Overall legal employment for the Class of 2021 improves significantly, with large law firm and public interest placement growing

Despite an ongoing pandemic, disrupted legal education, challenging bar exams, remote interviews, and the like, the red hot legal market benefited the Class of 2021. The trends were quite positive. Below are figures for the ABA-disclosed data (excluding Puerto Rico’s three law schools). These are ten-month figures from March 15, 2022 for the Class of 2021.

	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

The placement is still quite good. There was an increase of nearly 2500 full-time, long-term bar passage-required jobs year-over year, and the graduating class size was the largest since 2016. It yielded a placement of 74.8%. J.D. advantage jobs increased somewhat, too, perhaps consistent with an overall hot market.

It’s astonishing to compare the placement rates from the Class of 2012 to the present,. from 56% to 75%. And it’s almost entirely attributable to the decline in class size.

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

FTLT	Class of 2020	Class of 2021	Net	Delta
Solo	260	234	-26	-10.0%
2-10	4,948	5,205	257	5.2%
11-25	1,755	2,004	249	14.2%
26-50	1,010	1,218	208	20.6%
51-100	856	1,003	147	17.2%
101-205	1,001	1,143	142	14.2%
251-500	1,030	1,108	78	7.6%
501+	5,073	5,740	667	13.1%
Business/Industry	2,546	3,070	524	20.6%
Government	3,189	3,492	303	9.5%
Public Interest	2,284	2,573	289	12.7%
Federal Clerk	1,226	1,189	-37	-3.0%
State Clerk	1,938	2,094	156	8.0%
Academia/Education	269	328	59	21.9%

The trend continues last years uptick in public interest placement, which is not an outlier. Public interest job placement is up over 80% 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. Sole practitioners continue to slide (they were in the low 300s not long ago in raw placement).

Additionally, extremely large law firm placement continues to boom. Placement is up more than 2000 graduates in the last several years, approaching 6000.

I wondered if government and clerkship declines last year may have been attributable to the pandemic, and it appears that employment has rebounded in these categories.

Some figures have been updated to correct errors.