Top Law Schools

They used to have statistics on all of the law schools - the class size, number of graduates, ethnic/gender statistics, percentage of students receiving scholarships or grants/median scholarship or grant offered, faculty/library information, and more. Now it appears they got rid of it. Now they only have basic, vague descriptions provided directly from the law schools and a link to ABA employment stats and the school websites I guess. Did LSAC stop compiling basic statistical information from the law schools? If so, why? Did they just get too lazy? Did they think people need LESS information about law schools for perspective students!? Given the economy and legal market, the opposite is certainly true. Maybe I'm just not finding it on their website or not looking in the right place. I used to use this information and rely on it for basic data but now it's gone. Did anyone else notice this change or know why it happened?

Just search for each school's ABA required disclosures (509 report).

wheatbar wrote:They used to have statistics on all of the law schools - the class size, number of graduates, ethnic/gender statistics, percentage of students receiving scholarships or grants/median scholarship or grant offered, faculty/library information, and more. Now it appears they got rid of it. Now they only have basic, vague descriptions provided directly from the law schools and a link to ABA employment stats and the school websites I guess. Did LSAC stop compiling basic statistical information from the law schools? If so, why? Did they just get too lazy? Did they think people need LESS information about law schools for perspective students!? Given the economy and legal market, the opposite is certainly true. Maybe I'm just not finding it on their website or not looking in the right place. I used to use this information and rely on it for basic data but now it's gone. Did anyone else notice this change or know why it happened?

I actually just emailed my rep with LSAC about this earlier this week. I was really disappointed that this year's version of the Official Guide is basically just a list of law schools with a geographic search function. If not for the GPA/LSAT search, it pretty much would be no more useful than a Google search. What really peeved me was that the two links from each school's page are "ABA Statistics" and "Law School Website". The ABA stats pages SHOULD be the 509 report or the page on a school's website where it is hosted (since there are required disclosures in addition to what's in the 509), but it's not. It links to the ABA's list of schools, which then links to...(wait for it) the law schools' home pages. Exact same place as the other link.

I'm not sure why this change was made, but I do remember discussion between LSAC and the ABA regarding indemnification and waiver of liability for the data submitted by law schools. This was in the wake of the Illinois and Villanova scandals and in the context of implementing the "certification" process (of admissions data) so I imagined it had something to do with LSAC not wanting to be sued/found liable for publishing stats that ended up being false.

I'm with you, though. The previous version was WAY helpful because you could see most of the numbers in a single table and compare schools. Now you just see the name of the school and have to look up all the info individually. LST has picked up that slack, but they make various editorial adjustments to the employment numbers. Not saying they shouldn't or should, just that if I was LSAC I'd want to have an avenue where the unadulterated stats were available on my own website and not leave it up to other 3rd parties who might have an agenda that is not in keeping with my goals/philosophy. (I think if they'd released all this info 30 years ago then USNWR rankings wouldn't have been able to become what it has, which started b/c they were basically the only ones willing to spend the money to do their own survey. But I digress...)

Dean Perez