Inside: New York V100 statistics by law school
Posted: Mon Oct 26, 2009 8:20 pm
Without going into too much detail, I’m doing an economics project right now as part of a required undergraduate course. I chose a topic that relates to law school ranking and placement.
I thought I’d share some of my data in the hope that it would be useful for some TLSers.
This information is the amount of associates from the Class of 2007 and 2008 at V100 firm offices in New York City, categorized by law school.
Methodology:
I used the newest version of the Vault 100, located here. For those of you who don’t know, Vault is a “high powered career” job hunting company. The V100 attempts to rank law firms by prestige, and is often cited on TLS. V100 firms can be considered biglaw, though they're not the only biglaw firms.
I was curious about which law schools V100 firms hired their associates from. What I did was access their websites, and click through the attorney bios (probably 20,000 of them). I looked for associates who graduated with JDs in 2007 and 2008. I chose these two years in order to have a sample large enough to get a wide variety of schools, but yet recent enough for these to be the first firm jobs for graduates, so their only qualifications are which school they attended. About 80 out of the 100 firms met the following criteria: an office in New York and detailed bio information with the institution and year of graduation.
I then compared each school’s number of V100 hires in 2007 and 2008 with the estimated combined size of the two classes. I used the LSAC official guide to get the graduating class size. The 2010 guide, for which the data was gathered in Fall 2008 has the number of JDs awarded in 2007, but I don’t have the data for 2008, so I just doubled it to get the estimated size. I then divided the total number of V100 hires by the combined total of graduates in those years to get a percentage from each school that went on to work for a V100.
Note that this data is only for the New York City offices of the firms.
The Data:
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Schools in NYC, plus Cornell and Hofstra (right outside of NYC), are in bold. Overall I found ~2135 associates who graduated in 2007 or 2008 with a JD.
Conclusions, Tidbits, etc: Fordham is a BEAST (or at least it was in 2007 and 2008). Fordham's data compares favorably with Columbia, NYU, and Cornell. However, in addition to the fact that some of these hires were before the last few rounds of layoffs/hiring freezes, you have to note that Fordham grads overwhemingly stay in New York. In comparison, for example, 65% of NYU grads stay. As a top-30 school and the highest ranked non-T14 in the market, Fordham placed very well in NYC, as it should.
Cardozo and Brooklyn law also placed very well, which will no doubt surprise some people. It surprised me, because I didn't really know anything about them. Perhaps the biggest surprises are St. Johns, Hofstra, and New York Law School (not to be confused with NYU). I did, however, notice that many of the V100 associates from these schools were members of law review or other journals. (Which isn't a surprise)
Aside from those coming from Columbia, NYU, Cornell, and Penn, the number of T14 grads working in V100 firms in New York are relatively low. However, much of this can be attributed to self-selection, as it could be reasonably assumed that they're either not working or firms or working in a different market. In addition, it is likely that some T14 grads have access to options that could be better, such as clerkships.
Overall, none of the data (aside from maybe Brooklyn and Cardozo) is really that surprising. Just thought I'd share. I might have committed some errors, either in the data gathering itself or the calculations.
Please post feedback, thoughts, etc (a simple 'thank you' or 'you're an idiot' is fine). I'm gonna continue to work on this, and eventually include all V100 firm offices.
PS: Can anybody point me to the 2009 USNWR rankings? (not the current one)
I thought I’d share some of my data in the hope that it would be useful for some TLSers.
This information is the amount of associates from the Class of 2007 and 2008 at V100 firm offices in New York City, categorized by law school.
Methodology:
I used the newest version of the Vault 100, located here. For those of you who don’t know, Vault is a “high powered career” job hunting company. The V100 attempts to rank law firms by prestige, and is often cited on TLS. V100 firms can be considered biglaw, though they're not the only biglaw firms.
I was curious about which law schools V100 firms hired their associates from. What I did was access their websites, and click through the attorney bios (probably 20,000 of them). I looked for associates who graduated with JDs in 2007 and 2008. I chose these two years in order to have a sample large enough to get a wide variety of schools, but yet recent enough for these to be the first firm jobs for graduates, so their only qualifications are which school they attended. About 80 out of the 100 firms met the following criteria: an office in New York and detailed bio information with the institution and year of graduation.
I then compared each school’s number of V100 hires in 2007 and 2008 with the estimated combined size of the two classes. I used the LSAC official guide to get the graduating class size. The 2010 guide, for which the data was gathered in Fall 2008 has the number of JDs awarded in 2007, but I don’t have the data for 2008, so I just doubled it to get the estimated size. I then divided the total number of V100 hires by the combined total of graduates in those years to get a percentage from each school that went on to work for a V100.
Note that this data is only for the New York City offices of the firms.
The Data:
--ImageRemoved--
Schools in NYC, plus Cornell and Hofstra (right outside of NYC), are in bold. Overall I found ~2135 associates who graduated in 2007 or 2008 with a JD.
Conclusions, Tidbits, etc: Fordham is a BEAST (or at least it was in 2007 and 2008). Fordham's data compares favorably with Columbia, NYU, and Cornell. However, in addition to the fact that some of these hires were before the last few rounds of layoffs/hiring freezes, you have to note that Fordham grads overwhemingly stay in New York. In comparison, for example, 65% of NYU grads stay. As a top-30 school and the highest ranked non-T14 in the market, Fordham placed very well in NYC, as it should.
Cardozo and Brooklyn law also placed very well, which will no doubt surprise some people. It surprised me, because I didn't really know anything about them. Perhaps the biggest surprises are St. Johns, Hofstra, and New York Law School (not to be confused with NYU). I did, however, notice that many of the V100 associates from these schools were members of law review or other journals. (Which isn't a surprise)
Aside from those coming from Columbia, NYU, Cornell, and Penn, the number of T14 grads working in V100 firms in New York are relatively low. However, much of this can be attributed to self-selection, as it could be reasonably assumed that they're either not working or firms or working in a different market. In addition, it is likely that some T14 grads have access to options that could be better, such as clerkships.
Overall, none of the data (aside from maybe Brooklyn and Cardozo) is really that surprising. Just thought I'd share. I might have committed some errors, either in the data gathering itself or the calculations.
Please post feedback, thoughts, etc (a simple 'thank you' or 'you're an idiot' is fine). I'm gonna continue to work on this, and eventually include all V100 firm offices.
PS: Can anybody point me to the 2009 USNWR rankings? (not the current one)