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Monday, May 27, 2013
Spring Self-Reported Entry Level Hiring Report 2013
Following is a data summary of the Spring Self-Reported Entry Level Hiring Report for 2013. To remain consistent with past years, while the spreadsheet contains all hiring information received, the data analysis includes only tenure-track hires at U.S. law schools.
Here is the full spreadsheet:
We have reports of 106 people being hired, at 74 different law schools.
Two schools have been reported as doing no entry level hiring this year.
Here are answers to some frequently asked questions:
Q: 106 self-reported tenure-track hires? How does that compare to previous years?
A: Yeah. Not good. (I omit 2010 in this and all subsequent cross-year comparisons because insufficient data was collected that year.)
Q: How many reported hires got their JD from School X?
Yale 18; Harvard 16; NYU 12; Chicago 6; Duke 5; Michigan 5; Virginia 4; Cornell 3; Georgetown 3; Northwestern 3; Berkeley 3; Other 26.
Schools in the "other" category with two JD/LLBs who reported hires: Columbia; Texas; Stanford; UCLA.
Schools in the "other" category with one JD/LLB who reported hires: Brooklyn; College of Mgmt Acad Stud; Diego Portales; Fordham; Hastings; Kansas; Louisana State; Melbourne; Miami; Montana; New Mexico; North Carolina; Oklahoma; Penn; Phillipines (U of); Russian University; SMU; Tulane; Washington (St. Louis); West Virginia.
Q: How many reported hires had a fellowship, degree, or clerkship?
83 (about 78%) had a fellowship; 59 (about 56%) had an advanced degree; 53 (about 50%) had a clerkship.
Nonproportional Venn diagram:
Q: That seems like a lot of fellowships. How does it compare to previous years?
A: It's a lot of fellowships.
Q: Tell me more about these advanced degrees.
Okay, but first a caveat: Although some people had more than one advanced degree, the following looks only at what seemed to me to be the "highest" degree someone earned. For example, someone with a Ph.D. and an LL.M. would be counted only as a Ph.D. for purposes of this question. (This tracks the "Other Degree (1)" column, for the two people out there who are actually following along on the spreadsheet.)
That said, looking only at what seemed to be the most advanced degree (apologizing in advance for mischaracterizing the relative advancement of anyone's multiple degrees), and including "expected" degrees, the 59 "highest" advanced degrees broke down like this:
LL.M. (or LL.M. expected) 10; Masters (or Masters expected) 23; D.Phil. (Law), SJD, or JSD (or SJD or JSD expected) 6; D.Phil or Ph.D. (or Ph.D. expected) 20.
Topics ranged all over the map. For the 20 Ph.D.s, for example:
Q: How long ago did these reported hires get their initial law degrees?
Zero to Four Years (Graduated 2009-2013) 20; Five to Nine Years (Graduated 2004-2008) 59; Ten to 19 Years (Graduated 1994-2003) 21; Twenty or More Years (Graduated before 1994) 3; Blank 3. The year-by-year break-out is on the spreadsheet ("Years Since Hire" tab).
Q: Could you break the reported hires out by men/women?
Women 49 (about 46%); Men 57 (about 54%). (Let's say this is right within +/-2 people.)
Q: Did we learn anything interesting about reported speciality subject areas?
The self-reported entry level hires had diverse specialities--in fact, the hires named 116 different fields of specialty! (I did this differently from the "what kind of degrees" question--here, if someone listed four fields of speciality, I included all four.)
As for which fields were most popular:
You can see the full list, sortable either by number of people who stated an interest or alphabetically by interest, here (on the tab labeled "Subject Summary").
Q: More slicing! More dicing! Different slicing! Different dicing!
Sure--you can do it yourself, or ask questions in the comments and I'll see what I can do, or we'll work it out as a group.
Q: This is all wrong! I know for a fact that more people from School Y were hired! Plus, you account for only 76 different law schools, and there are over 200!
Yes, this spreadsheet is certainly missing some information. Repeat: this spreadsheet is incomplete. It represents only those entry-level hires that were reported to me, either through the comments on this blog or via email. It is without question incomplete.
If you want to know about real entry level hiring, I commend to you Brian Leiter's report and the Katz et al. article. This is just a report about self-reported entry level hires as of the spring before the school year starts.
Q: What does it all mean?
Not much. But it's been fun!
Originally posted 5/27/13; edited 5/28/13 to reflect misclassified hire from original spreadsheet.Posted by Sarah Lawsky on May 27, 2013 at 03:10 PM in Entry Level Hiring Report | Permalink
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Comments
Thanks for this list. It's annoying to still find job postings like Georgia State with no dates on their site to know when it was posted or a deadline.
Posted by: Adjunct | Jun 23, 2013 6:40:45 PM
What would also be interesting to see is a comparison (over a few years) of the proportion of success rates of JD/clerk/fellowship/Phd variations relative to the total pool of candidates -- if that can be ascertained? These numbers tell us how many hires had X, or X+Y, but that doesn't tell us how successful such types of candidates were.
Posted by: anon | Jun 19, 2013 6:01:50 PM
Many thanks, Sarah. This info is incredibly interesting (even if you say it doesn't mean much). And I noticed the same, Anon.
The fellowships and advanced degree numbers really pop. It's tough not to look at these numbers and think of Lior's recent post, "How Many Years of Famine to Follow Seven Years of Feasting on VAPs?" (http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2013/04/how-many-years-of-famine-to-follow-seven-years-of-feasting-for-vaps.html). As Orin notes, fellowships have become incredibly common -- a 10 point jump from 2012 and look at the massive increase in this "requisite" since 2009 alone. Despite all the complaints we hear, I tend to think that's a good thing.
Posted by: BAG | May 30, 2013 2:02:02 PM
There are at least a couple of candidates at the very top not yet listed, possibly because not yet committed.
Posted by: Anon | May 29, 2013 7:22:51 PM
It appears as though the average quality of schools hiring this year is markedly lower than in previous years. Is there a way to run the numbers and check that conjecture?
Posted by: GAB | May 29, 2013 3:16:15 PM
For Paul Horwitz and Michael Lewyn, I can only speak for myself as the '92 grad on the list. 6 years outside counsel experience at big firms in NY and Miami (commercial litigation, employment law) and 11 years in house counsel experience (deputy GC, compliance, ethics, chief privacy officer). I also did a two-year teaching fellowship.
Posted by: Marcia Narine | May 28, 2013 8:37:01 PM
Fields most popular: 15 of the hires list International Law subjects
[SBL: Yes, thanks, this is a great point--another useful way to look at the subjects is to aggregate overall topics that have been subdivided. So viewed this way, international law should be toward the top. Health/healthcare law is another one that jumps out at me that could be aggregated: 9 hires in that area.]
Posted by: HLB | May 28, 2013 12:16:30 PM
Hi guys, I don't, unfortunately, have any information about years in practice. I do have years out of law school for the previous two years, and this year's numbers match up with that--about 60% graduated from law school 5 to 9 years before being hired in each of the the three years--but I don't think that gives us information about practice experience (were they spending their time getting PhDs? fellowships? clerkships?).
Posted by: Sarah Lawsky | May 28, 2013 9:50:40 AM
Sarah, I wouldn't mind seeing an answer to Michael's comment too. Do you have data on years in practice (with or without clerkships) for these hires or for previous years?
Posted by: Paul Horwitz | May 28, 2013 8:00:59 AM
How do years out of law school and/or practice experience compare to prior years? Over the past few years, I've noticed a few people asserting that law professor hiring should be more connected to practice. Is that intellectual trend reflected in hiring at all?
Posted by: Michael Lewyn | May 28, 2013 2:15:21 AM
Thanks for doing all this!
Posted by: Joey | May 28, 2013 1:56:36 AM
Thanks for all the work, Sarah. Beyond the overall drop in numbers of candidates hired, it's particularly interesting that 78% had a fellowship and that 93% had either a fellowship or an advanced degree.
Posted by: Orin Kerr | May 27, 2013 4:38:26 PM
The data report, as opposed to the spreadsheet, includes only placements at tenure-track jobs at U.S. law schools. One of the Chicago placements was at a non-U.S. law school, and one was at a non-tenure-track job (I think--I made this assumption due to its subject matter--but someone with first-hand knowledge lets me know otherwise, I will certainly change it).
Posted by: Sarah Lawsky | May 27, 2013 3:57:44 PM
Thanks for doing the heavy lifting on this. I have no idea why these reports are important, but for some reason I think they are.
Note, it looks like there are 7 Chicago grads on the sheet, but you only report 5 in the summary.
Also a shout out to Luke Boso, a WVU grad from my time there,on the list. Alas, I can take zero credit for his success, but it's nice to see nonetheless.
[SBL: Thanks, Michael! I am reporting only tenure-track hires at U.S. law schools. One of the Chicago folks was hired at a non-U.S. law school. The other I had erroneously reported as non-tenure track. This is now fixed, and the data is updated to reflect the change.]
Posted by: Michael Risch | May 27, 2013 3:54:52 PM
Thank you for providing this service, Sarah.
But the numbers are at least a little off: Carla Fredricks is *not* a tenure-track hire at the University of Colorado.
[SBL: Thank you! I have now fixed that in the spreadsheet and data analysis.]
Posted by: Lower 'em | May 27, 2013 3:29:38 PM
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