Overall legal employment for the Class of 2023 improves slightly, with large law firm and public interest placement growing

That is literally the same headline I had for the class of 2022, but it’s another year of incremental improvement. Outcomes improved incrementally once again. Below are figures for the ABA-disclosed data (excluding Puerto Rico’s three law schools). These are ten-month figures from March 15, 2024 for the Class of 2023.

	Graduates	FTLT BPR	Placement	FTLT JDA
Class of 2012	45,751	25,503	55.7%	4,218
Class of 2013	46,112	25,787	55.9%	4,550
Class of 2014	43,195	25,348	58.7%	4,774
Class of 2015	40,205	23,895	59.4%	4,416
Class of 2016	36,654	22,874	62.4%	3,948
Class of 2017	34,428	23,078	67.0%	3,121
Class of 2018	33,633	23,314	69.3%	3,123
Class of 2019	33,462	24,409	72.9%	2,799
Class of 2020	33,926	24,006	70.8%	2,514
Class of 2021	35,310	26,423	74.8%	3,056
Class of 2022	35,638	27,607	77.5%	2,734
Class of 2023	34,848	27,828	79.9%	2,167

Placement continues to be very good. There was an increase of over a few hundred full-time, long-term bar passage-required jobs year-over-year, and the graduating class size was dipped a bit. Those factors combined for a placement rate of 79.9%. J.D. advantage jobs decreased somewhat, perhaps consistent with a hot law firm market last year.

It’s remarkable to compare the placement rates from the Class of 2012 to the present, from 56% to 80%. And it’s largely attributable to the decline in class size.

Here’s some comparison of the year-over-year categories.

FTLT	Class of 2022	Class of 2023	Net	Delta
Solo	160	174	14	8.7%
2-10	5,070	4,751	-319	-6.3%
11-25	2,115	2,047	-68	-3.2%
26-50	1,360	1,340	-20	-1.5%
51-100	1,175	1,157	-18	-1.5%
101-205	1,246	1,234	-12	-1.0%
251-500	1,145	1,223	78	6.8%
501+	6,137	6,360	223	3.6%
Business/Industry	2,797	2,236	-561	-20.1%
Government	3,591	3,766	175	4.9%
Public Interest	2,875	2,991	116	4.0%
Federal Clerk	1,130	1,182	52	4.6%
State Clerk	2,053	2,067	14	0.7%
Academia/Education	375	367	-8	-2.1%

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The trend continues a longstanding uptick in public interest placement, which is not an outlier. Public interest job placement is up over 100% since the Class of 2017. These eye-popping number continue to rise. It is likely not an understatement to say that law students are increasingly oriented toward public interest, and that there are ample funding opportunities in public interest work to sustain these graduates. (I include a visualization of the trend of raw placement into these jobs here.)

Sole practitioners continue to slide significantly (they were in the low 300s not long ago in raw placement).

Additionally, large law firm placement continues to boom. Placement is up more than thousands graduates in the last several years. Placement in firms with at least 101 attorneys is around 8800. A full 25% of all law school graduates landed in a “Big Law” firm, and more than 30% of those who were employed in a full-time, long-term, bar passage-required job landed in a “Big Law” firm. (Charts showing both the raw placement and the percentage of graduates are included here in another visualization (charting both on two different axes to see similar trends).

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How did law schools and law firms survive the purported “death of Big Law”? Well, Big Law seems to be doing better than ever. It’s not clear we’ll have as hot a market for this year’s class, but it’s something to watch.

One slightly interesting observation is a sharp decline in “business” placement. These tend to be JD advantage positions, and if there’s a decline in JD advantage placement we’d expect to see a decline here, too, but it seems more significant than just JD advantage jobs.

Federal clerkship placement improved a bit but has remained mostly steady.

There’s a lot more to examine in light of USNWR methodology changes, but I’ll save that for another post.