Fifty-eight percent of the new USNWR law school rankings turn on three highly-volatile categories: employment 10 months after graduation, first-time bar passage, and ultimate bar passage.

Because USNWR releases its rankings in the spring, at the same time the ABA releases new data on these categories, the USNWR law school rankings are always a year behind. This year’s data include the ultimate bar passage rate for the Class of 2019, the first-time bar passage rate for the Class of 2021, and the employment outcomes of the Class of 2021.

We can quickly update all that data with this year’s data—Class of 2020 ultimate bar passage rate, Class of 2022 first-time bar passage, and Class of 2022 employment outcomes (which we have to estimate and reverse engineer, so there’s some guesswork). Those three categories are 58% of next year’s rankings.

And given that the other 42% of the rankings are much less volatile, we can simply assume this year’s data for next year’s and have, within a couple of ranking slots or so, a very good idea of where law schools will be. (Of course, USNWR is free to, and perhaps likely to (!), tweak its methodology once again next year. Some volatility makes sense, because it reflects responsiveness to new data and changed conditions; too much volatility tends to undermine the credibility of the rankings as it would point toward arbitrary criteria and weights that do not meaningfully reflect changes at schools year over year.) Some schools, of course, will see significant changes to LSAT medians, UGPA medians, student-faculty ratios, and so on relative to peers. And the peer scores may be slightly more volatile than years past if schools change their behavior yet again.

But, again, this is a first, rough cut of what the new (and very volatile) methodology may yield. (It’s also likely to be more accurate than my projections for this year, which involved significant guessing about methodology.) High volatility and compression mean bigger swings in any given year. Additionally, it means that smaller classes are more susceptible to larger swings (e.g., a couple of graduates whose bar or employment outcomes change are more likely to change the school’s position than larger schools).

Here’s the early projections. (Where there are ties, they are sorted by score, which is not reported here.)

UPDATE July 2023: Due to an error on my part, some data among schools with “S” beginning in their name was transposed in some places. Additionally, some other small data figures have been corrected and cleaned up. The data has been corrected, and the chart has been updated.