Job Searches, Law Schools

Study: Elite Law Grads Get Jobs Easier And Other Obvious Observations

Law school prestige sticks with you throughout your career, so don't underestimate its value.

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Human progress marches on unabated with the release of a new study finally closing that gap in our collective knowledge: it turns out elite law degrees help you get jobs. Does anyone have the Nobel Committee on speed dial?

The authors, Chris Rider of Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business and Giacomo Negro of Emory University’s Goizueta Business School didn’t look at first-year hiring (which would have made for a truly “dog bites man” finding), but instead focused their study on the phenomenon — all too common in the legal industry — of lawyers forced out of the cradle of Biglaw and in need of a new job. Specifically, the studied charted 220 partners from a “prominent law firm” that went out of business.

Eighty percent found new jobs at lower status firms, while only 20 percent found jobs at higher or similar status firms. Remarkably, even though partner productivity was uncorrelated with educational prestige, and even though these partners graduated from law school many years ago, the alumni from top ranked schools were the least likely to lose professional status after their firm failed.

So, despite its initial premise, this study is pretty interesting in a couple of ways. First of all, that educational prestige trumped productivity years after law school is a finding that every aspiring lawyer should consider. I cannot count the number of times some student explains that their decision to attend a lower-tier law school is going to work out because they’ll demonstrate their real worth in practice. It turns out, fairly or unfairly, that on the other side of the law school gates the firms are still more interested in the name on the front of your law school jersey than the back. Never consider the law school decision as a short-term stepping stone to your first job, only to be replaced by experience and a book of business. Investing in an elite law school is investing in markers for the qualities that got you in that door: intelligence, drive, work ethic. And don’t forget the connections and alumni pride.

Second, this study focused on a firm that was driven into the ground. Meaning the partners looking for new jobs carried, on some level, the stigma that they participated in leading a failed firm. There are a lot of ways to potentially read that factor, but it seems as though the takeaway is that an elite law degree helps a lawyer overcome any negative perception of their management skills, which would be a hell of a thing to attribute to a mere law degree.

One can only imagine what signaling power a law school has for an associate lateral. If having a book of business and the stain of a failed firm gets washed away with a top law degree, it must make someone really stand out among the otherwise fungible class of associate applicants. The moral of the story, as always, is that law school rankings may not be perfect (or they may be), but the perception of prestige stays with you long after you grab your diploma.

Now obviously, “prestige” is subjective, but the study passes the Potter Stewart test if you will — focusing on the Top 10 of the T14 and refugees from the dearly departed Brobeck. Though not everyone supports their parameters:

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“I think the prestige metric is utterly misguided,” says Jon Garon, the dean of Nova Southeastern University’s Shepard Broad Law Center.

Yeah, I’ll bet you f**king don’t. Nova Southeastern has a problem with a prestige ranking everybody! Stop the presses.

Organizational Failure and Intraprofessional Status Loss [Georgetown University / McDonough School of Business]
Graduates of elite law schools are more likely to land on their feet after job loss [Deseret News]

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