Below are four charts that provide context to NALP’s recently released Class of 2017 data. But first, here are some key highlights from NALP’s press release and Selected Findings:
Why is the legal industry so slow to change? This question gets asked all the time – particularly during conference season – but it gets more than its fair share of airtime year-round. It is
The graphic above tells a simple, painful, and important story about the U.S. legal profession that we can’t afford to ignore. The graphic compares the receipts of U.S. law firms in 2007 and 2012 based on “class of customer” data from the Economic Census, the U.S. Census Bureau’s official five-year measure of American business.
The ABA just released 10-months out employment data for the class of 2016. The percentages of grads employed in full-time/long term Bar Passage Required and JD Advantage jobs is up (72.5% compared to 70.1% in 2015). However, the total number of these jobs is down (28,029 to 26,923).
Is this good news for law schools?
A lot. The trend is large and longstanding. Over the last two decades, the number of lawyers working in corporations has more than tripled, growing from 34,750 in 1997 to 105,310 in 2016. The chart above shows the trendlines.
Most people working in the legal industry know that in-house legal departments have been growing, but
Between 1971 and 2010, the average entering 1L class at an ABA-accredited law school was 246 students with a very narrow band of fluctuation. The high-water mark was 262 in 2010. Every year since 2012 has set a new historical low. As the chart above shows, the average has tumbled by a staggering 31%.
When