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.

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.

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.