Racial gaps in hiring new lawyers persists despite strong market, study shows
Last year’s law school graduates entered a strong job market, but people of color didn’t benefit as much as their white peers, according to the annual Jobs & JDs: Employment and Salaries of New Law Graduates report released Wednesday by the National Association for Law Placement.
The class of 2024 was the last that graduated before the Jan. 20 executive order signed by President Donald Trump that ended diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the government, making the survey “a critical benchmark,” Nikia Gray, NALP’s executive director, said in a press release.
“Their outcomes provide a vital reference point for assessing how changes in employer policies and practices will affect future graduates—particularly graduates of color—and whether these existing employment disparities widen or narrow,” she added in the release.
The report shows an overall 93.4% employment rate for law school graduates, but white graduates surpassed that, with 94.7% landing jobs. Latinx graduates had a 92.3% employment rate while Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander graduates hit 89.3%.
For jobs requiring or anticipating bar admission, the racial gap widens. While 84.3% of all graduates received those jobs, white graduates had the highest rate of employment with 86.5%, while Black or African American graduates had the lowest at 74.3%. The pattern repeats when looking at judicial clerkships as well as jobs in private practice, according to the report.
Notably, students with at least one lawyer parent saw an advantage, with their overall employment rate more than 3 percentage points higher than the overall group, 96.6% compared to 93.3%, according to the report. The same group is overrepresented in federal clerkship jobs, comprising only 14.2% of the overall class but receiving 20.7% of the federal clerkships, the study shows. Graduates with a lawyer parent also claimed a median salary of $103,500 compared to $90,000 for first-generation college students.
NALP bases its report on employment outcomes data received from individual law schools about their JD graduates about 10 months after graduation.
Earlier this year, Big Law firms started scrubbing diversity mentions from their websites and examining their DEI programs after the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission published informal guidance on DEI measures that can constitute illegal discrimination in a document and a website Q&A.
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