Top Law Schools

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

More info and updates over in this thread ...

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/

csc2law wrote: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/

What % of the total population of lawyers in CA is represented in this DB? Very useful btw...

What % of the total population of lawyers in CA is represented in this DB? Very useful btw...

Thanks. Good point. I 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. It should be (at least temporarily) complete within ten days or so.

There are over 160,000 members of the CA Bar! Wow.

-csc2law

csc2law wrote:

What % of the total population of lawyers in CA is represented in this DB? Very useful btw...

Thanks. Good point. I 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. It should be (at least temporarily) complete within ten days or so.

There are over 160,000 members of the CA Bar! Wow.

-csc2law

You know what would be cool? If you could enter a law school and see a graph with different colorings by county to indicate concentration of alums. Of course the raw data is the first step. But that might be your version 2.0.

Yeah, good idea.

All right, so version 2 has a custom report generator with the ability to display pie charts: For example, Counties per Law school.

Will post more info about it later.

csc2law wrote:Yeah, good idea.

All right, so version 2 has a custom report generator with the ability to display pie charts: For example, Counties per Law school.

Will post more info about it later.

Also, it would be nice if the state/school map had click through capability, so you see a list of attorneys in that county. Next step would be to have a drop down menu of all the employers that employ graduates of that school. The main thing here is to have a "sole practitioner" category or something like that so that there aren't a gazillion employers per county.

The graph looks good but I was thinking more along the lines of a map.

It also might be useful to have out of state data...

Also, it would be nice if the state/school map had click through capability, so you see a list of attorneys in that county.

Google's charting API doesn't allow linking from the chart segments, but the links in the list underneath each chart do what you're talking about.

Next step would be to have a drop down menu of all the employers that employ graduates of that school. The main thing here is to have a "sole practitioner" category or something like that so that there aren't a gazillion employers per county.

Not much I can do there, given the limitations of the Bar Association's database. Solo lawyers are sometimes listed as "Attorney at Law", sometimes they have some business name based on their actual name, and often just their street address is listed. I suppose that kind of match could be grouped in as an "other" category, but it would be pretty fuzzy. There seem to be a number of errors/inconsistencies in the Bar's data, and I have a suspicion that relying on implied rather than explicit information would magnify those a bit too much.

The graph looks good but I was thinking more along the lines of a map.

Ack. Too much work.

It also might be useful to have out of state data...

The Bar database doesn't track county data for out-of-state addresses (they're all marked 'Non-California'), but out-of-state cities do show up all right, e.g. in http://californiabar.globl.org/report.p ... 0&g=2&pp=5

Thanks for the feedback.

-csc2law

And of course, there are much more fun reports, such as (from the other thread about this):

Which schools lead the state in disbarred graduates?

Where not to work if you want to avoid Harvard grads

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.

The only downside is that these figures don't really show hiring preferences, as you don't know the total number of people who wanted to go to these places. for example I am from So Cal and considering Columbia. for me these figures don't mean much because I don't know how many Columbia law students are even trying to get into the California market (which is likely small).

True. The best you can get is some firms that clearly favor a particular school, e.g. a few of the fancy firms that seem to select disproportionately from Stanford.

In your case, you can at least find out which firms have hired Columbia grads in the past (and may be more likely to in the future).

At some point you should sift through the data and combine duplicate employer records. For instance, in the current data "Ofc of the District Attorney" is separate from "Office of the District Attorney." There are many other examples.

Yeah, I plan to do it once the first run through the database is done.

It's so confusing having two of these threads with the same name

.

Just a heads up that apparently the 162,000 member number is for active members of the California Bar, not the overall total. So that pushes back the completion date for my site by a few days.

More than 162,000 attorneys actively licensed to practice in the state. That means every person in the state could have their own personal , dedicated lawyer for almost two days a year. Even infants. An overgeneralization sure, and yes some of them don't work in CA, but still...

Thought I'd let you all know that my spidering program has finished scanning through the Bar's website. That means http://californiabar.globl.org/ has has (for the moment) a complete view of the California Bar membership.

This includes:

• 210,039 member records (152,455 currently active)
• 14,848 Hastings alumni
• Graduates of 331 different law schools and 1,677 undergraduate institutions
• 34,808 organizations/firms (not counting small private practices)

Things I noticed today:

• Beverly Hills (population 35,000) has as many disbarred lawyers as all of Sacramento (population near 500,000). This is not surprising.
• Fewer than half of Stanford Law students went to college in California

I also added the ability to exclude specific terms and include only active members on the report generator.

Anyway, let me know if you spot any problems. I know that some of the smaller firms may still have inconsistent naming, but hopefully only a few. The automation to fix that isn't smart enough to fix certain things. If you come across one, feel free to contact me.

-csc2law

Just bumping this for those who didn't know about it...

This is great. Thanks!

So much for undergrad not mattering. It seems like you have to go to Berkeley UG to improve your chances of going to law school.

Thank you so so much! I am going to law school because I want to work in a specific gov't office in CA. This helps me figure out my best options. Thank you!

Amazing job!

Bumping. Has OP been updating the database?

The Brainalist wrote:This is great. Thanks!

So much for undergrad not mattering. It seems like you have to go to Berkeley UG to improve your chances of going to law school.

FWIW, Berkeley UG doesn't help much either.