[美国&加拿大] The Top 15 Schools From Which Elite Law Firms Hire New Lawyers, 2008 [复制链接]

joe824
UID：187661

元老版主

Rank: 11

声望: 55
寄托币: 53107
注册时间: 2004-11-27
精华: 30
帖子: 252

电梯直达

楼主

发表于 2008-12-13 00:00:55 |只看该作者 |倒序浏览

转自：Brian Leiter

Where do the most elite law firms in the United States go to hire new lawyers? We started with the most recent Vault list of the most prestigious law firms in the U.S. We had to go to #24 on that list to identify fifteen super elite law firms that had the right kinds of search engines to permit efficient identification of where associates at these law firms went to law school. The firms studied were: Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; Cravath, Swaine & Moore; Sullivan & Cromwell; Skadden Arps; Davis Polk & Wardwell; Simpson Thacher; Clearly Gottlieb; Kirkland & Ellis; Covington & Burling; Paul, Weiss; Williams & Connolly; Sidley Austin; Arnold & Porter; Jones Day; and Morrison & Foerster.
LLM and other degrees beyond the JD were excluded; we searched in August 2008 for associates from 27 law schools in order to rank “the top 15.” Note that this is not a study of national placement power of law schools, since the super elite firms are overwhelmingly clustered in the Northeast corridor and in California; earlier studies are a better measure of the ‘national’ reach of a degree.Even though most of these firms have multiple offices nationally and internationally, the following chart makes clear how dramatic the clustering is among the 15 firms we studied:

City	Firms Headquartered	Other Firm Offices	Total Offices
New York	8	6	14
Washington DC	4	8	12
San Francisco or Palo Alto	1	8	9
Los Angeles	0	8	8
Chicago	2	2	4
Houston	0	2	2

Houston is one of the five biggest cities in the United States, but one has to get into the 40s on the Vault listing before Houston-based firms turn up. (This also, I’m sure, explains the results for the University of Texas in the current study, compared to the earlier studies of national placement: until recently, the student body was 80% Texas residents, who overwhelmingly prefer to enter the major legal markets in Houston and Dallas, which UT dominates. Contrast that with schools like Michigan, Virginia, and Vanderbilt, which do not have many high-powered law firms in their local markets as a draw for students.)

One thing the results indicate is how little impact U.S. News rankings are having on where the firms choose to hire. That is clearest when schools share a regional market. Boston College was, for quite some time, ranked ahead of Boston University in U.S. News, but it is quite clear that BU dominates BC at the best firms in the Northeast corridor. Although Columbia and NYU have been basically deadlocked in U.S. News for a decade now, the elite New York law firms continue to hire more from Columbia than NYU. Chicago, which has been ranked behind NYU and Stanford, and even tied with Penn some years in U.S. News, dominates all three of them when it comes to elite firm hiring, and notwithstanding the enormous coast-bias in the sample pool of firms studied.

The other striking fact about the results is how much geography matters once you get outside the ranks of elite law schools. Fordham, long a favorite with New York firms (essentially third behind Columbia and NYU in the local market), comes in 15th entirely because of the huge clustering of the most elite firms in New York (either with headquarters or major ‘branch’ offices). Similar observations apply to the striking results for Brooklyn, Cardozo, and George Washington, among others. With 26 “elite” firm offices in New York and Washington, D.C., graduates of schools with strong regional presences in those markets do very well. (Conversely, with 17 “elite” firm offices in California, I was actually surprised that UCLA and USC did not fare better, but this may just be a fluke of the sample size.)

Geography matters in another way too: where students choose to go to law school often says a lot about where they would prefer to work. That probably has much to do with the results for, e.g., Berkeley.

The chart below reports the results. In order to account for the fact that schools differ greatly in size, we divided the total number of graduates in associate positions at elite firms by the recent average class size (rounded to the nearest 25) in order to come up with the number on the basis of which the schools are ranked. Following the chart are detailed charts showing the number of graduates of each school in associate positions at the firms.

Rank	School	# of Graduates at Elite Firms /Avg. Graduating Class Size	Total # of Graduates at Elite Firms
1	Columbia University	1.53	613
2	University of Chicago	1.33	265
3	Harvard University	1.13	622
4	New York University	1.11	501
5	Stanford University	0.95	167
6	Yale University	0.94	187
7	Cornell University	0.87	174
	University of Pennsylvania	0.87	239
9	Northwestern University	0.74	185
10	Duke University	0.71	142
	University of Michigan	0.71	249
12	Georgetown University	0.67	404
13	University of Virginia	0.62	217
14	University of California, Berkeley	0.59	148
15	Fordham University	0.48	183
	Other schools studied (not ranked)
	Boston College	0.16	49
	Boston University	0.29	87
	Brooklyn Law School	0.18	91
	Cardozo Law School/Yeshiva University	0.25	63
	George Washington University	0.32	161
	Howard University	0.26	39
	University of California, Los Angeles	0.39	116
	University of Notre Dame	0.39	58
	University of Southern California	0.27	53
	University of Texas, Austin	0.22	101
	Vanderbilt University	0.32	64
	Washington & Lee University	0.07	10

Breakdown by Firm

School (avg. class size)/Firm	Wachtell	Cravath	Skadden Arps	Sullivan & Cromwell	Davis Polk	Simpson Thacher	Cleary Gottlieb	Kirkland & Ellis	Totals
Harvard (550)	26	42	87	42	69	48	47	66	427
Yale (200)	12	10	20	18	13	17	26	9	125
Chicago (200)	7	8	42	14	5	9	9	56	150
Stanford (175)	4	10	15	9	11	18	14	11	92
Columbia (400)	17	52	94	64	68	70	56	34	455
NYU (450)	14	24	51	36	47	53	63	39	327
Berkeley (250)	0	2	25	7	8	13	3	6	64
Michigan (350)	1	4	41	6	10	24	17	44	151
Virginia (350)	1	5	32	16	11	26	4	19	114
Penn (250)	11	14	42	20	14	39	19	18	177
Georgetown (600)	0	8	80	3	24	22	28	51	216
Duke (200)	3	4	19	5	10	22	4	13	80
Northwestern (250)	1	7	38	5	13	11	10	44	128
Cornell (200)	2	10	20	8	11	24	15	20	110
Texas (450)	0	2	22	2	0	3	2	4	35
Vanderbilt (200)	0	0	10	0	2	3	0	14	29
UCLA (300)	0	0	27	4	0	7	1	13	52
Fordham (400)	0	21	26	6	11	21	5	14	104
Howard (150)	1	3	5	6	0	4	2	4	25
George Washington (500)	0	1	25	1	7	9	6	24	73
Boston University (300)	1	3	15	9	1	2	7	14	52
Boston College (300)	0	1	10	4	1	2	1	3	22
Notre Dame (150)	1	0	9	0	0	0	2	13	25
Southern California (200)	0	0	8	3	1	5	0	0	17
Brooklyn (500)	0	2	14	12	11	12	6	6	63
Cardozo (250)	0	3	8	0	0	2	8	3	24
Washington & Lee (150)	0	0	2	0	0	0	0	0	2

Breakdown by Firm, continued

School (avg. class size)/Firm	Covington & Burling	Paul, Weiss	Williams & Connolly	Sidley Austin	Arnold & Porter	Jones Day	Morrison & Foerster	Totals
Harvard (550)	32	26	18	46	18	27	28	195
Yale (200)	9	7	8	10	7	8	13	62
Chicago (200)	11	5	6	72	1	14	6	115
Stanford (175)	7	11	5	10	5	12	25	75
Columbia (400)	12	57	6	24	16	13	30	158
NYU (450)	17	52	1	34	11	24	35	174
Berkeley (250)	9	5	1	14	0	12	43	84
Michigan (350)	15	13	3	26	8	26	7	98
Virginia (350)	15	7	9	30	7	30	5	103
Penn (250)	8	14	4	10	4	10	12	62
Georgetown (600)	18	16	18	42	24	42	28	188
Duke (200)	3	10	11	17	2	17	2	62
Northwestern (250)	1	6	2	21	2	21	4	57
Cornell (200)	2	9	1	16	6	16	14	64
Texas (450)	0	4	4	8	3	41	6	66
Vanderbilt (200)	2	0	1	7	8	17	0	35
UCLA (300)	0	4	0	8	3	25	24	64
Fordham (400)	2	8	0	29	4	19	17	79
Howard (150)	1	1	0	5	5	1	1	14
George Washington (500)	19	8	3	19	14	12	13	88
Boston University (300)	5	5	0	10	1	10	4	35
Boston College (300)	0	6	1	14	3	2	1	27
Notre Dame (150)	0	0	0	5	0	27	1	33
Southern California (200)	0	0	0	17	5	9	5	36
Brooklyn (500)	1	5	0	13	3	6	0	28
Cardozo (250)	1	6	0	7	1	19	5	39
Washington & Lee (150)	2	0	1	1	1	3	2	10