http://www.utexas.edu/law/faculty/bl...nal.html#_ftn1
This study aims to assess which of the top schools have the most “national” placement, as measured by hiring by elite law firms around the country. This study proceeds on the assumption that “national” law schools (1) place large numbers of graduates at the best firms, and (2) place graduates at the best firms throughout the nation.
We studied the usual suspects for the top law schools—Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, Columbia, NYU, Michigan, Virginia, Texas, Penn, Cornell, Georgetown, Northwestern, Duke--plus two schools on the cusp of this elite group, Vanderbilt and UCLA. [1] As a check on the reliability of the results, we added five very reputable, but presumably less national schools: Emory University, Washington & Lee University, University of Notre Dame, University of Minnesota, and George Washington University.
To identify “elite” law firms, we used the Vault Guide to the Top 100 Law Firms, including the 23 “best of the rest” identified by Vault, top firms that didn’t make the top 100 (see
http://www.vault.com/nr/lawrankings....d=242&top100=1). In order to assess national placement power, we had to have a genuinely national sample. Therefore, we studied only the top 3 firms in each city/region-- where there were at least three on the Vault list. (The primary failing of the well-known American Lawyer study of hiring by the AMLAW 100 firms was that the sample was not national, with nearly one-third of the firms in New York City and more than two-thirds of the firms on the list in the Northeast corridor. AMLAW 100 is informative as to job placement in New York and the Northeast, but says nothing about national placement power.)
Rank Based on Per Capita Score for Elite Firm Placement
Rank School Per Capita Value
1
University of Chicago
2.28
2
Harvard University
2.11
3
Yale University
1.90
4
University of Virginia
1.50
5
Stanford University
1.41
6
University of Michigan
1.25
University of Pennsylvania
1.24
8
Columbia University
1.10
9
Duke University
1.02
10
University of Texas, Austin
0.92
11
Northwestern University
0.84
Univ. of California, Berkeley
0.85
13
Univ. of California, Los Angeles
0.78
14
Cornell University
0.73
New York University
0.73
Vanderbilt University
0.73
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