Following on Sunday’s post, Top 14 Law School Grads: Too Good for BigLaw?:

• Christopher Zorn (Penn State), Pedigree and Performance,

I just couldn’t help myself from digging into the data a little.  … I found the same NLJ data from 2010, and did a little comparison.

Red “Xs” are the “Top 14” law schools, while black dots are the rest; I labeled a few of the outliers. The data are noisy: the simple (Pearson) correlation between the two years is 0.32.  But the correlation is driven almost entirely by the difference between elite and non-elite schools: the correlation among non-elite schools only is 0.06, while that among elite schools only is a paltry 0.02.  Moreover, the aggregate differences between Top 14 and non-Top 14 schools are large, averaging 17.2% vs. 28% in 2010 and 15.9% vs. 40.5% in 2011.

So, while the data are noisy, the larger pattern still holds: More elite schools have consistently lower “partner yield rates” than do less elite, tier-one schools.  While this doesn’t begin to get at the various reasons why this might be happening, it does lend some support to the idea that there’s something here worth looking into.

• Dan Rodriguez (Dean, Northwestern), Sorting, Part I:

This post by some empirically-minded law profs is getting some buzz. The principal claim is that young lawyers from lower-ranked schools will be more likely to make partner than those from higher-ranked schools. This conclusion (with the notable data caveats described in the post) is followed by various speculative explanations.

• Dan Rodriquez (Dean, Northwestern), Law School Sorting and the Partnership Track: Northwestern Empiricists Weigh In:

Some extremely interesting, powerful comments on the Henderson argument from my able empirical-legal colleagues.