Top Law Schools

Starting this fall.

Schools are currently releasing their doctored c/o 2009 statistics right now, but those are pretty much meaningless for ITE. Will there be any way to assess the damage to c/o 2010 at individual schools in the next three months? Any way to tell the percentage of the class that got biglaw from c/o 2010?

Choosing a law school is hard. You have to sort out the liars from the egregious liars, since each school uses different methods to lie to you about their placement. The only thing I trust are NALP statistics...nothing else. I'm hoping there will be a way to find this out before I pay my first tuition bill.

nm

thesealocust wrote:2) The market got worse, not individual schools. While the jury is still out on precisely how different 'tiers' of schools were affected as compared to one another, it's not like the order got suddenly inverted - the relative strengths of schools as per, say, the c/o 2005 NLJ/NALP data are going to remain largely the same, even if each individual school is doing (much) worse ITE.

You're assuming the market tanked uniformly across cities, which isn't true. Schools that rely on a home market that was hit particularly weakly/strongly by the economy will be in a relatively better/worse position.

Fall 2009 OCI is an outlier to the point that it's meaningless. At least, it had better be. Otherwise everybody is screwed.

ScaredWorkedBored wrote:Fall 2009 OCI is an outlier to the point that it's meaningless. At least, it had better be. Otherwise everybody is screwed.

Not everybody. YHSCCN did pretty good. The rest are iffy. But even there, it's about half.

Looking over the OP, it seems like he wants two different things. Class of 2010 is not the same as OCI 2009 (that would be Class of 2011).

Class of 2010 is more useless because, while the up-front carnage wasn't as bad for OCI 2008/summer 2009 as for OCI 2009/summer 2010, the no-offers, cold offers and year+ deferrals were much worse. It's a function of when the economy collapsed. It's also going to take a couple years to actually distill down to something useful because of the deferrals and figuring out which ones are legit and which ones are "don't call us, we'll call you."

So then how long does it take for firms to report the results of OCI 2009? This information should be available, but it's not like it's going to be published in any timely manner for potential students to use it to make an informed decision. Firms already know how many people they took from each school. When is the soonest the NALP will release this information?

I'm aware that c/o 2009 and 2010 are exceptions to the rule, but I still think it would be useful if any particular ranking group or any particular region got hit harder than the rest. I'm especially wary about schools just outside the T14, given that the scuttlebut is about how some top firms are now perhaps going to limit where they interview to fewer, but more high-ranking schools. Even within the T14, I'm thinking we might see more stratification among job opportunities. I want to be able to see the "floor" of hiring at its worst, so I can estimate where it might recover to.

Where can I find OCI data?

The expected summer class sizes are on NALP. As far as how many from what school - firms have never systematically published that information for summers.