Second Year of Positive Employment Rate for Law Graduates

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Second Year Of Positive Employment Rate For Law Graduates LawCrossing.com

Summary:

Law school graduates are starting to see an increase in employment numbers despite the fact that there are fewer graduates entering the field as attorneys.

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The employment rate for law graduates has grown slightly for the second year in-a-row. However, this improvement is a result of law schools graduating fewer students to be attorneys. According to the American Bar Association, the real number of graduates with full-time legal jobs after 10 months of graduating has gone down in the past year.

Professor Derek Muller at Pepperdine University School of Law studies employment trends. He said, “It’s good news, bad news. The prospects for law students are better simply because the classes are getting smaller. At the same time, it appears the market for legal graduates shrank last year.”

In 2015, ABA-accredited law schools graduated 39,817 Juris Doctors, which is around a 9 percent decrease from the 43,633 students that graduated in 2014. Of the 2015 graduates, 59.3 percent had full-time, long-term jobs that required bar passage whereas only 57.9 percent had acquired this kind of job in 2014. There were 1,689 fewer graduates in 2015.

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Along with fewer graduates, the July 2015 bar exam pass rate was down, helping to explain the decline in law jobs. Based on this and other reasons, each state has different outlooks. California is hit especially hard by the recession several years ago and seems to be bouncing back better compared to states like Ohio and New York.

Muller found that bar passage-required jobs for Ohio’s law graduates dropped by 15 percent and 5 percent in New York for jobs, where a law degree is an advantage. Muller said, “It’s good news for the graduates, but it does not portend good things for the long-term sustainability of legal education or the job market.”

This article “Second Year of Positive Employment Rate for Law Graduates” first appeared on LawCrossing is the world leader in “pure” monitoring and reporting of legal jobs, through its active and growing research into all legal employers throughout the world.

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