Some recent law school graduates have struggled to find legal jobs because of the challenging job market for lawyers over the past few years.
Aspiring lawyers who are concerned about the legal job market can boost their employment chances by attending law schools with high-quality career services offices, experts say.
Illinois-based attorney Joshua Stern, who graduated from Emory University School of Law in 2010, says the best way to judge a law school’s career services office is to speak to a few of the school’s recent alumni and ask whether the school helped them get their first legal job.
Here are four other strategies experts suggest to identify law schools with high-quality career services.
1. Study their job placement statistics: Experts say the key number to look for is the percentage of a law school’s graduates who had jobs on the day they graduated that required bar passage and weren’t funded by the law school.
Among the 161 ranked law schools that reported these job placement data to U.S. News in an annual survey, the average rate was 41.2 percent. But some schools had double that average.
[Discover which law schools have the highest full-time employment rates.]
The University of Chicago had the highest proportion of 2015 graduates who left school with jobs that required bar passage and weren’t funded by the law school: 91.3 percent.
Stern says prospective law students should drill into these employment statistics to see the most common types of legal jobs held by a school’s recent graduates and where a school’s graduates tend to work. That can help students assess whether a law school’s career services office can help them find work in any city and any legal specialty, or whether its connections are limited to a specific type of law or a specific region of the U.S, he says.
[Understand how a law school’s location can affect job prospects.]
2. Research the size of the career services staff: Martha Fagan, a retired senior director of alumni relations at Emory and a former administrator at the university’s law school, says prospective law students should find out out how much a school invests in its career services office.
Key questions to ask, Fagan says, are how many people work in the career services office and whether each student is assigned a career services counselor whom they can ask for help as needed.
3. Find out if there are special programs for first-year law students: Experts say the odds of graduating law school with a job are highest at law schools that offer students career counseling from the moment they arrive on campus.
Marcia Pennington Shannon, assistant dean of career strategy with the law school at Georgetown University, says one way to gauge the quality of a law school’s career services office is to see if it offers career exploration workshops to first-year law students so the students can discover which areas of law they find most intriguing.
Another key sign of quality, she says, is if first-year students have the option of taking a career assessment test they can use to decide which legal discipline is the best fit.
These career services at the beginning of law school are critical, Shannon says, because few law students enter law school knowing precisely what kind of law they will practice. Students who start law school with a vision of what kind of attorney they hope to become are much more likely to graduate with legal jobs they enjoy, she says.
[Consider practicum opportunities when choosing a law school.]
4. Ask about clinics, practicums and externships: Experts say that law students who are allowed to earn course credit for real-world work experience are more likely to leave law school with a marketable resume.
“Courses that place students in a courtroom, or in front of real people with legal needs, better equip students with practical legal skills than traditional lecture courses,” says Tyler Smith, a summer associate at the Chicago office of large law firm Dinsmore & Shohl who is currently in his third year of law school at the Chicago-based Depaul University.
Atlanta divorce lawyer and adjunct law professor Randall Kessler says students who excel in law school clinics are occasionally hired by their instructors, who are generally successful lawyers.
Kessler, who teaches family law litigation courses at Emory, says he occasionally hires former students to work at his family law firm, where he is a founding partner, and he also recommends students for jobs outside his practice. “You can see the rising stars, you see the students that are wonderful, and you say, ‘That kid’s great.'”
Searching for a law school? Get our complete rankings of Best Law Schools.
More from U.S. News
10 Law Schools With the Highest Full-Time Employment Rates
Master Trial Advocacy Skills During Law School
Choose the Right Law School For a Corporate Law Career
Evaluate Law School Career Services originally appeared on usnews.com
