Top Law Schools

This thread,

http://www.top-law-schools.com/forums/v ... 6&t=112056

prompted me to ask a question I've always wondered about: how many lawyers graduate every year in the United States? In Canada, I know that just over 2300 lawyers graduate with common law degrees every year; I don't know about civil lawyers from Quebec schools, and am ashamed to say that I don't even know if the Quebec LL.L. is a first degree or not. If it is, then they could possibly be turning out that number all by themselves, but then those students don't take the LSAT, and what I'm really wondering about is LSAT percentiles. Assuming 150,000 people took the test this year, which would be a record (I don't have the actual number), if the top half all get to go to law school, that's 75,000 people; minus the 2300 in Canada and, let's generously assume, another 700 at universities in Australia like Melbourne and Monash, that's 72,000 American J.D. admits in any given year.

How is that even possible?

Likely not. There are 550,000 lawyers in America (which is already a horrifyingly large number). Probably no more than 20-25,000 annually are needed to replace the retiring lawyers/grow with the rest of the population. I wonder how many people who score in the 150's decide to go on and get their law degree. It might not be worth it for most of them, to be honest.

Shrimps wrote:Likely not. There are 550,000 lawyers in America (which is already a horrifyingly large number). Probably no more than 20-25,000 annually are needed to replace the retiring lawyers/grow with the rest of the population. I wonder how many people who score in the 150's decide to go on and get their law degree. It might not be worth it for most of them, to be honest.

It's much more than that, over 40,000.

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But then, that's the question: what do they do? There's not enough demand for 43,000 new lawyers in America every year. Most newly-minted JD's probably go out on their own and get some side income doing wills and stuff, eventually dropping out of law altogether and moving to other careers.

Like there are far more people with real estate agent licenses than there are practicing RE agents.

So figure there's some substantial disparity between the number of people who graduate law school and the number of people who take over open jobs in the legal field. Some portion of that disparity gets reduced by the people who graduate law school but don't pass the bar, which is not a serious issue up at the top tier, but down at the bottom tier schools, a lot of the students either don't ever pass the bar or take a lot of attempts to pass the bar. The rest of that disparity is people who graduate law school, pass the bar, and then do something else, often because they can't get jobs in law.

Bar passage and job placement are not guaranteed for all law schools. Top tier schools brag about their good bar passage and job placement rates because lower tier schools don't necessarily get all of their graduates to pass the bar and then get a law-related job.

Anyone has the statistics on the number of freshly-minted JDs who don't pass the bar exam annually?