NLJ Report Shows Contracting Proportion of Graduates Going to Top 250 Firms

The National Law Journal has conducted a survey of hiring at its top 250 law firms.

I'm not going to copy the list, suffice to say that many of their results match up with the similar small-scale study I did awhile back on this exact same subject. Stanford did more poorly than you'd expect; Howard, BYU, and Rutgers-Newark did better than expected. But there are also some surprises. Yale finishing only 15th is a surprise. Same with Wake Forest, Seton Hall, and Maryland being more highly rated that I'd expect.

But what's really noteworthy is not the order of the schools, but the percentages. Texas is 20th on the list and only a quarter of its grads land jobs at these firms. By the 50th school, the number drops to 10%. It's not just conjecture: you really do have to be in the top 10% for the jobs most of these schools portray as what the median graduate does.

The most noteworthy result is the comparison to 2009, most notably how more exclusive legal hiring has become:

[T]he top two schools on the list supplied nearly 3% more of their graduates to the nation's 250 largest law firms, compared with 2009. But overall, this year's Go-To Law Schools sent fewer graduates into the big-firm market. The percentage of 2010 graduates taking jobs at NLJ 250 law firms was 27.3%, compared with 30.3% of 2009 graduates.

With 45,000 graduates, a 3% drop translates into 1,350 people who are looking for jobs elsewhere. But if the top schools' numbers are increasing, that means that 1,350 deficit is coming disproportionately from lower-tiered schools. In other words, it seems big law firms are being more exclusive in their hiring practices and taking fewer chances on kids from second- and third-tier schools.

Thus, when the job market fully turns around, it looks like there may be a trend towards elitism instead of away from it. With fewer big law jobs to go around, big firms may be more reluctant to "take a chance" on no-name school graduates, instead making certain that they fulfill their "prestige" quotient. So when you third-tier career services' offices claim the job market is turning around, even if it's true for Cornell graduates, it's not necessarily true for everyone else.