As noted earlier this week, H. Rodgin Cohen, the eminent Sullivan & Cromwell partner and certainly one of the great lawyers of his generation, recently gave an interview with Bloomberg BNA in which he said some encouraging things about the prospects of non-“T14” law graduates as elite firm lawyers. Alas, Cohen’s remarks don’t seem to have much of a connection to reality.
On the topic of law student recruiting, Cohen declared, “Most young people when coming here are amazed at how many — what I would call non-traditional law school graduates that we have as partners, and not just as associates.”
Here are a couple of fun facts to put this in context:
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- The percentage of S&C partners hailing from T14 schools is 83.2% (excluding S&C partners who hold law degrees from non-U.S. law schools).
- There are only 20 non-T14 schools with alumni who are current S&C partners, with an average of 1.5 partners from each school (George Washington has the most, with four).
The S&C partners from non-T14 law schools — “non-traditional” in Cohen’s parlance — are clearly both rare and very thinly spread out. The only thing amazing about this is that anybody would be “amazed.”