Stat Of The Week: Law School Grades Do Not Correlate With Partnership Prospects

A report from Harvard Law School contains some very interesting findings.

onMay 15, 2015 at 2:15 PMMay 19, 2015 at 11:43 PM

Earlier this week, Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession released a preliminary report, “The Women and Men of Harvard Law School,” on a survey of HLS graduates in the classes of 1975, 1985, 1995 and 2000. Their data is full of interesting findings. For example, it appears Harvard Law grads are actually slightly more likely to leave the practice of law than JDs as a whole: 28 percent of HLS grads from these classes no longer practice, compared to the overall 24 percent non-practicing grads identified by the ABA’s After The JD study.

In exploring their data in order to examine the legal profession’s gender gap, the authors happened upon a perhaps surprising absence of correlation between law school grades and law firm partnership prospects for HLS alumni:

[W]e examine another widely held belief about law firms: that success in these institutions is highly correlated with law school performance. Although less commonly stated today, this assumption has historically been implicitly relied upon to explain differences in the success of women and men in these institutions. If women are less likely to make partner than men, the implication is that they must have been less―qualified to do so on the basis of their entering credentials.

We find no support for any aspect of this story in our data. Not only is there no difference between the grades of the women and men in our sample who have become partners in law firms, there is also no difference between the grades of those who have become partners in law firms and those who have not.