NJL 250 Law Firm Hiring Data

March 9th, 2013 / By Robert Rhee

I crunched the numbers on the NLJ 250 law firm hires for 2012. The total number of new graduates hired by NLJ 250 law firms is 4,457. This constitutes about 10% of the entire graduating law school class of 2012.

The Top 10 schools, including Virginia, Boalt, Michigan and Penn, took 1,677 jobs, which is 38% of the total jobs. These schools graduated a total of 3,470 students, and so 48% of their graduating students got NLJ 250 jobs.

The Top 11-22 schools, including WashU, GW, Minnesota and BU, took 1,091 jobs, which is 24% of the total jobs. These schools graduated a total of 3,773 students, and so 29% of their graduating students got NLJ 250 jobs.

After this august group of Top 22 schools, a total of 142 law schools placed at least one student in the NLJ 250 law firms. These 142 schools took 1,689 jobs, which is 38% of the total jobs. These schools graduated a total of 32,558 students, and so 5.2% of their graduating students got NLJ 250 jobs.

The above list accounts for 164 schools. So 38 ABA accredited schools did not place a single student in the NLJ 250 law firms. A quick spot check confirmed that most of these schools are lower tier schools.

These numbers obviously show that after the Top 22 or so schools, the chances of getting an NLJ 250 job drop precipitously. The weighted average Top 22 school sticker tuition was $47,003. The weighted average Bottom 142 school sticker tuition was $33,262. Obviously, the net tuition is unknown and I’m not inclined to dig for this information. We can put these figures into some sort of an efficiency ratio for the purpose of rough comparisons. Suppose the average NLJ 250 firm job paid $120,000. One way to calculate this efficiency ratio is this: [(Average NLJ 250 Salary) x (Percent of Students Placed)] ÷ (Average Sticker Tuition for Peer Schools). The Top 22 schools would be 0.98. The Bottom 142 schools would be 0.19. These ratios give us a very rough sense of the value proposition in terms of economic return for students seeking high paying lawyer jobs.