Satisfaction with the decision to become a lawyer was actually fairly consistent across the spectrum from T14 to Tier 4
Posted: Thu Jan 13, 2022 4:00 pm
After the JD, a study that tracks the professional lives of thousands of lawyers who entered the bar around 2000 through their first 10 to 12 years after law school (the same representative group of lawyers were surveyed three times over the course of the study). It has been called the most extensive and ambitious national longitudinal study of the American legal profession ever undertaken. The study contains useful data for practicing attorneys (such as the finding that there appears to be a migration from private practice to the public interest and business sectors; also lots of data on the effects of the 2008/2009 recession), but there are also findings of interest to those trying to choose a law school.
1. Practicing attorneys that graduated from T14 schools heavily skewed toward big law with those from Tier 4 school heavily skewed toward small firms, with a correlation for schools in between.
2. Positions in federal government skew toward T14, while those in state government skew toward Tier 2, 3 and 4.
3. Fulltime lawyer salaries for T14 are loosely correlated to the GPA received; strongly correlated for Tier 2, 3, and 4.
4. An attorney with good skills in Spanish can build a prosperous niche practice that can turn into quite a prosperous solo career.
5. As we would expect, as the tier of law school attended declined, the amount of debt remaining rose.
6. Satisfaction with the decision to become a lawyer was actually fairly consistent across the spectrum from T14 to Tier 4.
7. The cohort was also fairly uniform across the spectrum from T14 to Tier 4 when asked if they felt a law degree was a good career investment.
8. The cohort was also fairly uniform across the spectrum from T14 to Tier 4 when asked if they would do it all over again, would they still have attended law school.
One concern I have is that the number of respondents decreased with time, with only about 2/3 of the wave 1 respondents responding to wave 3. This particularly could influence the findings of items 6, 7 and 8 above, as perhaps those that could not find work just stopped replying (although it could also be true that the very successful lawyers just got too busy to reply). Nonetheless, missing 1/3 of respondents will not cause a landslide of change in the findings 6, 7, and 8, and these findings are important as they imply that a decade after graduation, graduates of low-ranking schools were similarly satisfied and felt the JD was a good investment as was noted for T14 graduates.
I have pdfs of the study results and a slide show; private message me with an email address if you want those.
Links to the study:
http://www.americanbarfoundation.org/re ... summary/42
http://www.americanbarfoundation.org/re ... roject/118
https://thebarexaminer.ncbex.org/articl ... l-careers/
1. Practicing attorneys that graduated from T14 schools heavily skewed toward big law with those from Tier 4 school heavily skewed toward small firms, with a correlation for schools in between.
2. Positions in federal government skew toward T14, while those in state government skew toward Tier 2, 3 and 4.
3. Fulltime lawyer salaries for T14 are loosely correlated to the GPA received; strongly correlated for Tier 2, 3, and 4.
4. An attorney with good skills in Spanish can build a prosperous niche practice that can turn into quite a prosperous solo career.
5. As we would expect, as the tier of law school attended declined, the amount of debt remaining rose.
6. Satisfaction with the decision to become a lawyer was actually fairly consistent across the spectrum from T14 to Tier 4.
7. The cohort was also fairly uniform across the spectrum from T14 to Tier 4 when asked if they felt a law degree was a good career investment.
8. The cohort was also fairly uniform across the spectrum from T14 to Tier 4 when asked if they would do it all over again, would they still have attended law school.
One concern I have is that the number of respondents decreased with time, with only about 2/3 of the wave 1 respondents responding to wave 3. This particularly could influence the findings of items 6, 7 and 8 above, as perhaps those that could not find work just stopped replying (although it could also be true that the very successful lawyers just got too busy to reply). Nonetheless, missing 1/3 of respondents will not cause a landslide of change in the findings 6, 7, and 8, and these findings are important as they imply that a decade after graduation, graduates of low-ranking schools were similarly satisfied and felt the JD was a good investment as was noted for T14 graduates.
I have pdfs of the study results and a slide show; private message me with an email address if you want those.
Links to the study:
http://www.americanbarfoundation.org/re ... summary/42
http://www.americanbarfoundation.org/re ... roject/118
https://thebarexaminer.ncbex.org/articl ... l-careers/