How effective are 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 think about 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 current NALP data. In a sense, it represents a logical way to rank law schools:

Georgetown…..835 employers

Harvard…..775 employers

Virginia…..752 employers

Michigan…..665 employers

Duke…..653 employers

NYU…..652 employers

Columbia…..592 employers

Berkeley…..564 employers

Stanford…..559 employers

Penn…..530 employers

George Washington…..522 employers

Northwestern…..495 employers

Chicago…..491 employers

Yale…..450 employers

Texas…..432 employers

Vanderbilt…..430 employers

UCLA…..372 employers

Cornell…..360 employers

USC…..319 employers

Emory…..290 employers

Boston College…..284 employers

North Carolina…..281 employers

Boston U…..269 employers

Notre Dame…..242 employers

William & Mary…..208 employers

Washington & Lee…..202 employers

Wash. U. (St. Louis)…..178 employers

Illinois…..178 employers

U. of Iowa…..169 employers

Minnesota…..117 employers

U. of Washington…..94 employers

To discuss the impact of these factors on your planning for law school, send an e-mail to me at BradDobeck@aol.com. For more information about my work for law school applicants, please see my website PrelawAdvisor.com.