{"id":329,"date":"2011-03-03T18:24:55","date_gmt":"2011-03-04T00:24:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/?p=329"},"modified":"2011-03-03T18:26:01","modified_gmt":"2011-03-04T00:26:01","slug":"so-you-want-to-be-a-rock-n-roll-star","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/2011\/03\/03\/so-you-want-to-be-a-rock-n-roll-star\/","title":{"rendered":"So You Want to Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Many law students enter law school with dreams of getting a job with one of the major law firms, but what are their chances of doing that?\u00a0 The NALP Salary Distribution, Curve for the Class of 2009<\/a>\u00a0suggests that about 25% of reported salaries fell in the $160,000 range.\u00a0 But only 19,513 members of that class reported salaries.\u00a0 Using data from the 2011 edition of the ABA-LSAC Official Guide to ABA-Approved Law Schools (online version<\/a>), those law schools granted 43,859 JDs in 2008-2009 academic year.\u00a0 The 2009 Salary Distribution Curve included information on only about 44% of the members of the Class of 2009.\u00a0 To what extent is there a selection bias<\/strong> in the NALP survey?\u00a0 To what extent are graduates who get jobs with big law firms and high salaries disproportionately likely to report their salaries?<\/p>\n

There is increasing evidence that there is a large selection bias in the NALP salary surveys.\u00a0 First, as I discussed in The Market for J.D.s<\/a>, the percentage of recent graduates employed varies widely\u00a0 among the law school, but generally falls as the median LSAT of a law school falls. Second, the recent report on Go-To Law Schools<\/a>\u00a0suggest that there may be a lot. As I discussed in\u00a0Go To Law<\/a>, that report lists the top 50 law schools from which the National Law Journal top 250 law firms drew first-year associates in the 2010<\/em> hiring season.\u00a0 According to that report, in 2009, the 50 Go-To law schools placed 30.3% of the Class of 2009 with NLJ-250 law firms, or about 4239 graduates (using the numbers for the Class of 2010), as compared to 4,878 persons (25% of the 19,513 persons included in NALP 2009 survey).<\/p>\n

Second, if the sample included in the NALP 2009 survey represented the distribution of salaries for all 43,859 persons getting JDs from ABA-approved law schools in 2009, then about\u00a010,965 persons in that class would have big-firm level salaries.\u00a0 Taking out the 4,239 graduates of the Go-To law schools, 6,726 of the 29,870 graduates of the remaining ABA-approved law schools, or about 22.5%, would have received jobs with big law firms.\u00a0 Yet the 5oth-ranked Go-To law school sent only 13.2% of its class to the NLJ-250 law firms in 2009 (10.57% in 2010).<\/p>\n

Admittedly, these are back-of-the-envelope calculations.\u00a0 I don’t know the size of the 2009 classes of the 2009 Go-To law schools, so I’ve used the size of the 2010 classes.\u00a0\u00a0Most glaringly,\u00a0different law schools were included in the top 50 in 2009 than were included in 2010.\u00a0 Also, I don’t know whether the proportion of graduates of Go-To law schools who got jobs with the NLJ-250 law firms that responded to the NALP salary survey was higher\u2013or lower\u2013than students who did not get jobs with the NLJ-250.\u00a0 That, of course is the point of those, including the ABA’s Young Lawyer’s Division (see <\/em>Truth in Law School Education<\/a>), who are calling for greater transparency in reporting job and salary information.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Many law students enter law school with dreams of getting a job with one of the major law firms, but what are their chances of doing that?\u00a0 The NALP Salary Distribution, Curve for the Class of 2009\u00a0suggests that about 25% of reported salaries fell in the $160,000 range.\u00a0 But only 19,513 members of that class […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,29,14,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-employment","category-law-firms","category-law-schools"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=329"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":364,"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329\/revisions\/364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}