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Where Partners Come From: Finding the Brass Ring

By Jim Chen et al.

The ABA has become increasingly interested in outcome measures. US News uses relative bar pass rates and questionable at-grad and 9-month employment rates. Bill Henderson has looked at per capita NLJ first-year-associate hiring rates.

This post reports preliminary results of a study examining what many law students view as the ultimate outcome measure: partnership in a big firm. Specifically, it attempts to gauge how successful graduates of each US law school have been at obtaining big-firm partnership status over the past 25 years. The study is limited to current partners (October 2010) in US offices of the NLJ 250.

My research assistants have almost completed the task of collecting the relevant information for all 250 firms from Martindale-Hubbell on-line. I have personally quality-checked the spreadsheets for the five largest law firms in the United States, which collectively employ 13,942 US lawyers ? 11% of all US lawyers employed by the NLJ 250. This post reports the results for those five firms. The five firms studied (with their two largest US offices, measured by number of partners) are:

Baker & McKenzie (Chicago, New York)
DLA Piper (Chicago, New York)
Jones Day (New York, Washington)
White & Case (New York, Washington)
Skadden Arps (New York, Washington)

Here follow the complete results, by rank and number of partners in those five firms nation-wide who obtained their JD degree within the past 25 years (I apologize for the awkward formatting):

1 Harvard 69
2 Georgetown 61
3 NYU 55
4 Columbia 52
5 Michigan 47
6 Northwestern 44
7 Chicago 42
8 Virginia 41
9 Texas 35
10 Fordham 34
11 UC Berkeley 29
12 UC Hastings 27
13 Duke 25
13 Ohio State 25
13 Pennsylvania 25
16 Notre Dame 23
17 Cornell 21
18 Boston U 20
18 George Wash 20
20 UCLA 19
21 Maryland 18
22 San Diego 16
23 American 15
23 Loyola Chicago 15
23 Loyola LA 15
23 Yale 15
27 Case Western 14
27 SMU 14
27 Stanford 14
30 St. John's 13
31 Chicago-Kent 11
31 San Francisco 11
31 Tulane 11
34 Emory 10
34 Houston 10
34 Illinois 10
34 USC 10
38 Boston College 9
38 Brooklyn 9
38 Georgia 9
38 Minnesota 9
38 Pittsburgh 9
38 Wisconsin 9
44 Cardozo 8
44 Cleveland State 8
44 DePaul 8
44 Indiana 8
44 Miami 8
44 Vanderbilt 8
44 Washington U 8
44 William & Mary 8
52 Catholic 7
52 John Marshall 7
54 UC Davis 6
55 Baylor 5
55 Duquesne 5
55 Pepperdine 5
55 Rutgers 5
59 Albany 4
59 George Mason 4
59 Hofstra 4
59 McGeorge 4
59 New York LS 4
59 SUNY Buffalo 4
59 Syracuse 4
59 Temple 4
59 Texas Tech 4
59 Tulsa 4
59 Washington 4
59 Washington & Lee 4
71 Akron 3
71 Baltimore 3
71 Brigham Young 3
71 Cal. Western 3
71 Drake 3
71 Florida 3
71 Franklin Pierce 3
71 Golden Gate 3
71 Mercer 3
71 Northeastern 3
71 Oregon 3
71 Santa Clara 3
71 South Texas 3
71 Villanova 3
71 Widener 3
86 Alabama 2
86 Arizona 2
86 Capital 2
86 Cincinnati 2
86 Colorado 2
86 Connecticut 2
86 Creighton 2
86 Dayton 2
86 Florida State 2
86 Iowa 2
86 Kansas 2
86 Louisville 2
86 Marquette 2
86 North Carolina 2
86 Ohio Northern 2
86 Pace 2
86 Seton Hall 2
86 Southwestern 2
86 Toledo 2
86 Washburn 2
86 Wayne State 2
107 Arizona State 1
107 Arkansas 1
107 Campbell 1
107 Denver 1
107 Detroit-Mercy 1
107 Howard 1
107 Louisiana State 1
107 Memphis 1
107 Missouri 1
107 New England 1
107 Oklahoma 1
107 Oklahoma City 1
107 Penn State 1
107 Southern Ill. 1
107 St. Louis 1
107 St. Thomas 1
107 Stetson 1
107 Suffolk 1
107 Tennessee 1
107 Thomas M. Cooley 1
107 Valparaiso 1
107 Vermont 1
107 Wake Forest 1
107 Western NE 1
107 Western State 1

Focusing on the top 50 law schools (by top-5-firm partners), 21 law schools outperform their 2010 US News ranking by 10 or more (e.g., San Francisco is ranked 67 places higher on this scale than in the 2010 US News rankings):

San Francisco 67
Loyola Chicago 64
St. John's 57
Loyola Los Angeles 48
Chicago-Kent 46
DePaul 43
San Diego 39
Pittsburgh 33
Case Western 28
UC Hastings 27
Miami 27
Houston 25
Brooklyn 23
Ohio State 22
Maryland 22
American 22
SMU 22
Fordham 20
Tulane 14
Georgetown 12
George Washington 10

Focusing again on the top 50 law schools (by top-5-firm partners), 10 law schools underperform their 2010 US News ranking by 10 or more (e.g., Vanderbilt is ranked 27 places lower on this scale than in the 2010 US News rankings):

Vanderbilt -27
Washington U -25
Stanford -24
Yale -22
Minnesota -18
USC -16
William & Mary -16
Emory -14
Boston College -12
Illinois -11

Note: Cleveland State is ranked 44th on this measure, although third tier in US News, and therefore clearly belongs on the list of overperforming schools. Indiana is not evaluated for under- or overperformance, because Indiana graduates do not typically list the campus, and the two campuses are ranked differently by US News.

Interpretation

Different readers will undoubtedly interpret the foregoing results differently. There are several possible explanations for the results, among them:

1. Students from Vanderbilt, Wash U, Stanford, and Yale don?t apply for big firm jobs.
2. Students from Vanderbilt, Wash U, Stanford, and Yale don?t get big firm jobs.
3. Students from Vanderbilt, Wash U, Stanford, and Yale don?t survive in big firm jobs.
4. Students from Vanderbilt, Wash U, Stanford, and Yale leave big firm jobs to do other things.

For law school applicants and faculties, two of these explanations might be viewed as benign or positive ? that students from schools that don?t seem to do well on this scale are simply making different choices. Indeed, one might even hypothesize that they have more choices than students from other schools of comparable US News rank.

Two, however, are negative ? that students from schools that don?t seem to do well on this scale either don?t get in the door or don?t survive once in. There are at least two reasons this might be so. First, big firm recruiters prefer large schools; the schools on the underperforming list are slightly smaller, on average, than the typical ABA school. Second, graduates of these schools may be less well prepared for big-firm practice.

The average size of schools on the list of underperformers is not dramatically different than that of ABA-accredited schools in general: 666 FTE versus 714 FTE (2004-05 data). The average size of schools on the list of overperformers is almost 50% larger than that of ABA-accredited schools in general: 1049 FTE versus 714 FTE (2004-05 data). Size is clearly helpful, but does not explain much of the variance in outcomes. Yale, Stanford, and Chicago are of comparable size, but Chicago substantially outperforms the other two. Maryland is smaller than Washington University, but has managed to place substantially more partners in the five largest US firms over the past 25 years.

For prospective employers, all of the explanations hypothesized above are negative. As a former big-firm hiring partner, I will tell you that hiring is obscenely expensive. Today, big firms commonly lose money on their first-year associates. Hiring someone who leaves voluntarily to do other things is often regarded as an expensive mistake. The fact that a school is small is itself a negative; cost-effective hiring strategies commonly focus on schools with large pools of potential hires.

Further work

My next step is going to be to extend the analysis to the full NLJ 250. The fact that the five firms analyzed employ 11% of all lawyers employed nationwide by the NLJ 250 suggests that the results reported here are likely to be somewhat representative, but this needs to be confirmed. In particular, I expect that Harvard is a more likely recruiting target for firms further down the NLJ 250 list than its closest competitors.

I have also collected city-by-city data. Again, I expect it will show that few schools are actually national law schools ? in the sense of producing significant numbers of big-firm partners in multiple cities. Here again, I expect Harvard to pull away from the competition.

Full post as published by MoneyLaw on October 15, 2010 (boomark / email).