Excellent Article on Law School Rank/Debt

[OldFart]

All --

Bill Henderson has an absolutely terrific article on law school debt vs. prestige and employment prospects over at NLJ.  He also has worked with NLJ to come up with some terrific charts on real career prospects -- the percentage of students from each school who end up in biglaw, other firms, clerkships, etc.  It's awesome data and much better than blindly relying upon USNWR.

http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNLJ.jsp?id=1207904889498

From the later posts on this thread, it looks like most people were able to access the "regional_rankings.pdf" file that is linked from the main article.  How??  I get a "404 not found" error page when I try to use the link, and more errors when I try to dig it out.  (I'm not sure if this is a subscription issue, since it's not an "access denied" error, it's a "not found" error.)

ETA: I signed up for "free limited access" with no luck.  Is the "rankings" sub-article restricted to full subscribers?

The files are back up and available now;  looks like one of their servers was down when I was trying to get it, since I'm not getting some of the odd errors I was getting yesterday.

Thank you for your kind offer, PC!

[TRad]

I sent this article to my brother, a very, very successful businessman who has a mere BA from W & M (he's COO of a Fortune 500 firm at the age of 41).  Here's his response, some of which is specific to me (the non-BigLaw thing).  I thought it was worth sharing.

- You don't plan to take a high-paying corporate job anyway.
- You're likely to get more financial aid at [the T2 school] since you'll bring up their
stats
- You'll save money on COL at the T2.
- If you stay in the T2 area, it is probably an advantage vis a vis
networking

I found the statement that law schools have deployed aid solely in pursuit
of stats to be fascinating.  Not surprising at all - it's a business
decision.

Prestige is nice, but you can't cash it.  I would look at this as a business
transaction.  Do the math to figure out where you'll end up at the end of
law school and follow the numbers.  The school is making a business decision
about you.  You should return the favor.

[OldFart]

In grazing through the charts, I notice that a large percentage of W&L grads get judicial clerkships after graduation.

Contrasting with Tulane, if one counts only the "biglaw or law firm" graduates, W&L places relatively badly.  If one counts "biglaw or law firm or clerkship", the two place about the same percentage in the three groups combined, with W&L having about a 50% edge in the "biglaw" subcategory.

As an IP nerd, I'm not really aware of what judicial clerkships mean in terms of the general career ladder.  Are they a step into politics, or government, or an intermediate stage in joining some biglaw firm and getting huge steaming wads of cash?

I guess what I'm wondering is, is this a major positive for W&L grads' chances, or is this a step down from obtaining a general small/medium law firm job?

[Martin Prince, Jr.]

tag

[SplitFinger]

By and large, getting a clerkship = prestige and more $$$ when you're done with it.  It's not something you get because you couldn't get a real job.  It's something you get and then the firm that hires you gets to brag about it.

That being said, not all clerkships are created equal.

[BlueGreen]

tagsies

[countbizaller]

I wonder just how much these numbers fluctuate every year. That bar graph is from the 2005 class and has UT placing about 27% in the NLJ 250, but that other NLJ article mentions UT having 39% in 06 and 35% in 07. That's a 12% jump from 05-06. I wonder if that's a typical fluctuation or just flaws in the numbers. Did anyone else notice other schools with similar variations?