Talk To Your Law School Career Services Folks Or Risk Devaluing Your Law Degree

When career services asks you for something, there's an important reason.

Many third year law students have returned to campus after the end of a successful summer with a post-graduation job offer in hand, ready to start the “bore you to death” year of law school, when they receive a surprise email from an entity they thought they would never hear from again, Career Services. While the phrasing of the email might change from school to school, the jist is the same. CSO wants to check on your job prospects. To pull back the curtain a bit, this inquiry takes place for two main reasons. First, the people who work in Career Services are genuinely interested and invested in the students with whom they work and want to make sure they are on the right path to achieve their long-term career goals. Second, and more importantly for the purposes of this column, said employment information is needed for the myriad of reporting requirements that fall upon Career Services.

As has been mentioned numerous times in previous iterations of this column, a significant portion of time in any CSO is dedicated to collecting and reporting a host of employment statistics. Here at Vanderbilt, we use the National Association for Law Placement (NALP) Employment Report and Salary Survey — a two page form that seeks a broad range of demographic and employment data — to get a set of standardized information from all graduating students, regardless of their employment status. Not only is this information invaluable for our own records, internal tracking, and study, but it is necessary for external reporting requirements. Once compiled, employment information is sent to two organizations, NALP and the American Bar Association (ABA). These two entities, possessing markedly different constituencies and purposes, analyze and utilize the information in varying ways.

NALP looks at a student’s employment status at graduation and requires schools to provide the data as of the April subsequent to graduation (i.e., April 2019 for the Class of 2018). This information allows NALP to compile reams of statistics and research on all aspects of legal employment that should be regular reading material for not only law students but anyone considering going into the legal field.  

What the ABA is looking for in the realm of employment data is different both in terms of scope and usage. Unlike NALP, the ABA looks at student employment ten months after graduation, specifically on March 15th — this used to be nine months but changed with the Class of 2014. Not only does the ABA use this information to generate their own employment statistics for each school — the previously discussed, invaluable ABA Employment Summary — but it also forms the backbone of many law school rankings, including U.S. News and our own Above the Law rankings, the latter of which focuses on outcomes and is why employment (both the overall level and the type) constitutes 60 percent of a school’s score.

The outsized importance that the ABA employment data plays on school rankings is why I am always mystified when I hear of students (either at Vanderbilt or elsewhere) fail to inform CSO of their employment status. If a student’s employment cannot be verified, they are listed as unemployed to the ABA. This means that the overall reported employment rate for your school will fall. A drop in employment rate will have a significant impact on your school’s ranking, which we all know will have an adverse effect on the general perception of the school. So, in essence, by not reporting your employment to CSO, you are damaging the value of your own law degree.  

And indeed, student reporting is vital because the ABA standards for what qualifies as evidence of employment is remarkably strict. Outside of being listed on a legal employer’s website, which is unlikely to happen for an attorney prior to be admitted to the bar, only a NALP Survey filled out by the student serves as sufficient, standalone, proof of employment. Other representations that would seem to be unimpeachable, e.g., a graduate’s LinkedIn page, are insufficient, or at least require significant supporting documentation. And schools are rightly hesitant to cut corners on said supporting documentation as there is always the risk of an ABA employment audit, which is as pleasant as it sounds.

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So while the semester is still in the early stages, take a moment to inform CSO about your post-graduation employment plans and follow that up by completing whatever paperwork is provided in a timely fashion.  If an entire graduating class follows the example of Senate Republicans during the Kavanaugh Supreme Court hearings and waits until March 14th to drop 42,000 pages of employment surveys on Career Services, not only will you alienate the people who have dedicated themselves to providing you with employment assistance (and will continue to do so throughout your legal career), but you might well harm your own future by degrading your degree.


Nicholas Alexiou is the Director of LL.M. and Alumni Advising as well as the Associate Director of Career Services at Vanderbilt University Law School. He will, hopefully, respond to your emails at abovethelawcso@gmail.com.

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