Wide World

May 11th, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt

QS, a British company that supports international study, has published a ranking of law schools worldwide. Like all other rankings, this one undoubtedly has flaws. The method, however, seems at least as plausible as the one used by U.S. News for our domestic rankings. The QS ranking for subjects like law focuses on academic reputation surveys, employer surveys, and measures of scholarly productivity and impact. Let’s see what the results of the survey tell us about the place of U.S. schools in the wide world of law.

First some good news for our home team: Harvard Law School tops the QS list, and four other U.S. schools (Yale, NYU, Columbia, and Stanford) appear among the top ten. These United States similarly dominate the top fifty, with fourteen American schools in that group. The United Kingdom is our closest competitor, with nine schools listed among the top fifty. Next comes plucky Australia, with six law schools in the top fifty. If this were the Olympics, we would win; we have the most medals and that’s that.

American students and professors, however, may be surprised to find the glory spread among schools from so many different nations. In addition to the U.K. and Australian schools, the top fifty includes law schools from France, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Canada, Singapore, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Japan, China, Chile, and Italy. The top U.S. schools have a strong global reputation, but so do schools from many other nations.

Some of our dominance, furthermore, stems from our size. The United States has a population of 313.9 million residents. The United Kingdom is just one-fifth our size, with a population of 62.6 million. Australia is even smaller, with a population of just 22.6 million. A nation our size has many more educational institutions–and more opportunities to make a top-fifty list–than smaller countries do.

To adjust in a very rough way for size, we can compare the QS showing for California, with a population of 38 million residents, to both the United Kingdom and Australia. California’s population is about three-fifths as large as the population of the United Kingdom. Puny Australia, in turn, is about three-fifths the size of California.

California fares quite nicely on QS’s ranking of law schools: It has one school (Stanford) in the top ten and two others (Berkeley and UCLA) among the top fifty law schools worldwide. But the United Kingdom triples that showing, with three schools in the top ten and six others among the top fifty. The U.K. achieves that record with a population that is less than double California’s size. Tiny Australia, meanwhile, trounces California: It has two schools in the top ten and four others among the top fifty. That’s double California’s performance at just over half its size.

What does this mean for U.S. law schools and their graduates? The most lucrative forms of practice, serving corporate and financial clients, are now global practices. U.S. law matters, but so does the law of the European Union, China, and dozens of other nations. Large corporations obtain counsel from lawyers around the world, and many of those lawyers received their training outside of the United States.

To get a sense of this, scan the lawyers associated with Baker & McKenzie. For 2012, the latest year available, Baker grossed more money than any other law firm in the world. Baker is headquartered in the United States and it hires plenty of U.S. law school graduates. According to a search box on the firm’s site, it employed forty-six Harvard Law School graduates to help accomplish that end. The firm, however, also employed twenty-three lawyers educated at the University of Melbourne. Nor did those Melbourne lawyers stick to Baker’s Australian offices; they also practice in Chicago, Washington, DC, London, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur.

Examine the leading law firms headquartered outside of the United States, and you’ll find even more lawyers from all of those non-U.S. schools on the QS list. Clifford Chance, the U.K. mega-firm, has thirty lawyers in its Hong Kong office. Only two of those thirty have a law degree from a U.S. school, and one of those is an LLM earned to complement a Hong Kong degree. United Kingdom degrees predominate at Clifford Chance, but degrees from Hong Kong, Switzerland, Singapore, and Australia also appear among the Clifford Chance lawyers in Hong Kong.

Graduates of U.S. schools, in other words, are competing against a wide world of lawyers. That competition is one of the forces reducing the number of BigLaw positions for graduates of our schools. Corporate clients hire law firms located in many parts of the world. Those firms, in turn, hire lawyers from many countries–and often show little interest in U.S.-educated lawyers. As BigLaw positions contract, displaced U.S. lawyers move into positions more focused on the domestic market, placing pressure on those positions as well.

The United States enjoyed such global dominance during the last half of the twentieth century, that I fear many legal educators, law students, and prospective students don’t grasp the impact of global competition on jobs in our profession. BigLaw is no longer our playground; it’s a busy marketplace that we share with the rest of the world.

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