Law Schools

Law School Class Of 2020 Sees Employment Rate Take A Tumble Thanks To COVID-19

This isn't horrible, but it isn't great either.

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It’s been almost a year since the Class of 2020 graduated from law school. Given the dire financial straits the world was thrust into due to the coronavirus crisis, there’s been much speculation about what the employment scene would look like for this law school class. Amid unfamiliar online learning environments and canceled and repeatedly rescheduled bar examinations, would they be yet another forgotten generation of graduates, similar to those who left law school during the Great Recession? Or would they be able to come out on the other side of COVID-19, victorious in the job market?

The American Bar Association recently released employment data for the Class of 2020, so let’s find out.

According to the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, a grand total of 77.4% of 2020 graduates from accredited law schools were employed in full-time, long-term bar passage required or J.D. advantage jobs about 10 months after graduation. To break that down a bit, 69.9% were employed in jobs where bar passage was required, while 7.5% were employed in jobs where a J.D. was an advantage. That doesn’t seem too bad, per se — the last time we saw numbers remotely similar to this was in 2018 — but let’s compare these findings to the Class of 2019, so we can see what we’re dealing with here.

Back in 2019, 80.6% of graduates were employed in similar full-time, long-term jobs (72.1% in bar passage required jobs, and 8.5% in J.D. advantage jobs). We’re looking at a 3.2 percentage point loss in overall employment, a 2.2 percentage point loss in bar passage required jobs, and a 1 percentage point loss in J.D. advantage jobs. The size of the class of 2020 was about 1.4% larger than that of the class of 2019, which may have contributed to some of these percentage changes, but the actual number of the full-time, long-term professional jobs 2020 graduates versus 2019 graduates found decreased by 714 (-2.6%).

This table provided by the ABA highlights some employment developments that may have been caused by the pandemic’s impact on the hiring scene — we’re talking interesting trends like large increases in part-time employment of all varieties and a 30.5 percentage point increase in unemployed graduates.

All in all, 2020 was an off year for entry-level legal employment, but then again, it was an off year for everything. Let’s cross our fingers that the Class of 2021 has better luck when it comes to finding jobs after law school graduation.

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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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