Los Angeles area V50 firm placement Forum

[ogurty]

27 V50 firms have Los Angeles area offices (including Orange County, but not San Diego or the Bay area). I searched the calbar website for attorneys in these offices and compiled data on all attorneys currently working at the office who were admitted to the bar since January 1, 2006. Data is only available for bar admissions before mid-2009, so I tried to take a snapshot of the classes of 2006-8. I did not include bar members who were listed as working for the firm, but not working at the firm's primary address (this was the case for lots of lawyers with certain firms like Latham; my first thoughts on these listings were that the lawyers were "of counsel" or very recently laid off).

The table below shows the number of graduates by school since the class of 2006 currently employed by V50 firms in LA. This info should obviously be taken with a grain of salt - it doesn't account for attrition, self-selection outside the Los Angeles area, etc. etc. etc.

School...V50 lawyers...% of 3 graduating classes
1 USC … 103 … 16.35%
2 UCLA … 113 … 11.18%
3 UC Berkeley … 53 … 6.18%
4 Stanford … 31 … 5.87%
5 Loyola … 60 … 5.00%
6 Yale … 27 … 4.50%
7 Columbia … 53 … 4.46%
8 Harvard … 73 … 4.14%
9 Chicago … 24 … 3.92%
10 NYU … 56 … 3.85%
11 Pepperdine … 18 … 3.28%
12 Michigan … 38 … 3.27%
13 Penn … 23 … 2.98%
14 Cornell … 16 … 2.78%
15 Duke … 11 … 1.77%
16 Northwestern … 13 … 1.77%
17 UC Davis … 8 … 1.52%
18 Georgetown … 27 … 1.37%
19 UT … 15 … 1.18%
20 Virginia … 13 … 1.08%
21 Boston U … 6 … 0.88%
22 Southwestern … 8 … 0.86%
23 Vanderbilt … 5 … 0.75%
24 UC Hastings … 9 … 0.75%

Conclusions:
1) The difference between USC and UCLA in v50 placement is shocking.
2) The T10 schools most likely place better than any Los Angeles area school, taking into account self-selection. 11-14, maybe not.
3) It was recently stated in this thread that the reputation of Southwestern and Loyola is identical around Los Angeles; this is but a small part of the overwhelming evidence that that statement is false.

v100 coming soon

[dogmatic slumber]

Trojan power. Boom!

(ITT: people preparing to shell out for USC feel better about themselves)

[im_blue]

Conclusions:
1) The difference between USC and UCLA in v50 placement is shocking.

A UCLA JD is more portable to SF and elsewhere on the West Coast, while USC grads are largely confined to LA. If you compared LA+SF markets, I suspect you'd see UCLA pull ahead of USC by a substantial margin.

[ogurty]

Trojan power. Boom!

(ITT: people preparing to shell out for USC feel better about themselves)

My reason for doing this was to feel better about myself for shelling out to UCLA...oops.

[dogmatic slumber]

Conclusions:
1) The difference between USC and UCLA in v50 placement is shocking.

A UCLA JD is more portable to SF and elsewhere on the West Coast, while USC grads are largely confined to LA. If you compared LA+SF markets, I suspect you'd see UCLA pull ahead of USC by a substantial margin.

Do you have numbers (or anything else) to back this up?

[lakerfanimal]

OP, thanks for compiling that and posting that!

[beachbum]

Huh, wow. I wonder how the relative placement will look (particularly between USC and UCLA) when you factor in the San Fran and San Diego markets. This is an important piece of information to have for those of us who are (or who could be) making a decision between these two schools. Thanks for putting it together.

[General Tso]

Conclusions:
1) The difference between USC and UCLA in v50 placement is shocking.

A UCLA JD is more portable to SF and elsewhere on the West Coast, while USC grads are largely confined to LA. If you compared LA+SF markets, I suspect you'd see UCLA pull ahead of USC by a substantial margin.

Do you have numbers (or anything else) to back this up?

http://californiabar.globl.org/report.p ... 0&g=2&pp=5

http://californiabar.globl.org/report.p ... 0&g=2&pp=5

USC places about 2% of its classes in SF and UCLA 4%.

By contrast, Hastings and Davis each place nearly 7% in LA. Of course, LA's legal market is significantly larger than SF's.

[Kohinoor]

The problems with this data sample make it pretty useless as a stand alone analytical tool. No offense OP.

[Viktor Vaughn]

Wow, thanks OP. This is great information for those of us looking to work in LA Biglaw. The info looks especially valuable to schools that are regional to LA. Do well at Loyola and it seems one has a shot at a top firm; for Southwestern, looks like you'd better be damn special.

If you could include all California markets, I would be ecstatic.

[Kohinoor]

Wow, thanks OP. This is great information for those of us looking to work in LA Biglaw. The info looks especially valuable to schools that are regional to LA. Do well at Loyola and it seems one has a shot at a top firm; for Southwestern, looks like you'd better be damn special.

If you could include all California markets, I would be ecstatic.

no u

[Mroberts3]

Trojan power. Boom!

(ITT: people preparing to shell out for USC feel better about themselves)

Woohoo, I'm validated! I can has job now?

I'm not even looking for biglaw, but it seems to be the only employment area with a large enough sample size to show anything definitive.

[ogurty]

The problems with this data sample make it pretty useless as a stand alone analytical tool. No offense OP.

I don't understand, do you disagree with my analysis? No one is making broad conclusory statements here. I don't think it's necessary to use this as a standalone analytical tool, what with the volumes of similar data available elsewhere, but even if it were, I think the size of the gap between the regional schools is statistically significant and analytically valuable.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I just don't understand your gripe.

[existenz]

Interesting, though similar to what I saw by looking at the cal bar site myself. Obv USC and UCLA dominate the alumni network in LA, with Loyola and Harvard also having a pretty nice showing.

Not much Mich representation, but I'm guessing a lot of that is self selection.