I believe that top 1% at FSU or UF would be favored by a large NYC firm overt top 50% at the NY schools you mention. For mid-sized and smaller firms, the NY law schools may have an advantage, in that students have closer proximity and can clerk during the year, but I believe that is a small advantage given the price you will pay over three years. I am confident that with an FSU or UF degree you will get a job if you are a good student and take initiative, but it may not be as easy if you are going for NYC instead of closder markets in Florida or Atlanta.
I am not sure that going to Miami is the answer if you wish to work in NYC. Miami may have more graduates in the NYC area, but basing a decision on placement statistics alone can be misleading. Many of the students at Mianmi are from the Northeast, so it does not surprise me that Miami's NE placement rack record is better, but I suspect that is driven by supply rather than demand. I thought your question was what firms would be more likely to hire graduates of a school, not which law school's graduates would be most likely to move back to NYC!
Also, to elaborate on my earlier post, while I do not think that FSU -- as a general undergraduate institution -- is as quite strong as UF (and as an alumnus of FSU this disappoints me), I do not think that FSU's lower rank as an undergraduate school (111 in the recent U.S. News, even though the law school ranks 56) should influence your choice about law school. I would note two things. First, UF's undergraduate institution also lags behind its law school in national rankings. Second, the network advantage of UF is frequently WAY overstated. I understand that UF has more grdauates each year and has gbeen around longer, so it have a much bigger network -- it does not take a NASA rocker scientist to see this. Again, do not confuse past supply with future demand. A lot of Nova and Stetson graduates staff law firms in S Florida, but I would recommend FSU over Nova and Stetson any day. Placed in perspective UF's network is not at all impressive when compared to a school like Texas or UNC and FSU's network is increasingly impressive in all of the same ways that UF's is (just not as big). In my opinion, as long as there are enough network contacts to have the door cracked open for consideration, a strong placement network alone is not going to make your career.
What WILL make your career is your initiative, ability, performance, and follow through. This is about your future, and you should think of your decision about which law school to attend as making an investment in a school -- it is not about any institution's past, but about anticipating a trend 5-10 years out -- specifically, what the learning and degree you receive from that school can do for you in the future? In that sense, you are asking precisely the right question in asking where these schools will be 5 years from now.
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