Excess of Democracy

View Original

Legal employment outcomes in 2013

Earlier I blogged about the legal employment outcomes in California in 2013. Now that the ABA has released all of its data, I can run the same analysis for every law school (and update the now-out-of-date figures in a certain magazine's rankings). Like the California list, it includes the "full weight" positions as determined by U.S. News & World Report, which are full-time, long-term, bar passage-required or J.D.-advantage positions. It includes the 2015 USNWR peer score, the 2013 full-time, long-term, bar passage-required and J.D.-advantage positions, along with the year-over-year increase or decline in points from the 2012 rate. It then lists the raw number of students who obtained such positions, along with a parenthetical notation of how many of those positions were school-funded. The same is listed for 2012.

A few notes follow the table.

See this content in the original post

First, law school-funded positions for these types of jobs increased nearly 40%, from 659 school-funded positions in 2012 to 908 in 2013.

Second, if you wanted to be among the top schools, you had to fund jobs. The top 15 schools each funded at least 5 such positions; the top 26 schools each funded at least 1 such position.

Third, the California market is still suffering. A full 50% of the lowest-performing schools are in California. Only 5 of the California law schools make the top half of this list.