10 Law Schools Most Likely To Help You Land Jobs As Lawyers

How did your law school do in terms of placing graduates in preferred positions?

Entry-level employment for graduates of ABA-accredited law schools increased in 2014, but if you read between the lines, you’ll see that demand for new lawyers is still completely flat, if not worse than before. The actual number of jobs obtained by members of the class of 2014 decreased by 2 percent when compared to the class of 2013. The job market only looks better at first glance because law schools are graduating smaller classes.

That being the case, how can you make sure that you’ll put your law degree to work after graduation? No matter how much you pad your résumé with extraneous activities, honors, and awards, in today’s job market, the one thing that will all but ensure that you get a job as a lawyer after graduating from law school is prestige — recent data on job placements drives that point home especially hard.

These days, the “gold standard” for lawyer jobs are ones that are full-time, long-term, require bar passage, and aren’t funded by recent graduates’ own law schools. In the past, law schools pumped up their employment statistics by paying graduates to work in jobs that were allegedly full-time and long-term where bar passage was required, but as it turns out, those types of jobs actually decreased in 2014 — just 3.6 percent of recent graduates held jobs like these, compared to 4 percent in 2013. Yay, we suppose, but again, we shouldn’t really be celebrating this when it’s a result of having a smaller class to employ.

According to research conducted by the National Law Journal, 10 law schools surpassed all others when it came to placing their graduates in preferred, “gold standard” jobs. Which law schools came out on top? Unsurprisingly, they’re some of the best in the country. Here are the 10 law schools most likely to help grads land jobs as lawyers:

  1. Penn Law: 91.37 percent of class of 2014 employed in LT/FT jobs as lawyers
  2. Cornell Law: 90.05 percent
  3. Duke Law: 87.91 percent
  4. Columbia Law: 87.18 percent
  5. Chicago Law: 87.14 percent
  6. NYU Law: 86.01 percent
  7. Harvard Law: 85.49 percent
  8. UC Berkeley Law: 85.37 percent
  9. Stanford Law: 85.03 percent
  10. UVA Law: 84.81 percent

As you can see, the vast majority of the elite T14 is represented on this list. What happened to the rest of the law schools that supposedly reign supreme in terms of prestige? On a list of the top 30 schools that assisted graduates in obtaining these “gold standard” jobs, Michigan clocks in at No. 11 (81.79 percent) and Northwestern comes in at No. 14 (78.35 percent), while Yale and Georgetown are nowhere to be found.

Instead, Georgetown appears on the list of the law schools with the highest percentage of graduates employed in jobs funded by their own law schools. With 14.22 percent of its class of 2014 employed in such jobs, GULC comes in fifth place on that list. We suppose that’s just one of the reasons why Georgetown continues to put the 14 in T14.

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Yale, on the other hand, is sitting pretty in second place behind Stanford on the list of the law schools that place the highest percentage of graduates in federal clerkships, with 25.65 percent of its most recent class employed in such jobs. Stanford can be proud that it finally beat Yale at something important for once.

How did your law school do in terms of placing graduates in preferred positions? You can find out here, at the ABA’s Law School Employment Database. All you have to do is select your school, generate the report, and proceed to celebrate or hang your head in shame.

Law Graduates’ Job Rate Rises [National Law Journal]
Charts: Where the Jobs Are [National Law Journal]

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