Overall legal employment for the Class of 2020 declines slightly, with large law firm and public interest placement growing

Pandemic, lockdowns, delayed bar exams—there were many challenges facing the Class of 2020, whose graduations were moved online and whose job opportunities became all the more perilous. The trends were slightly negative, which is maybe impressive given those challenges. Below are figures for the ABA-disclosed data (excluding Puerto Rico’s three law schools). These are ten-month figures from March 15, 2021 for the Class of 2020.

	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

The placement is still quite good. There was a decline in just 400 bar passage-required jobs year-over year, and the graduating class size increased for the first time in several years. Those yielded a drop to 70.8%—still better than the Class of 2018. But there continues a notable decline in J.D. advantage jobs, which have dropped nearly in half in 6 years, to 2514.

We can see some of the year-over-year categories, too.

FTLT	Class of 2019	Class of 2020	Net	Delta
Solo	236	260	24	10.2%
2-10	4,761	4,948	187	3.9%
11-25	1,769	1,755	-14	-0.8%
26-50	1,075	1,010	-65	-6.0%
51-100	864	856	-8	-0.9%
101-205	1,059	1,001	-58	-5.5%
251-500	1,044	1,030	-14	-1.3%
501+	4,976	5,073	97	1.9%
Business/Industry	2,801	2,546	-255	-9.1%
Government	3,656	3,189	-467	-12.8%
Public Interest	2,146	2,284	138	6.4%
Federal Clerk	1,197	1,126	-71	-5.9%
State Clerk	2,135	1,938	-197	-9.2%
Academia/Education	296	269	-27	-9.1%

Last year’s sharp uptick in public interest placement was not an outlier. Public interest job placement is up over 50% in two years. Last year’s eye-popping number rose further. 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.

Additionally, extremely large law firm placement continues to boom. Placement is up more than 1000 graduates in the last several years, breaking 5000.

Despite a bevy of new federal judges confirmed to the bench, federal clerkship placement slid, a suggestion, perhaps, that federal judges continue to look toward clerks with experience. The drop in state clerkship and government clerkship placements might be related to the pandemic, but we’ll see if those rebound next year.