Law Schools

The Connection Between Bar Pass Rates And Employment Rates For Recent Law School Graduates

Won't somebody please hire law grads who can't pass the bar exam?

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Rather than small and medium-sized and public sector employees having to deal with people they have hired and then fail the bar, they just don’t don’t hire them until they get the bar license. So I do think some of the depressed employment rate is a result of this depressed bar passage rate.

— James Leipold, executive director of the National Association for Law Placement, commenting on how the higher percentage of recent law school graduates failing the bar exam may be affecting the overall entry-level legal employment rate, a statistic that is calculated 10 months after graduation.

According to new data, per Law School Transparency, 68.3 percent of the class of 2018 was employed in long-term, full-time jobs that required bar passage. This is up 2.1 percentage points from the class of 2017. The number of full-time legal jobs is more or less flat (up by only a few dozen), which is consistent with the past several years.

Staci ZaretskyStaci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

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