For several years, the ABA has had a required employment data reporting protocol as a part of all law school’s accreditation. NALP and of course US News also have long standing protocols for reporting job data. The gold standard of jobs are jobs that either require the bar exam or prefer a J.D. Schools that do not have a high percentage of students landing these gold standard jobs are not considered competitive in the law school marketplace. So, law grads that enter investment banking, start/run their own business or “practice” in any other non-traditional way are not counted in that golden number. I do not think it is a revelation to anyone that there are law students who come to law school with no intention to practice law in a traditional way. In fact, more and more millennials intend to earn a J.D. to use the knowledge it offers in more novel, entrepreneurial venues. Most people agree that a J.D. is a flexible degree, so are we losing the forest for the trees with what we count and how we count it?
What We Count
The law can be a nimble and future-looking profession, yet we are still defining a lawyer in the same way we have for hundreds of years. Can there be no evolution of a lawyer beyond those depicted in the movie Inherit the Wind (a 1960 movie taking place in 1925)? With the complete understanding that we cannot have law schools counting a student working as a barista in their employment stats (because this would cause misrepresentation in their graduates’ employment statistics and is just wrong), is there no better way to provide job data than counting only the Clarence Darrows among us? I hypothesize that the legal market would be better for counting in some way those law school graduates that choose alternative paths that are not specifically J.D. advantage in their golden number. Attend any legal tech event and you will find hundreds of non-practicing attorneys in lucrative and game changing roles that neither the ABA, NALP nor US News validate with their golden number. In turn, the lack of validation hurts the law schools that graduate these entrepreneurs, financiers, etc.
