Top Law Schools

law2015 wrote:Skri65, you must be a 0L to write such a useless and dumb thread.

cahwc12 wrote:Not to undermine your hard work, but you could have done this in a spreadsheet in less than two minutes using the ABA complete employment data spreadsheet available at http://employmentsummary.abaquestionnaire.org/

law2015 wrote:Skri65, you must be a 0L to write such a useless and dumb thread.

Crowing wrote:Imo looking at just one year's data is not extremely useful and you get a better overall picture if you look at say the past 3-5 years.

Crowing wrote:Imo looking at just one year's data is not extremely useful and you get a better overall picture if you look at say the past 3-5 years.

Suralin wrote:

Crowing wrote:Imo looking at just one year's data is not extremely useful and you get a better overall picture if you look at say the past 3-5 years.

+1

dingbat wrote:

Crowing wrote:Imo looking at just one year's data is not extremely useful and you get a better overall picture if you look at say the past 3-5 years.

I've looked at placement data as far back as 2005 (admittedly, more for curiosity; 2008 or older is irrelevant)

vzapana wrote:

dingbat wrote:

Crowing wrote:Imo looking at just one year's data is not extremely useful and you get a better overall picture if you look at say the past 3-5 years.

I've looked at placement data as far back as 2005 (admittedly, more for curiosity; 2008 or older is irrelevant)

Did an analysis of T-14 schools. I couldn't find 2009 and older data for all the schools (Columbia started completing the NALP survey in 2010, for instance), so I stuck with 2010 and 2011 data only. It's a limited analysis because of this, so take it with a grain of salt.

To compare apples to apples, I looked at "long-term" employment with 101+ law firms and federal judges. I didn't look at simply FTLT (full-time, long-term) employment, because the 2010 NALP survey didn't require you to report that data. Nonetheless, the math doesn't change too much. Only two schools reported PTLT (part-time, long-term) employment: Georgetown and University of Virginia. And Gtown reported only 3, while UVA reported only 1.

I calculated the 2010 and 2011 employment ratios for each school, then I averaged the two values. Here are the results:

1.) Stanford: 77.3%
2.) Columbia: 74.1%
3.) Harvard: 68.9%
4.) Penn: 68.0%
5.) Cornell: 63.7%
6.) Chicago: 63.2%
7.) Yale: 62.9%
8.) Northwestern: 60.8%
9.) NYU: 60.4%
10.) Duke: 56.9%
11.) Berkeley: 54.9%
12.) Virginia: 54.4%
13.) Michigan: 52.7%
14.) Georgetown: 42.1% [YIKES]

I also calculated the percent change from the 2010 to the 2011 ratios. (Positive numbers are good; negative, bad.) This should give a sense of which schools have job numbers that are in free fall. Here are those results:

1.) Yale: 11.6%
2.) Northwestern: 1.6%
3.) Penn: -2.5%
4.) Duke: -3.0%
5.) Stanford: -10.7%
6.) Harvard: -10.7%
7.) Columbia: -11.6%
8.) Berkeley: -12.2%
9.) Michigan: -13.0%
10.) Georgetown: -18.3%
11.) NYU: -19.0%
12.) UVA: -20.9%
13.) U. Chicago: -25.1%
14.) Cornell: -42.1% [YIKES]

law2015 wrote:Skri65, you must be a 0L to write such a useless and dumb thread.

Spinoza wrote:

law2015 wrote:Skri65, you must be a 0L to write such a useless and dumb thread.

If only 50% of students get good jobs coming out of School A and 70% get good jobs coming out of School B, school B is likely to be more competitive with more able students/job candidates. Accordingly, your own chance of getting a job is probably roughly similar at both schools. This is an oversimplification, to be sure, but no one is surprised when the kid who gives up an offer from Columbia to get a full ride at Duke ends up excelling there.

Yukos wrote:

Spinoza wrote:

law2015 wrote:Skri65, you must be a 0L to write such a useless and dumb thread.

If only 50% of students get good jobs coming out of School A and 70% get good jobs coming out of School B, school B is likely to be more competitive with more able students/job candidates. Accordingly, your own chance of getting a job is probably roughly similar at both schools. This is an oversimplification, to be sure, but no one is surprised when the kid who gives up an offer from Columbia to get a full ride at Duke ends up excelling there.

This is a really dangerous assumption. Even if we assumed law school exams are not at all arbitrary (which we shouldn't), the different in credentials between most of the T14 is marginal. A student at Duke's LSAT median* of 170 and a student at Columbia's median of 172 would be in the same score band, meaning even LSAC would admit they're statistically the more or less the same.

Moral of the story: if you're choosing between the T14, the percentage of students who get biglaw is much more important than the presumed difference in "intelligence" or "skill" between the students.

*Class of 2014 LSAT median because Duke hasn't released class of 2015 medians.

Big Dog wrote:Great stuff, thank you.

My question has to do with the threshold of law firms 100+.

Another blog (and the National Law Journal) seems to indicate that Big Law = firms of NLJ 250+. Any thoughts on the difference? Are those from 100-250 just as good for salary/work experience?

Yes, I realize that the Law Journal excludes clerkships, which are hugely valuable.)

Tiago Splitter wrote:

Big Dog wrote:Great stuff, thank you.

My question has to do with the threshold of law firms 100+.

Another blog (and the National Law Journal) seems to indicate that Big Law = firms of NLJ 250+. Any thoughts on the difference? Are those from 100-250 just as good for salary/work experience?

Yes, I realize that the Law Journal excludes clerkships, which are hugely valuable.)

The NLJ 250 is the 250 biggest firms, the smallest of which has about 160 attorneys. The ABA collects data based on placement into firms of 100-250, 250-500, and 501+. Given this, the data from the NLJ 250 and the ABA data are hard to match up. It's generally assumed that most firms of greater than 100 attorneys pay well and even if they don't quite make the NLJ 250 are as good as the typical firm in the bottom of that list. This isn't always true, of course, but including the non-NLJ 250 firms of greater than 100+ lawyers in the list of good outcomes is a safer assumption than not including them. Having said that most T-14 schools place a very small percentage into firms of 100-250, so whether you include them or not doesn't make a big difference.

Ruxin1 wrote: I believe someone, Kurst? made a graph of the schools of 50+ with federal clerkships. Which I think is important because a lot of southern markets have solid, smaller firms.

dingbat wrote: I've looked at placement data as far back as 2005 (admittedly, more for curiosity; 2008 2011 or older is irrelevant)

Tiago Splitter wrote:

Big Dog wrote:Great stuff, thank you.

My question has to do with the threshold of law firms 100+.

Another blog (and the National Law Journal) seems to indicate that Big Law = firms of NLJ 250+. Any thoughts on the difference? Are those from 100-250 just as good for salary/work experience?

Yes, I realize that the Law Journal excludes clerkships, which are hugely valuable.)

The NLJ 250 is the 250 biggest firms, the smallest of which has about 160 attorneys. The ABA collects data based on placement into firms of 100-250, 250-500, and 501+. Given this, the data from the NLJ 250 and the ABA data are hard to match up. It's generally assumed that most firms of greater than 100 attorneys pay well and even if they don't quite make the NLJ 250 are as good as the typical firm in the bottom of that list. This isn't always true, of course, but including the non-NLJ 250 firms of greater than 100+ lawyers in the list of good outcomes is a safer assumption than not including them. Having said that most T-14 schools place a very small percentage into firms of 100-250, so whether you include them or not doesn't make a big difference.

Yukos wrote:

Tiago Splitter wrote:

Big Dog wrote:Great stuff, thank you.

My question has to do with the threshold of law firms 100+.

Another blog (and the National Law Journal) seems to indicate that Big Law = firms of NLJ 250+. Any thoughts on the difference? Are those from 100-250 just as good for salary/work experience?

Yes, I realize that the Law Journal excludes clerkships, which are hugely valuable.)

The NLJ 250 is the 250 biggest firms, the smallest of which has about 160 attorneys. The ABA collects data based on placement into firms of 100-250, 250-500, and 501+. Given this, the data from the NLJ 250 and the ABA data are hard to match up. It's generally assumed that most firms of greater than 100 attorneys pay well and even if they don't quite make the NLJ 250 are as good as the typical firm in the bottom of that list. This isn't always true, of course, but including the non-NLJ 250 firms of greater than 100+ lawyers in the list of good outcomes is a safer assumption than not including them. Having said that most T-14 schools place a very small percentage into firms of 100-250, so whether you include them or not doesn't make a big difference.

How does boutique placement fit into this? If you consider placement into all boutiques (many/most by definition excluded from these lists) would that include enough students to meaningfully change these stats? For Yale at least it seems like boutique placement would be noticeable.

(I realize it would be impossible to capture students going to boutiques in a table like this, I'm just wondering if the very top schools are being a little undersold)

JO 14 wrote:

dingbat wrote: I've looked at placement data as far back as 2005 (admittedly, more for curiosity; 2008 2011 or older is irrelevant)

JO 14 wrote:If you like older stats, great. Tune into the history channel.