Best Career Prospects

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A week ago, we mocked Princeton Review’s “Best Career Prospects” law school rankings.

We felt that any methodology that ranked Boston College Law School as a better career move than Yale Law School had to be flawed.

Brian Leiter chose to tackle this career prospects question from a simple but reasonable angle:

Where do the most elite law firms in the United States go to hire new lawyers? We started with the most recent Vault list of the most prestigious law firms in the U.S. We had to go to #24 on that list to identify fifteen super elite law firms that had the right kinds of search engines to permit efficient identification of where associates at these law firms went to law school.

From this premise, Leiter has composed a list of the best “feeder schools” for Biglaw jobs.

Results after the jump.


Leiter’s top feeder school list doesn’t look like the U.S. News law school rankings. His list simply looks at which schools elite associates went to:

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1. Columbia

2. Chicago

3. Harvard

4. NYU

5. Stanford

6. Yale

7. Cornell

Penn

9. Northwestern

10. Duke

Michigan

Leiter explains that his list highlights the fact that law firms do not slavishly follow the U.S. News rankings, even if law students do:

One thing the results indicate is how little impact U.S. News rankings are having on where the firms choose to hire. That is clearest when schools share a regional market. Boston College was, for quite some time, ranked ahead of Boston University in U.S. News, but it is quite clear that BU dominates BC at the best firms in the Northeast corridor. Although Columbia and NYU have been basically deadlocked in U.S. News for a decade now, the elite New York law firms continue to hire more from Columbia than NYU.

Knowing is half the battle.

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The Top 15 Schools From Which the Most “Prestigious” Law Firms Hire New Lawyers [Brian Leiter’s Law School Rankings via TaxProf Blog]

Earlier: Princeton Review Ranks Law Schools Too

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