The Crisis That Wouldn’t End

May 14th, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt

The crisis in legal education was supposed to be over by now. The recession, after all, ended in June 2009. Even allowing for a slow recovery, legal educators predicted that JD hiring would be robust by this point. When applications fell and schools cut class sizes, educators hoped for a recovery bonus: An improved job market, combined with smaller graduating classes, would boost placement rates and attract applicants back to law school. Meanwhile, some projected, the economy would suffer a lawyer shortage.

Things haven’t worked out that way. As the ABA employment report for the Class of 2015 shows, JD employment remains depressed–and there is some evidence of a downward trend. In this post, I explain why law schools need to take this news very seriously.

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2015 Employment: Fixing the Fruit Salad

May 6th, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt

As promised, I explain here a quirk in the ABA’s employment report for the Class of 2015. That report shows that 62.4% of the 2015 graduates obtained jobs that require bar admission (“lawyering” jobs), while just 59.2% of the graduates secured lawyering jobs that were also full-time and long-term (i.e., expected to last at least one year).

Those percentages are sobering in themselves, but they are even more worrisome when compared to percentages for the Class of 2014. For the latter class, the ABA reports that 64.1% of graduates obtained lawyering jobs, with 59.9% of the graduates landing full-time, long-term jobs in that category. The percentage of graduates securing lawyering jobs, in other words, seems to have declined.

Things are bad, but not quite that bad. Here’s where the data quirk comes in.

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Class of 2015 Employment: How Bad Is It?

May 3rd, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt

After a few data glitches, the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has released its report on employment outcomes for the Class of 2015. The Section’s scorecard, comparing the Class of 2015 to the Class of 2014, appears here.

The numbers are pretty sobering: Absolute numbers declined in every employment category. Law firms, for example, hired 1,574 fewer graduates than they did in 2014. That’s a dismaying decrease of 8.8%. Government employers showed similar retrenchment: They too hired 8.8% fewer graduates in 2015.

Graduating class size also fell 8.8% between 2014 and 2015, which shored up the percentage of 2015 graduates obtaining jobs. Law schools, however, did not gain much ground in placing a higher percentage of their graduates. Smaller classes merely kept pace with a contracting job market.

I will have more details tomorrow, including an explanation for why the percentage declines in the top ten lines of the table are overstated. The news on those lines, which detail jobs requiring bar passage and those for which a JD is considered an advantage, is disheartening–but not quite as bad as the reported percentages suggest. The ABA changed its reporting methods between 2014 and 2015, so those comparisons match pineapples to prunes–a fruit salad you would never want to serve.

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Data Difficulties

May 3rd, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt

*Update: For those of you who can’t sleep until the data match, Jerry Organ has figured out the discrepancy described below. The spreadsheet on the ABA site is too comprehensive: It includes Hamline, William Mitchell, and Mitchell/Hamline as separate (and duplicative) entries. Eliminate the entries for the first two schools, while retaining the combined Mitchell/Hamline, and the figures on the spreadsheet match the scorecard. Data deliverance!

For the last several years, the ABA’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has collected increasingly helpful data about employment outcomes for law school graduates. Data about individual schools, as well as a spreadsheet combining all data, are displayed at this website. The Section also posts a “scorecard” summarizing key statistics for the graduating class; those scorecards appear here.

Data for the Class of 2015 are now available, and both bloggers and mainstream media have started to report on those numbers. Unfortunately, however, the data appear to be in flux. The ABA posted several versions of the spreadsheet yesterday, as it worked to include all schools. The current spreadsheet appears comprehensive, but the totals do not match those appearing on the scorecard.

So, if you see conflicting numbers in the press, don’t be confused. Several professors have been in touch with the ABA Section, and we will analyze the data further once we are sure that it is in final form. Meanwhile, no excuse for not grading exams….

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