UVA2B wrote: ↑Mon May 11, 2020 10:17 pm
necho2 wrote: ↑Mon May 11, 2020 2:45 pm
SmittyWerben wrote: ↑Sun May 10, 2020 10:22 pm
Johannes wrote: ↑Sun May 03, 2020 2:33 am
necho2 wrote: ↑Fri May 01, 2020 3:17 pm
SLS takes a lead over YLS in the clerking numbers this year! Also LOL@ their defensive-sounding specificity w/ the JD-Advantage jobs... "THESE ARE THE COOL ONES, NOT THE LAME ONES GUYS!!!" In all seriousness, those are quite impressive JD-advantage gigs though!
Harvard continues to lag Chicago on clerkships huh? Tsk tsk... I suspect UChi is a little inflated by the quality of the Fed Soc pipeline + a broader pool of potential candidates who aren't averse to clerking in far-flung non-coastal places, but I think some of it too is just how strongly the school/internalized student pressure pushes folks to apply pretty aggressively.
You can make damn near a half mill in JD advantage jobs out of the top 3 law schools. What do you mean.
I've heard this every now and again, do you happen to have any sources for these high-paying unicorn jobs that Yale/Harvard kids are getting that are closed off to the rest of us?
I mean just read the specific JD-advantage jobs SLS says their grads wound up in- I don't think it's particularly unlikely that in a good year a VC/PE associate can crack that, and depending on what their vesting schedule looks like, the BigTech folks might get close fairly quickly too. Obviously WLRK and maybe Susman (in a good bonus year) also might get close within a year or two after graduation, but these are objectively pretty lucrative outcomes... The problem is just that these outcomes are so rare and absent a full disclosure of what jobs JD-advantage grads get, BL/FC% is a better overall metric for employability.
I think there is a sliding scale of deference to these sorts of objective measures of employment. BL/FC% is a proxy for "financially acceptable" outcome, but more deference should be given to Stanford than is given to WUSTL, more deference to Harvard than Duke, and likely NU JD/MBA to UCLA JD advantage outcomes. The problem is in collecting that level of granularity because the employment data provided by schools usually doesn't draw these distinctions out and relies on overly broad categories to define an overly broad category like JD advantage.
Much like flaws in Vault, ATL, LST, and the like, there will be overfitting and underfitting when you try to capture "good" outcomes. BL/FC% is the most easily drawn because of its likelihood of being reliable. Occasionally schools will miss the really good JD-advantage or PI outcomes, and sometimes there will be a person at an ID firm with 101 attorneys paying less, but substantially the figure captures financially stable outcomes, even accepting it is imperfect.
We're also missing outcomes like jobs at market/above-market boutiques, clerking on the Delaware Court of Chancery (or a state Supreme Court), and government honors programs. Those are all great outcomes, but very hard to distinguish in the statistics from shitlaw, clerking for a NJ trial court, and being a local prosecutor. A school putting over half of its graduates into the prestige outcomes this thread tracks is very likely putting the bulk of its government, PI, and state clerks in good positions as well (and its JD advantage outcomes are likely good), and the higher that BL/FC number goes, the more likely that any given employment outcome the school produces is likely a "good" version of that outcome.
Folks interested in government/PI should also look into the relevant thread that Nebby runs to see how the various LRAPs are regarded, because a great LRAP definitely makes for a solid financial outcome, and a person landing a government/PI gig out of a school with that kind of support very likely set out to do that sort of work when they applied to law school in the first place. If we look at Yale, for instance, 17.5% of its graduates in this last class were in government/PI jobs, and a few more were in state clerkships. Given the rest of Yale's numbers and its genuinely awesome LRAP, we can be pretty sure that all of those students were doing work they really wanted to do in a financially viable situation. The ten pursuing graduate degrees are also likely doing things they want to do. That's part of why, when I wasn't focusing on law school, I was including all of those other categories in my big spreadsheet - so folks can evaluate it easily for themselves.
There are also some inherent flaws in relying purely on these numbers. Someone who gets a job with a big personal injury or divorce shop that happens to hit 101 attorneys (or the bigger regional firms that aren't really paying market) will still show up in the biglaw pool. There's not really a way to filter these results out without excluding a lot of relevant data, nor is there a way to distinguish a school placing its graduate with a magistrate judge as opposed to a circuit judge.
TL;DR: The statistics in this thread are imperfect, but still useful.
