How many 2012 grads did each law schools send to the NLJ 250?

Here's the data.  (h/t: Tax Prof Blog) The data is sliced and diced in interesting ways, such as a chart of which schools place more grads into biglaw than you'd guess from their US News rankings. Also, a list of the top 50 schools in terms of placing grads, which can be broken down into schools that place 60% or more (Penn), schools that place 50-59% (Chicago, Columbia, NYU, Northwestern, Harvard), place 40-49% (Duke, Stanford, Berkeley, Cornell, Virginia), place 30-39% (Michigan, Georgetown, Yale), place 20-29% (UCLA, USC, Vanderbilt, Texas, Fordham, UC-Irvine, George Washington, BU, BC), and so on.

Comments

[Stephen Gillers]

Is this methodology mistaken because it fails to recognize the students who first go into clerkships and then to Big Law?

[John Steele]

Stephen, it would be nice to know that. Presumably that would affect the top 20 schools that place most of the clerks and would have little statistical effect on the large majority of schools.

Still, the stats have been an eye-opener for me as to some schools. Bill Henderson has written some articles on the effect of geography on hiring and you can see that some of the supposedly second-tier schools in the bigger cities punch above their weight class.