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?
As the legal market remains flat for law firms, the focus naturally turns to clients. How they think. What they care about. How they spend their budgets. Etc. Yet, to the extent that clients vary in significant ways, the generalizations aren’t particularly helpful.
There are many ways to categorize clients, but by my lights the most useful is size and organizational structure of the in-house legal department. As shown in diagram above, this metric varies from zero for individuals (Type 1) and business owners (Type 2), to the equivalent of a specialized law firm embedded inside a large corporation (Types 5 and 6).
Continue Reading Six Types of Law Firm Clients (005)
The purpose of Post 004 is to introduce readers to the Rogers Diffusion Curve. The Rogers Diffusion Curve was created by the eminent sociologist Everett Rogers. It was first published in his book Diffusions of Innovations, one of the most widely cited works in all of the social sciences.
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
Legal Evolution is two things. First, it is an online publication that curates and compiles examples of successful innovation within the legal industry, often through a simple narrative format. This is because examples and stories tend to be the most effective way to understand and communicate inherently complex material.
Second, Legal Evolution is an experiment