Which law school is producing the most BigLaw associates?
Columbia University.
Columbia Law School has the highest percentage of 2016 graduates hired by large law firms, according to information released by the National Law Journal.
The school placed 57 percent of its recent graduates at large law firms, according to the publication’s annual Go-To Law Schools package. That’s 8 percent more than the University of Chicago Law School, which placed 48.84 percent of its recent graduates in big firm associate jobs. Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, which was ranked third on the NLJ list, placed 47.58 percent of its recent graduates in jobs at large law firms.
Another piece in the package notes that last year, the top three law schools were Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania Law School and Chicago.
Also, it was found that among the top 50 ranked law schools, 24 percent of recent graduates had large law firm jobs. Comparatively, the percentage last year was 23 percent. The country’s top 100 law firms hired 3,521 new associates in 2016, and hiring was up by 3 percent from last year, according to the article.
However, the publication also found that class sizes are smaller. Among those on the Go-To Law Schools list, there were fewer graduates—6 percent—in 2016 than in the previous year.
