LST has made Class of 2012 job outcome data (as of 9 months after graduation) available about the 200 ABA-approved law schools. School-specific profiles and regional comparisons can be viewed on the LST Score Reports, http://lstscorereports.com. The Score Reports are a popular law school decision tool based on employment data. They are not rankings and aid students to make decisions on a local and regional basis, rather than on a meaningless national scale.

The Class of 2012 outcome data shed considerable light on how difficult the job market remains for law school graduates. These graduates fared 1% better than last year’s graduates in lawyer jobs: 56.2% of 2012 graduates were be employed in full-time, long-term lawyer jobs. Exclude jobs funded by the law schools from this figure and it is 55.1%. A devastating 27.7% were either underemployed (short-term or part-time job, or non-professional) or not employed (unemployed or pursuing an additional degree). The national non-response rate was 2.6%.

Full-time, Long-Term Legal Jobs:

The national full-time, long-term legal rate is 56.2%.

• These jobs
  • require bar passage or are judicial clerkships; and
  • require 35+ hours per week and have an expected duration of at least one year.
• At 66 law schools (33.0%), less than 50% of graduates had these legal jobs.
  • 26 schools (13.0%) had less than 40%;
  • 11 schools (5.5%) had less than 33%.
• 95 schools (47.5%) exceeded the national rate of 56.2%.
  • 50 schools (25.0%) had more than 66%;
  • 20 schools (10.0%) had more than 75%;
  • 6 schools (3.0%) had more than 90%.

Last month, the ABA agreed to further disaggregate school-funded jobs data. The new format sheds light on how many of the school-funded jobs were Bar Passaged Required, J.D. Advantage, Professional, and Non-Professional. Like last year, these categories are also broken down by whether they are full- or part-time and long- or short-term.

The national full-time, long-term legal rate, excluding school-funded jobs, is 55.1%.

• The richest schools were able to hire their struggling graduates full time and long term; only 15 schools (7.5%) had 5% or more of their graduates in long-term, full-time, school-funded jobs that required bar passage.
  • Many of these schools were top performers on the full-time, long-term rate.
  • Excluding the school-funded jobs from this rate caused five of the six schools over 90% to drop below that threshold; two of those five dropped below 80%.

Underemployed or Not Employed:

• The national rate is 27.7%.
• A graduate counts as underemployed when he or she in a non-professional job or employed in a short-term or part-time job.
• A graduate counts as not employed when he or she is unemployed or pursuing an additional advanced degree.
• 187 schools (93.5%) reported a rate greater than 10%.
• 153 schools (76.5%) had more than 20%;
• 112 schools (56.0%) had more than 25%;
• 58 schools (29.0%) had more than 33%;
• 27 schools (13.5%) had more than 40%;
• 8 schools (4.0%) had more than 50%.
• 24 schools had more underemployed and non-employed graduates than graduates employed in long-term, full-time legal jobs.

Large Firms (at least 101 attorneys):

• 12.2% of graduates were employed at large firms in full-time, long-term positions
  • Graduates seek these jobs partly because they tend to pay the highest salaries.
  • Note that not all of these jobs are associate positions. An unknown number are paralegals, administrators, and staff attorneys.
• At only 51 schools (25.5%) were more than 10% in these jobs.
  • 27 schools (13.5%) had more than 20%;
  • 14 schools (7.0%) had more than 33%;
  • 8 schools (4.0%) had more than over 50%.

Despite 2012 graduates taking 2,000 more long-term, full-time legal jobs than 2011 graduates, the percentage improvement was just 1% because there were 5.4% more 2012 graduates than in 2011. The Class of 2012 does not represent the apex for new J.D.’s either; only after the class of 2013 will the number of graduates drop, though the total still looks to be in substantial disproportion to the number of jobs available in our quickly evolving profession.

The students entering this fall (who graduate in 2016) will likely fare better on the job market because fewer prospective students are deciding to take the LSAT, to apply to law school, and to attend now that post-graduation realities are transparent. But even if every law school graduate obtained a job, the sky-high cost of legal education means that expected salaries for law school graduates portend economic hardship. For many, it will be impossible to fulfill their student loan obligations without gambling on the continuation of federal hardship programs.

Law School Transparency’s executive director, Kyle McEntee, urged caution to students planning to enroll this fall. McEntee said, “Law school is too expensive relative to job outcomes. If you plan to debt-finance your education or use hard-earned savings, seriously think twice about attending a law school without a steep discount. For the vast majority of prospective law students who have not received a sizable scholarship, it makes sense to wait for prices to drop.”

+ School profiles: http://www.lstscorereports.com/?r=schools.
+ Comparison charts: http://www.lstscorereports.com/?r=other.

Established in 2009, Law School Transparency is a nonprofit legal education policy organization. Our mission is to improve consumer information and reform the traditional law school model. We operate independently of any legal institutions, legal employers, or academic reports related to the legal market.

The Transparency Index reflects Law School Transparency’s review of law school websites, through which we analyze the employment information that law schools use to market their programs. We measure not only whether law schools meet voluntary transparency standards, but also whether they meet the requirements from ABA Standard 509.

Our project has three important parts:

• Index for our initial review period (Dec. 18, 2012 – Jan. 9, 2013)
• Live Index that reflects the state of affairs as of today
• Report on Findings

During the initial review period, we found that 78.4% (156/199) of ABA-approved law schools were not meeting the expectations set forth by Standard 509. We contacted ever school’s dean, admissions office, and career services office with an offer to help them meet our criteria. 102 law schools took us up on our offer, and to date 84 of these schools have updated the consumer information on their websites.

See also:

• Statistics
• Methodology and Definitions

Today, Law School Transparency announces an alternative to the U.S. News law school rankings: The LST Score Reports.

LST has developed the Score Reports in an effort to produce a tool to help prospective students make application and enrollment decisions, keeping in mind that each person has a different risk tolerance, financial situation, and set of career aspirations.

The Score Reports are user-friendly tools for sorting law school employment outcomes, projected costs, and admissions stats. There is a Score Report for every state (includes only schools that place graduates there), every school (called a profile), and job types. They measure job outcomes, use a regional scope, and use real terms about the outcomes to allow prospective students to make an educated decision about not just which school to attend, but whether any school happens to meet their needs.

The Score Reports are not rankings, although they do serve as an alternative to conventional law school rankings. But unlike rankings, the Score Reports do not reduce complex data to a single metric. Instead, the Score Reports focus on observable relationships to specific legal markets and job types. Only a small handful of schools have a truly national reach in job placement. The rest have a regional, in-state, or even just local reach. A decision tool should not obfuscate this reality; it should embrace it.

You can view the Score Reports, and read more about them, by following these links:

The Score Reports: http://www.lstscorereports.com
Guide to Using the Score Reports: http://www.lstscorereports.com/?r=guides&show=12
The Value of the U.S. News rankings: http://www.lstscorereports.com/?r=guides&show=13
Methodology, Published in the Journal of Legal Metrics: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2106814

Founded in 2009, Law School Transparency is a nonprofit legal education policy organization dedicated to improving consumer information and to reforming the traditional law school model. LST and its administrators operate independently of any legal institutions, legal employers, or academic reports related to the legal market. The LST Score Reports are a new project from LST Reform Central.

In a sworn statement, Karen Grant, a former career services assistant director at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, admits that she fabricated graduate employment outcomes for the class of 2006. Grant alleges that her fraud was part of a deliberate scheme by the law school’s administration to inflate its employment statistics. She also claims that her direct supervisor, Laura Weseley, former Director of Career Services, instructed her on multiple occasions to improperly record graduate employment outcomes and justified the scheme because “everybody does it” thus “it is no big deal.” TJSL could face sanctions from the American Bar Association as severe as losing accreditation.

Grant was Assistant Director of Career Services at TJSL from September 2006 to September 2007, during which she was tasked with tracking and recording employment outcomes of recent graduates. Grant is a licensed California attorney and made her sworn declaration on August 2, 2012 in connection to the class action lawsuit filed by Anna Alaburda, et al. against TJSL in 2011. (Complaint; Original Story.) Grant’s statement was filed in court last week in connection to Alaburda’s motion for sanctions.

Specifically, Grant admits that she “routinely recorded currently unemployed students as ‘employed’ if they had been employed at any time since graduation,” which is a violation of both ABA and NALP reporting guidelines. Graduates should only be recorded as employed if they are employed as of February Exhibit B, A handwritten note by Karen Grant from a meeting with Laura Weseley on Oct. 16, 2006. 15 following graduation.

Grant’s admitted actions likely mean that TJSL violated ABA Standard 509 and Interpretation 509-3. Possible sanctions under Rule 16 for violating Standard 509 include monetary penalty, censure, probation, and losing accreditation.

Paul Campos, professor of law at the University of Colorado Law School, says that “the ABA ought to be pursuing an investigation vigorously.” He continued, “if the ABA is at all serious about transparency, they will have to crack down on this.” The ABA is preparing its public comments, which will be available shortly. (Update: see below for ABA comments.)

In addition to her own admission, Grant alleges that Weseley, her then-boss, instructed her to misrecord graduate employment outcomes and justified the actions based on a belief that such practices were widespread throughout the legal education community. From Ms. Grant’s testimony (emphasis added):

4. … I was instructed to “probe” graduates because “they may say no,” meaning that graduates may indicate they were currently unemployed and I therefore needed to ask whether they had been employed any time prior to graduation.

5. … Ms. Weseley instructed me to “update ERSS prior to Feb if [unemployed] & become [employed] but not vice-versa.” … I expressed my concern at the time that it did not seem right to update graduates’ employment data only if the graduate became employed, but not if they became unemployed.

Grant continues by explaining her data recording process and Weseley’s alleged influence on it:

6. Ms. Weseley later reiterated that, when talking to students, I was to first ask if they were currently employed. If the graduate indicated he or she was not currently employed, I would then inquire whether he or she was employed at any time after graduation. If the graduate indicated he or she was employed at any time after graduation (even though currently unemployed), I was instructed to record the graduate as “employed” in TJSL’s Excel software.

7. I again expressed my concern and told Ms. Weseley that it not seem right to report currently unemployed students as “employed” merely because they had been employed at some point after graduation. Ms. Weseley responded by saying “it is no big deal, everybody does it.”

8. I followed Ms. Weseley’s instructions. I routinely recorded currently unemployed students as “employed” if they had been employed at any time since graduation. As a result, the employment data that I entered into the Excel files included currently unemployed students who were inaccurately categorized as “employed.”

It is the nature of the process that schools do not follow up with certain graduates before submitting data to NALP by the end of February. Schools begin collecting post-graduation job outcome data shortly before graduation and continue through the February 15 reporting deadline. Once a school knows that a graduate has a job, career services staffers will often cease follow-ups because they believe their time is better spent elsewhere.

However, Grant alleges that the accepted practice in the TJSL career services office, at least during her tenure, went beyond cherry picking which students to follow up with. She alleges that she participated in a scheme that guaranteed that TJSL’s employment stats would be better than the reality by affirmatively ignoring new, true, and proper outcomes of graduates whose jobs were terminated or ran their course before the reporting deadline. Grant admits that TJSL submitted false information to NALP, U.S. News, and the American Bar Association as a result of her counting as employed at nine-months any student who was employed at any time after graduation regardless of whether they had a job at that time.

A look at the statistics TJSL reported to the ABA for the class of 2006 confirms that the numbers from Grant’s spreadsheet, Exhibit D of her declaration, were submitted to the ABA. These numbers were not submitted to the ABA until after her termination in September 2007.

In an email to LST, Rudy Hasl, dean of Thomas Jefferson School of Law, questioned Grant’s reliability, disputing the accuracy of her sworn testimony and her motivations. “The law school stands behind the accuracy of the data that we submitted to the American Bar Association.” Sources report that Grant was terminated in 2007, though when asked for clarification, Dean Hasl would not comment on internal personnel matters beyond suggesting that LST “do a due diligence analysis … including the reasons for her departure from the School of Law.”

Grant’s admission marks the first on-the-record account of a law school administrator falsifying employment data. It remains to be seen whether she was a rogue employee, or whether there was a deliberate scheme by the law school to inflate the appearance of its employment outcomes. Nevertheless, her allegations of a culture within American legal education where fraudulent reporting is a legitimate strategy are sure to reignite concerns about the quality of data that schools report, how schools present data to the public, and whether the current level of public investment in legal education is appropriate in light of this culture.

UPDATE: Comment from ABA

The ABA Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar is fully committed to ensuring that law schools comply with the letter and spirit of the Standards for Approval of Law Schools and all reporting requirements. We take seriously our responsibilities for collecting and disseminating law school data, including employment data.

The actions of a few schools have called into question the integrity of all. As a consequence, the Section has been called upon to play a greater role in investigating possible non-compliance with our rules and in sanctioning non-complying schools. We regularly follow up on reports and other communications regarding possible non-compliance with the Standards that come to our attention.

Under our rules, all matters concerning the accreditation of an individual school must be confidential. Thus, we cannot comment on the matter that is now being reported. Given the confidentiality requirement, no one should assume that a matter has not been, or is not being, addressed.

Last year, in an effort to increase clarity, accuracy and accountability in the reporting of employment data, the Section began requiring law schools to report employment data directly to the Section; in the past, schools reported this information to NALP. We have established detailed definitions and instructions for the reporting of employment data. The Section is fully committed to the clarity and accuracy of law school placement data. By vigorously enforcing the Standard that requires fair and accurate reporting of consumer information, and by having law schools report more comprehensive, specific consumer information, as a result, those students who choose to enter law school will be better informed about the prospects for employment than ever before.

UPDATE: Context of Court Filing

LST received a copy of the evidence as it was filed last Thursday by Anna Alaburda’s attorneys. It was filed in connection to her latest motion, a motion for sanctions.

View Bill Henderson's original article here. Posted by LST on June 29, 2012.

Excerpt:

In a few short years, [the ABA's new employment] data are going to fundamental reshape our industry. The changes will make the industry better and stronger, but the journey to this better place is going to painful and disorienting for all law schools—that’s right, even the elite national law schools will be affected.

This is worth explaining in very simple and concrete terms. The Class of 2011 employment data consists of 134 variables on 200 ABA-accredited — 26,800 discrete data points, which is enough fill a phonebook. For a long time, the policy of the ABA was to do just that – publish a phonebook of data in the form of the ABA-LSAC Official Guide to Law Schools. Well, decisions on where to attend law school are not free. They require time and effort. When a prospective student has to wade through a phonebook to assemble relevant data to make important decisions, many (most) will forgo the exercise altogether.

This has two very important effects:

• The quality of enrollment decisions goes down because, from the student perspective, the costs are too high. That’s error #1. But it is forgivable—decisionmaking is a skill taught in a top-notch legal program, not a prerequisite for applying.
• To simplify their decisions, students gravitate to U.S. News ranking, which is a compact 4-page table that contains easy-to-understand comparative data.

Yes, the U.S. News has serious flaws; and every year, overreliance on them produces tragic consequences in the form of excessive student debt. Now, with the ABA employment “phonebook” in spreadsheet format, those a with modicum statistical skills and an internet connection can analyze, simplify and publish relevant statistics that will better inform the decision to attend law school.

Consider the chart below:

When I created with this simple pie chart, I started with a simple premise: If I am applying to law school, my minimum hope is that nine months after graduation I will be able to obtain a full-time, permanent professional job. The phonebook has three columns of data that speak to this hope:

• Bar Passaged Required Jobs, FTLT (i.e., Full-time, Long-Term)
• JD-Advantage Jobs, FTLT
• Professional Jobs, FTLT.

All the other myriad data columns, parsing things by part-time, short-term, non-professional, unemployed, unknown, etc., do not meet the minimum hope. So they are lumped together as “Other Outcomes.” Clearly, for 1/3 of the Class of 2001, their full-time, permanent professional ambitions have not yet materialized.

A reasonable next question is how these figures vary by U.S. News rank. The answer is reflected in the chart below.

Some observations:

• Least surprising. The outcomes are better at “national law school”–almost 90% are FTLT professional jobs. I used the T14 cutoff because the composition of this group has not change in two decades of U.S. News rankings. Few people would disagree that these schools have strong pull among legal employers.

• Most surprising. There is a whole lot of Purple–i.e., “Other Outcomes”–throughout Tiers 1, 2, 3, and 4. For over 90% of law schools, this is a very challenging legal market.

• Biggest reality check. The JD-Advantaged and Professional jobs appear to be, on balance, less desirable than those requiring bar passage. They increase nearly three times in relative proportion as we move from T14 to Tier 1 to Tier 2. Many are likely compromise jobs—not as good as practicing law, but better than non-professional alternatives.

With these relative benchmarks in place, a prospective law student can look for law schools that are outperforming their U.S. News rankings. And there are quite few.

For example, in Tier 4, St. Mary’s (Texas) has 78.3% Bar Passage Required placement; Mississippi College’s figure is 75.3%; and Campbell (NC) is 71.4%. These schools aren’t feeding BigLaw, but their graduates appear to be full-time practicing lawyer nine months after graduation. What accounts for their success? Most of their graduates are probably in cities and towns far away from corporate practice. Nonetheless, these schools have a clear niche they are filling.

In contrast, there are 20 schools in Tiers 1 and 2 that have less than 50% Bar Passage Required jobs. What do they have in common? Many are in big cities in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic or California–large urban markets that are attractive for young professionals. It is likely that too many young lawyers are chancing after a finite set of legal jobs. It is worth noting, however, that these same schools also have rates of placements in JD Advantage and Professional jobs that are higher than other law schools at statistically significant levels.

So many young law graduates are voting with their feet. Better to stay in the city as a non-lawyer professional than to move to south to be country lawyer doing small firm practice. Although I suspect a large proportion of these grads will fare quite well, it is important to keep in mind that JD-Advantaged and Professional jobs are not a panacea—they are also in short-supply. At most schools in Tiers 1, 2, 3, and 4, between 30% and 42% of graduates are either unemployed and underemployed in jobs that are either nonprofessional, part-time, or short-term. Indeed, 4.3% (1,874) of all jobs for the Class of 2011 were funded by the law schools themselves!

As I have said previously (here and here), the current legal job market reflects a structural change in the legal sector—these numbers aren’t going to turn around in a year or two.
So what is going to happen? Notwithstanding the heady optimism of the “Kaplan kids“, the ABA employment data, thanks to the blogosphere, is going to reduce information costs, making it easier for prospective law students to determine whether law school is a good investment. The needle is going to move, just not as fast as a Chicago School economist might predict.

Further, expect students to aggressively negotiate for scholarship money. Whether schools become more generous in merit aid, admit fewer students, or both, all signs point to shrinking budgets for law schools.

The utter transparency of a changing and stagnant legal market has potentially more dire consequences for law schools. The lifeblood of the entire legal education establishment, including elite law schools, is federal student loans. Our students get the same generous terms as graduates of medical and dental schools, who are not struggling to make six figure incomes. The graphs above suggest that a large proportion of our students will be on Income-Based Repayment (IBR), which is – functionally – insurance in the event a high income fails to materialize in the years following graduation. The downside risk of that insurance – lack of repayment of expected principal and interest—is borne by U.S. taxpayers.

Right now, it is possible to estimate the size and probability of this downside risk. All the Federal Government has to do is add-up the shortfall between the repayment of principal and interest in normal repayment versus the monies actually being collected. What percentage of graduates are on IBR? What portion of their current principal and interest are they able to pay? These are simple numbers that some enterprising journalist will eventually request. Further, they are legitmate public policy questions that we, the legal academy, should face long before the journalists get there.

Lawyers and law schools are not a favored interest group on Capitol Hill. We need to plan for the extremely high probability that the financing of law schools will be dramatically altered in the years to come. The longer we wait, the more painful and disastrous the transition. Every law school will need a damn good story to justify continued federal loans. And right now, many of us lack that story – being in Tier 1 or T14 (where debt loads tend to be the highest) won’t mean anything if the math falls short.

In summary, our ivory tower is crumbling. With the ABA putting the employment data in downloadable format on its website, law schools will have to do something completely new and scary to us—we are going to have to compete to keep our jobs and stay in business. The litmus test is going to be the ability of our graduates to obtain remunerative professional work in a highly competitive global economy. This is very serious work.

LST's Take:

This has been reposted in (almost) its entirety with permission from Professor Henderson.

Following our success in collecting NALP reports from schools last year, we are asking schools to now make their reports for the class of 2011 available.

For the class of 2010, we managed to collect 50 NALP reports. These reports helped us expand our data clearinghouse so that we could become the place to go for the most thorough and easy-to-compare employment information. This year, our goal is to double the number of reports we collect.

Even with the improvements to law school transparency, thanks to immense pressure on the ABA, these reports contain helpful data that schools are not required to be make public.

• Salary Data (aggregated in categories)
• Job Source (e.g., OCI, networking, direct mailings)
• Job Offer Timing (before graduation, before bar results, after bar results)
• Job Status (employed graduates who are still seeking or not seeking)
• Job Region and Job States
• Job Type Breakdowns by Employer Type (e.g., government JD Advantage)

Check out Seattle University School of Law’s Class of 2011 NALP report, which the school sent to us unprompted, to see what schools have to offer this year.

We hope that schools share our sense of urgency and help us put comparable employment information into the hands of consumers. Check out the full letter after the jump.

(more…)

• LST's Request Letter

View Brian Tamanaha's original article here. Posted by LST on June 18, 2012.

Excerpt:

My critical book about legal education, Failing Law Schools, is out. About a dozen advance reviews of the book have been published, each with different take, but all in agreement that the book should be read by legal educators. (A few examples: Fish, Kerr, and Henderson.). This recent comment caught my eye:

I just finished reading a book that everyone who cares about legal education in the United States should read: Failing Law Schools by Brian Z. Tamanaha. The book does an excellent job of describing the economic realities of law schools for prospective law students and society as a whole. Tamanaha gives a compelling and highly critical analysis of how law school became so expensive, and what can be done about it now. And, he doesn’t pull punches. If the law school you went to wasn’t mentioned, the law school you teach at, or that your colleagues went to will be named (and shamed). Tamanaha is critical of law schools and law professors from the top 14 to the 4th Tier and every school in between.

For those of us who went to law school before it became so expensive, Tamanaha does an excellent job of breaking down what it means to graduate with $100,000 or $120,000 in student loans for the average law student with the average salary of around $70,000. He also lays out the statistics about how difficult it is, and will probably continue to be, for many law graduates to find full time work as lawyers. This is a situation that Tamanaha argues will continue well past the time when the economy recovers. Tamanaha also describes the shift from needs-based to merit-based scholarships that has, among other problems, made it even tougher for lower income law students to attend law school without high debt. (ADR Prof Blog)

Many legal educators will disagree with my arguments, of course, and I do not claim to know how to solve what I call the “broken economics of legal education.” Indeed, things are so out of whack that I doubt we will solve it.

The opening comment of Bill Henderson’s review was the most jarring observation I have seen so far: “Many legal academics are going to dismiss Brian Tamanaha’s book, Failing Law Schools, without ever reading a page. A larger number may simply ignore it. That is ironic, because this is the response one would expect if Tamanaha’s account of a corrupt, self-indulgence academic culture were true.” I hope Bill is wrong.

What I have tried to do with this book is bring solid data to the debate. I am struck by the fact that the defenders of the legal education status quo so often respond with unverified assumptions, sweeping generalizations, or old platitudes–usually without having read the book.

In an article on the book today in the National Law Journal, for example, the Chair of the ABA Section on Legal Education, John O’Brien, remarks critically, “Nobody feels good that tuitions have gone up. But the claim that a law degree is a bad investment doesn’t hold water.” My precise argument is that a law degree is a good investment for some students, but for many it is a financial disaster.

To see what I mean we need look no further than Dean O’Brien’s own institution, New England School of Law. Nine months after graduation, only 34.4% of the 2011 class had obtained full time, permanent lawyer jobs (see ABA data broken down here). The average debt for 2011 NE law grads was $120,480 (90% of the class had debt). NE claims that the median salary in the private sector for the class of 2010 was $67,500, but only 15% of the grads in private employment reported their salaries so the actual median salary for the class is undoubtedly much lower. People who earn that much will struggle to make the monthly payments ($1,400) due on the average debt.

This is what the book does–it brings numbers to the debate about legal education. I talk about professor teaching loads and salaries, the costs of research and clinics, the remarkable rise of tuition and debt, the salaries our graduates earn at graduation and a few years out, the implications of the transfer phenomenon, the social consequences of our scholarship policies, the ongoing collapse in applicants, and much more.

If you care about the fate of our students, about the fate of your own law school (many will be in trouble soon), or about legal education more generally and its impact on the legal system and society, the information in this book will be sobering.

LST’s Press Release:

Mister Hart, here is a dime. Take it, call your mother, and tell her there is serious doubt about you ever becoming a lawyer.
- Kingsfield, The Paper Chase

The ABA has released Class of 2011 job outcome data for all domestic ABA-approved law schools. The data are far more granular than ever before. Law School Transparency has analyzed the data and made the school-specific data available on its website for easy comparison.

The ABA data shed considerable light on how poorly the 2011 graduates fared. We can now say with certainty that the employment picture is far worse than previously reported. Only 55.2% of all graduates were known to be employed in full-time, long-term legal jobs. A devastating 26.4% of all graduates were underemployed.

According to the ABA data from 195 law schools:

Full-time, Long-Term Legal Jobs:

• These jobs require bar passage or are judicial clerkships and are for at least 35 hours per week and have an expected duration of at least one year.
• The national full-time, long-term legal rate is 55.2%.
• At 73 law schools (37.1%), less than 50% of graduates had these legal jobs.
  • 30 schools (15.2%) had less than 40%
  • 10 schools (5.1%) had less than a 33%
• 89 schools (45.2%) exceeded the national rate of 55.2%.
  • 31 schools (15.7%) had more than 67%
  • 19 schools (9.6%) had more than 75%
  • 5 schools (2.5%) had more than 90%

Underemployed:

• We define a graduate as underemployed when he or she is “Unemployed – Seeking”, pursuing an additional advanced degree, in a non-professional job, or employed in a short-term or part-time job.
• The national underemployment rate is 26.4%.
• 180 schools (91.4%) reported a rate greater than 10%.
  • 144 schools (73.1%) had more than 20%
  • 109 schools (55.3%) had more than 25%
  • 57 schools (28.9%) had more than 33%
  • 20 schools (10.2%) had more than 40%

Large Firms (at least 101 attorneys):

• 10.7% of graduates were employed at large firms in full-time, long-term positions
  • Graduates seek these jobs in part because they’re the jobs that tend to pay the highest salaries.
• At only 45 schools (22.8%) were more than 10% in these jobs.
  • 20 schools (10.2%) had more than 20%
  • 15 schools (5.6%) had more than 33%
  • Only 3 schools were over 50% – Columbia, Northwestern, and Penn.

Law School Transparency’s executive director, Kyle McEntee, urged caution to students planning to enroll this fall. McEntee said, “Law school still costs way too much money compared to post-graduation employment outcomes. If you plan to debt-finance your education or use your hard-earned savings, seriously think twice about attending a law school without a steep discount. For the vast majority of prospective law students who have not received an extensive scholarship, it will make sense to wait for prices to drop.”

There has been some speculation that the class of 2011 may represent the bottom, though this view is grounded more in optimism than evidence. Rather, evidence points to a structural shift in legal employment, especially at the entry-level, that signals a new normal far below pre-recession levels. Technology, globalization, and law firm strategies are substantially changing our profession.

To view every ABA-approved law school’s profile, visit http://www.lawschooltransparency.com/clearinghouse/.

To view comparison charts, visit http://www.lawschooltransparency.com/clearinghouse/?show=compare&sub=jobs

Established in 2009, Law School Transparency is a nonprofit legal education policy organization. Our mission is to improve consumer information and to usher in consumer-oriented reforms to the current law school model. We operate independently of any legal institutions, legal employers, or academic reports related to the legal market.

View Karen Sloan's original article here. Posted by LST on June 10, 2012.

Excerpt:

The American Bar Association and NALP are not “indispensible absent parties” to a proposed fraud class action brought by 12 recent graduates against the Thomas M. Cooley Law School, a federal judge has ruled.

U.S. District Judge Gordon Quist’s June 7 ruling dealt a blow to Cooley’s argument that it was “just following orders” by providing the job figures required by NALP … and the ABA …

“So far, we’re two for two on that,” [Jesse] Strauss said, noting that a New York state trial judge in March rejected a similar argument by New York Law School before dismissing the larger suit. …

In its motion to dismiss, Cooley argued that the plaintiffs’ claims are aimed primarily at the ABA and NALP, and that failing to include those organizations as defendants was ground to dismiss the complaint.

“Plaintiffs ask for an “industry”-wide rewrite of those standards, but fail to name as defendants the very entities whose standards they want the court to rewrite,” Cooley argued in its motion.

Quist disagreed, ruling that the ABA and NALP’s reporting requirements “are a floor, not a ceiling,” and that Cooley could provide employment information beyond what those organization mandate.

“Even though the plaintiffs’ goal may be to fix systemic problems in law school employment data reporting, that goal is not what they seek to accomplish with this particular lawsuit,” Quist wrote. “Plaintiffs seek damages and equitable relief solely from Cooley and its agents.”

New York University School of Law has decided to continue withholding valuable employment data from prospective students. After sending NYU a third request to publish its NALP report, we finally received a reply from Dean Ricky Revesz:

Thank you for your note. I expect you are aware that, since the end of last year, we have added a substantial amount of employment data to the NYU Law website. If there is more information that would be suitable and helpful for us to provide, we are happy to consider doing that. For example, we are now looking into posting data of the type found in Table 12 of the NALP form (Source of Job by Employer Type), since that would likely be of interest to prospective and current students. Please let me know if there is additional information that you think would be helpful for us to publish.

Our letter was quite clear about what would be helpful: NYU needs to publish its NALP report. It was a short letter and referenced the NALP report five times. (Read it here.) There is no other way to read any of our three requests and it’s insulting that Dean Revesz would feign ignorance while referencing the very report we requested.

We responded to Dean Revesz, repeating that we believe the entire NALP report should be published and noting what information NYU has not released (along with the sections of the NALP report that contain this information):

• Full-time and part-time employment by required/preferred credentials (“FT/PT Jobs”)
• Classification of business jobs (“Business Jobs”)
• Position held in a law firm (“Type of Law Firm Job”)
• When the job was obtained (“Timing of Job Offer”)
• Salaries by job type (“Employment Status Known” and “Employment Categories”)
• Salaries by location (“Jobs Taken by Region” and “Location of Jobs”)
• Salaries by firm size (“Size of Firm”)

Dean Revesz’s response to our last communication was disappointing:

As I indicated in my last note to you, we will continue to add data to the area of our website that contains employment statistics.

We must read this to say that NYU has no plans to publish the additional information we have requested, even though it is of value to both the legal profession and law school applicants. The data NYU indicated it was “looking into” publishing 14 months after collection–the source of job by employer type–has not been added to NYU’s website despite more than another month passing. The immense intellectual, technological, and financial resources of NYU have proven unequal to the task of posting an 8×7 table.

(To see the data NYU knowingly withholds, check out our reconstruction of its NALP report in our data clearinghouse. Fields shown in dark gray represent information NYU possess but has not released.)