PrelawAdvisor.com's Top 30 Law School Ranking (November 2009)

How effective are top law schools in attracting legal employers?

You may not be thinking of this now--as a law school applicant--but it is extremely important to know how effective your desired law school is in attracting the law-related employers you will be interested in working for, after your second year of law school, and on into your future.

Use the excellent website of the National Association for Law Placement, www.nalpdirectory.com, a truly outstanding service to applicants and students, to see which employers are involved in your target law school's on-campus recruiting program. Are there many employers? Are they from locations of interest to you? Are you seeing depth and breadth to the list of such employers? Are you seeing more than just law firms? Are the most respected law firms in the cities and states of interest to you recruiting at your target schools?

Which schools attract the most employers to on-campus interviewing? Consider this list, from November 2009 NALP data. In a sense, it represents a logical way to rank law schools:

  1. Georgetown.....760 employers (down 3 employers from April 2009)
  2. Virginia.....687 employers (up 7 employers)
  3. Harvard.....662 employers (up 9 employers)
  4. Michigan.....602 employers (up 3 employers)
  5. NYU.....586 employers (down 1 employer)
  6. Columbia.....556 employers (down 3 employers)
  7. George Washington.....517 employers (up 5 employers; overtakes Duke)
  8. Duke.....510 employers (down 6 employers) 
  9. Berkeley.....503 employers (up 2 employers; overtakes Penn)
  10. Penn.....496 employers (down 7 employers)
  11. Northwestern.....489 employers (up 5 employers)
  12. Stanford.....472 employers (up 7 employers)
  13. Chicago.....445 employers (down 2 employers)
  14. Vanderbilt.....425 employers (up 10 employers)
  15. UCLA.....377 employers (down 11 employers)
  16. Yale.....369 employers (up 5 employers)
  17. Texas.....356 employers (down 6 employers)
  18. USC.....325 employers (down 8 employers)
  19. Cornell.....304 employers (up 3 employers)
  20. Boston College.....281 employers (up 3 employers; overtakes Boston U)
  21. Boston U.....280 employers (up 2 employers)
  22. Notre Dame.....273 employers (down 3 employers)
  23. Emory.....241 employers (up 3 employers)
  24. North Carolina.....220 employers (up 3 employers)
  25. Wash. U. (St. Louis).....217 employers (up 3 employers)
  26. Washington & Lee.....198 employers (up 1 employer)
  27. Illinois.....175 employers (up 2 employers)
  28. William & Mary.....168 employers (up 2 employers)
  29. U. of Iowa.....162 employers (down 2 employers)
  30. Minnesota.....150 employers (down 3 employers)

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