Past employment information Forum

[Moneytrees]

I'm interested in doing some research regarding pre-Great Recession employment data. Is there somewhere where I can find employment information from the mid 2000's?

[Tiago Splitter]

I'm interested in doing some research regarding pre-Great Recession employment data. Is there somewhere where I can find employment information from the mid 2000's?

http://www.nalp.org/recentgraduates

[Moneytrees]

Thank you, much appreciated.

[Moneytrees]

Is the most recent employment information out? I know it will be published on Law School Transparency by May or so, but I'd like to be able to take a look at the most current data before I commit to a school.

[Tiago Splitter]

Is the most recent employment information out? I know it will be published on Law School Transparency by May or so, but I'd like to be able to take a look at the most current data before I commit to a school.

They've pushed back the reporting timeline to ten months after graduation, so we'll start seeing reports on school websites sometime after 3/15

[Moneytrees]

Interesting. Why change it to 10 months? Did schools think a 1 month difference will help bolster their employment stats?

[Tiago Splitter]

Interesting. Why change it to 10 months? Did schools think a 1 month difference will help bolster their employment stats?

yup. They wanted to push it back further but LST and others kept it from going too far, arguing that getting it out in time for the current 0L's to use it in decision making was important.

Schools with poor employment stats often say that the numbers aren't fair because many of their students get jobs more than 9 months after graduation. But to date not a single one has voluntary released this kind of employment information.

[Moneytrees]

Tiago, I have a question about the NLJ 250 rankings. I know you've stated that they are incomplete. Do they not consider placement to firms with 101 to 250 attorneys in their rankings? In their 2010 rankings, for instance, they have BU at 30% placement, while Law School Transparency shows a 37% placement.

The reason I'm confused is because for the same year, NLJ shows that BC had a 33.5% placement, and law school transparency shows that it had 34% (the two numbers match up, essentially). I'm just trying to get a sense of how we should be using NLJ's rankings, which are one of the few sources of data for job placement prior to 2009.

[Tiago Splitter]

There are two problems:

1) Sometimes firms within the top 250 aren't included, because the firm didn't respond to NLJ's survey and NLJ couldn't find it out through any other sources.

2) The NLJ 250 survey only covers the 250 biggest firm, the smallest of which is like 160 attorneys. So placement into firms between 101-160 won't be counted on that list. This latter reason typically won't have a huge impact as these firms aren't usually doing a ton of hiring, but it can change things on the margins.

Ultimately I don't think you should put too much weight on class of 2014 employment stats when making your decisions. Several years worth of data is always better.