be very good predictors of what things are like for class of 2010, 2011, 2013, or the current applicants who would be class of 2014. Citing class of 2009 NLJ numbers just doesn't reflect where things are right now.
