Quick Comment on the 2012 Employment Data

Last Friday was ABA employment data day, a national holiday all Americans celebrate with food and rum, salutes to the flag, and tales of John Adams, the nation’s first lawyer to become president.

I honored it by looking through the ABA’s master spreadsheet on the topic to glean a few points that you brazen researchers who need to be restrained from cutting corners might be unaware of.

(1)  Cooley’s branch campuses appear! But they’re all zeroed-out. Oh ABA, you tease us!

(2)  Aside from the JAG school, anyone working with the data might want to eliminate the most mediocre of law schools: The Generic University School of Law, which managed to graduate one student last year. He or she was placed in a law school-funded job with a 2-10-person firm. Congrats!

(3)  Oddly, the ABA press release says there were 46,364 grads even though the master spreadsheet lists 46,408.

(4)  At last there are data on what happened to Puerto Rico’s law school’s graduates.

Someone explain to me again why there are no Puerto Rican scambloggers?

(5)  There’s a typo in Michigan’s entry in the master spreadsheet. It lists 358 employed-by-status graduates when there are only 355. It’s due to a mis-entry in the number of “other clerkship” employment status. It’s a “4” when it should be a “1”. I’m sure that saved your meticulous research from total ridicule.

(6)  The employment data for the freestanding private law schools, which I wrote about for The Am Law Daily last week, were largely unchanged from last year except there are a lot more graduates and a lot more of them bothered to tell their schools that they were totally unemployed. 1,329 FSP law school grads were unemployed, more than 1,000 were seeking work. They amount to about a fifth of all unemployed law school grads, and three in ten of all unemployed private law school grads.

That is all.