What do these rankings mean?

I'm tired and bored enough from studying that I thought I'd do a small write-up of what you can take away from these rankings.

1) I discourage the line of thought that concludes that, say, Harvard is worse than Columbia because they placed nearly half as many graduates at a Vault 10 firm. What I expound here is where graduates ended up. These rankings do not purport to indicate how many students in a given class-year received offers from Vault 10 firms. Lower numbers by one school can be explained by a variety of possibilities. Here are two:

• Students who received V10 offers likely also received V20 or above offers. Not everyone acts in strict obedience with "firm prestige rankings". There are many considerations that go into choosing firms, such as cultural fit, practice strengths, geographical location, the particular strengths of the training program, and so forth. Rational and intelligent students would be wise to pick firms based on these factors, rather than the elusive characteristic of "prestige".
• Even if one took a summer-associateship at a firm, there is no guarantee that the student ended up working there. Many students opt to do 3L OCI and work elsewhere, to avoid Biglaw altogether, or simply did not receive offers from their summer firm (this possibility is a bit more unlikely, considering the economy of summer 2006).

2) Certain schools have stronger foci that are not in BigLaw placement. For instance, schools like Chicago, Harvard, Yale, and Stanford are renowned for affording their top graduates prestigious clerkship and, thus, academic positions. Similarly, schools like NYU, Michigan, and Boalt encourage students to pursue public interest, not foisting one particular career path on their studentry. There is an NLJ-250 chart that shows what percentage of a given law school's class decided to do what, and this should temper your expectations as to how well that law school places in biglaw.

3) I think the percentages in these rankings can tell you one thing (and there may be other things it can tell you, but I only had one purpose in mind): They give you the floor. That is to say, they tell you–at a minimum–what percentage of the class ended up at the Vault 10 (or Vault 5 or whatever). The number of students who received offers could be much, much higher.

4) In the same vein, I'd hesitate to say that Vault 10 firms take the top 30% of, say, Columbia's class. Expect this number to be padded somewhat: Students ranked highest will usually opt to take other routes upon graduation. Aside from the academic incentive, for instance, firms allocate hefty bonuses for associates who took up prestigious clerkships after graduating.

I hope this helps. I know it sounds a little paradoxical that I don't want to encourage a ranking's obsession, even though I'm creating... a ranking. Nevertheless, I think rankings are useful as a very rough tool: They help to show, roughly, which school is stronger at what. The lines will blur as schools get closer in percentages, and the wild variations year-to-year in placement should show you, really, that pretty much the entire top 14 do very well at placing their students at the most prestigious firms (think about it: We've only gone through the 10 most prestigious firms in the nation and we're already swatting away large portions of these schools' classes).

5) Oh, and regarding this economy and how people will fare during 2009 OCI: All bets are off. I expect hiring to be down, but how far down... I don't know. It won't be down simply because of the economy. 2007 and 2006 OCI were genuine peak years in legal hiring, with a lot of chanting on legal tabloids about moving market pay to 190,000$. I don't expect any OCI to match those years' numbers in the near future.

Hope this helps!

BLS