Is Fordham a good law school? Forum

[NewGuyT]

It's hard to know exactly what percentage of its graduating class Fordham sends to "BigLaw". When I graduated from Fordham (several years after the recession), it was about 25-33%, if you include federal clerkships. That is compared to around 40% of graduates who didn't have full time legal employment (JD required) 9 months after graduation; i.e., you were more likely to not have any job at all than you were to have a job in Big Law (or a federal clerkship). That is a terrible outcome given the cost of attendance and the limited geographic range of the school's influence.

That said,Fordham's numbers appear to have improved some in recent years; based on their ABA required disclosures for the class of 2018, their BigLaw class percentage has now peaked at about 35-40%. Even graduates employed at good mid-size firms or plaintiffs firms that don't technically fall into the "V100" can make a pretty decent living (though salaries are much more variable outside of BigLaw and probably don't come close to BigLaw lockstep). Also, even now, 20% of the class is unemployed 9 months out. That is not good.

Fordham's evening program hurts its US News ranking. They have also significantly lowered their admissions standards for the day program in the last 5 years (though to be fair, so have other schools). It used to be a 164-166-167 LSAT split, now it's more like 161-164-165. However, US News doesn't take a law school's feeder schools into account, and FLS tends to attract students from better undergraduate schools than similarly ranked schools. Hope this helps prospective law students.