Ranking Top Law Schools by Employer Interest (September 2008)

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 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 September 2008 NALP data. In a sense, it represents a logical way to rank law schools:

1. Georgetown…..822 employers
2. Virginia…..760 employers
3. Harvard…..713 employers
4. Michigan…..652 employers
5. NYU…..637 employers
6. Columbia…..627 employers
7. Duke…..591 employers
8. Penn…..588 employers
9. George Washington…..559 employers
10. Berkeley…..528 employers
11. Northwestern…..527 employers
12. Stanford…..506 employers
13. Chicago…..504 employers
14. Vanderbilt…..462 employers
15. Texas…..415 employers
16. UCLA…..405 employers
17. Yale…..403 employers
18. USC…..357 employers
19. Cornell…..346 employers
20. Notre Dame…..335 employers
21. Boston College…..292 employers
22. Boston U…..289 employers; Emory…..289 employers
23. North Carolina…..221 employers
24. Washington & Lee…..205 employers
25. William & Mary…..202 employers
26. Illinois…..196 employers
27. Wash. U. (St. Louis)…..194 employers
28. U. of Iowa…..171 employers
29. Minnesota…..124 employers
30. U. of Washington…..107 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.