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:
Harvard…..775 employers
Virginia…..752 employers
Duke…..653 employers
NYU…..652 employers
Berkeley…..564 employers
Stanford…..559 employers
Penn…..530 employers
George Washington…..522 employers
Northwestern…..495 employers
Chicago…..491 employers
Yale…..450 employers
Vanderbilt…..430 employers
UCLA…..372 employers
Cornell…..360 employers
USC…..319 employers
Emory…..290 employers
Notre Dame…..242 employers
William & Mary…..208 employers
Washington & Lee…..202 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.