Super Lawyer Rankings

[Business Attorney]

I think rankings of law schools, like ranking of Super Lawyers and other attorney rankings, are basically a good thing if the selection criteria disclosed.  Prospective students look for different things in law schools and different clients have different needs for attorneys. 

A top flight corporate mergers and acquisitions attorney from a nationally recognized law school who is practicing in a major international law firm may not be the right person to represent a person selling a closely-held $2 million manufacturing company in Peoria.  Likewise, Harvard Law School may not be the best choice for a prospective law student who knows that he is going to join his father's divorce law practice in a small city in Idaho.

While the rankings, either of law schools or or lawyers, cannot tell you whether a school or attorney is "best", the rankings are useful as a comparative tool if there is enough information about the selection criteria.

[pacelaw2013]

I HIGHLY question the legitamacy  of these rankings. Maybe sour grapes since Pace is ranked very low, but to say that it is worse than Western New England College? I got into both (more scholarship $$ at WNEC), and I can say the two do not compare.

ILRG had the acceptance rate of WNEC at 71% (Pace at about 37%), starting salary is about 55K for WNEC, about 88K for Pace, job % is about 80% for WNEC, 97% Pace (according to admissions office), class size is the same, reputation I feel goes to Pace, and I really don't think its that close of a call. WNEC is a good school, don't get me wrong, and I am glad I got in there, but I think Pace is heads and shoulders above.

[bigs5068]

I don't know if placement or acceptance rate make any difference. Schools and U.S. News both manipulate that so much that it is hard to consider. Placement means an unpaid internship or flipping burgers god only knows what placement means.  Acceptance rate is also manipulated because school throw out fee waivers to people they have no intention of admitting.

If schools or U.S. News did not count fee waivers in teh acceptance rate and more importantly included actually salaries in placement they might have some merit. As it stands there is no foundation for any of the schools or U.S. News reports.  GGU did end up giving me a list of salaries etc and it is clearly maniupulated and I saw the same manipulation on Santa Clara's and other schools I was considering. 

I wish the ABA/LSAC would step in and give more detail than they do. They give slighlty more facts than U.S. News does, but when you consider how f'ing expensive it is for any law school they should be required to give some real in depth reports and not manipulated statistics. That goes from Harvard up to Cooley it is just bad how schools puff their stats so blatantly.

[Thane Messinger]

I HIGHLY question the legitamacy  of these rankings. Maybe sour grapes since Pace is ranked very low, but to say that it is worse than Western New England College? I got into both (more scholarship $$ at WNEC), and I can say the two do not compare.

ILRG had the acceptance rate of WNEC at 71% (Pace at about 37%), starting salary is about 55K for WNEC, about 88K for Pace, job % is about 80% for WNEC, 97% Pace (according to admissions office), class size is the same, reputation I feel goes to Pace, and I really don't think its that close of a call. WNEC is a good school, don't get me wrong, and I am glad I got in there, but I think Pace is heads and shoulders above.

You mention one way in which rankings become deceptive:  below the top schools, and with the exception of significant differences, rankings are not--or should not be seen as--a linear truth.  Rather, rankings reflect gross distinctions, focusing in reputation, student (not faculty) quality, and a sprinkling of other factors.  More importantly, local and regional schools can be compared only roughly with other schools from outside that region.  If the "region" is a metropolitan area, the value of cross-comparisons is even more tenuous for non-metro schools (or from schools in different markets).

In short, rankings provide an important point of reference, but they should be the starting, not stopping, point.

[ElFieryHabanero]

Adjusted for school size

...if the editors had not been drinking theThomas Cooley kool aid that rewards big schools for being, well, big.   Amazingly, they produced a list of schools that graduated the most "super lawyers" without making any effort to take account of the fact that, e.g., Harvard has graduated more than twice as many lawyers as Yale over the past thirty years.  The list has another peculiarity, which is that it is not a list of "super lawyers" per se but of "super" lawyers in each region of the country, thus any law school that dominates its region (and doesn't get much competition from the elite law schools) fares, shall we say, surprisingly well.

Relatively few schools have changed their class size radically over the past generation, though some got bigger in the 1960s and 1970s, while others scaled back a bit more recently.   Still, if we use as a rough control for class size the recent class sizes rounded to the nearest 50, we get a top fifteen for graduating "super lawyers" (total number of super lawyers divided by the recent class size figure) as follows:

1.  Harvard University (6.44)

2.  University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (5.89)

3.  University of Texas, Austin (5.81)

4.  Yale University (5.43)

5.  University of California, Berkeley (5.25)

6.  University of Virginia (5.20)

7.  University of Chicago (4.83)

8.  University of Minnesota (4.55)

9.  Duke University (4.18)

9.  Stanford University (4.18)

9.  University of Pennsylvania (4.20)

12.  Vanderbilt University (4.08)

13.  Boston University (3.91)

13.  University of California, Los Angeles (3.93)

15.  University of Florida, Gainesville (3.81)

Columbia clocks in with a 3.57, NYU with a 3.40, Cornell with a 3.65, Northwestern with a 3.58, Georgetown with a 2.88, SMU with a 3.73, Hastings with a 3.06, Boston College with a 3.64, and George Washington with a 1.78.

http://leiterlawschool.typepad.com/leiter/2009/11/what-the-super-lawyer-ranking-of-law-schools-would-look-like.html

[bigs5068]

It is always nice to see someone use real facts when doing rankings and taking the peculiarities into consideration.  Some schools do just have massive amounts of alumni and it's no surprise they have more successful alumni, but they also have less successful ones.

[louiebstef]

Very interesting, yet not surprising to see UF on the list.   Not that I give a damn about school sports (OMG!), but I'd rather be a Gator, or even a 'Nole, than a 'Cane or anything else!

Be that as it may, Stetson is in my backyard.

[MidWesternPleb]

IU-Indy's relatively strong showing is a perfect example of the flaw (or strength, depending on your perception) of this ranking.  IU-Indy graduates a high number and places almost exclusively in Indianapolis big and/or locally prestigious firms.  As a consequence, their most successful graduates tend to be the highest profile lawyers in the state's only significant legal market.  IU-Bloomington grads, for example, can tend to disperse to larger legal markets where they have less chance to stand out and become "super lawyers".  In a way, this ranking can be read to expose how relatively well lower T1 and T2 law schools produce successful lawyers in their regional markets.  So in that sense, it is valuable in a way other rankings are not.