Adam Feldman (President, EmpiriLaw), A Map of Destinations: What Elite-Firm Associate Rosters Reveal About Law-School Pipelines:
[W]hen people ask which law schools place students at elite firms, what can the available data actually show? The rosters that firms publish on their own websites are public, current, and detailed enough to name a school, and often a graduation year, for thousands of associates at once. They function as a snapshot of firm-side composition rather than as survey, admissions, or hiring data, and they describe something real: the makeup of the associate pools that eighteen major firms have assembled, office by office, across fifty-three captured locations. This composition maps a set of school-firm-office pipelines whose apparent strength shifts once school size and market context enter the picture. The same numbers turn into a ranking that goes well beyond what public rosters were built to demonstrate. Two supporting public sources sharpen that picture further: ABA-reported first-year class sizes make representation comparable across schools of very different sizes, and Vault-verified summer-associate program figures, available for a subset of the sampled firms, offer an independent check on whether a firm’s current associate scale tracks the size of the classes it has been bringing in. …
Even before any adjustment, a comparatively small group of schools accounts for a large share of the associates captured. Columbia leads with 661 associates across all eighteen firms, followed by Harvard (563), NYU (513), and Georgetown (495); together those four schools alone hold nearly 36% of every associate row with a disclosed school. Every school in the top fifteen is represented at seventeen or eighteen of the eighteen firms, a genuinely expected national presence for the group as a whole, though the sizes differ by a factor of four between Columbia at the top and Yale in fifteenth place with 155 associates.
Raw counts like these reward large graduating classes as much as they reward strong firm relationships. Columbia, NYU, and Georgetown each graduate several hundred JDs a year; Yale graduates roughly two hundred. A school with a small class can supply a high share of its class to elite firms and still trail the largest schools in a simple head count, purely because it has fewer students to send anywhere, not to mention to other opportunities like clerkships. Separating those two stories, visibility within the observed pool versus representation relative to the size of the pipeline behind it, is the first task the data can actually do well.
The same schools look different again once the analysis is split by office market.
A market representation index, a school’s share of associates within one city divided by its share across the full sample, isolates schools that punch above their national weight in a particular place. Northwestern’s index in Chicago is 9.0: the school supplies roughly a quarter of the disclosed-school associates in the sample’s Chicago offices against under 3% of the sample nationally. UCLA (7.3) and USC (7.0) show a similar signature in Los Angeles, together accounting for over a third of that market’s disclosed associates. In Washington, George Washington (3.0), Virginia (2.5), and Georgetown (2.4) all sit well above the reference line, while Yale, despite a modest national footprint, is also disproportionately present there at 1.8 times its overall share.
New York differs in kind as well as in degree. Because well over half the sample’s associates sit in New York offices, most schools’ New York shares track close to their national shares by construction, and the market’s distinguishing feature is instead a wide bench of mid-size local and regional schools, Fordham, St. John’s, Brooklyn, and Cardozo among them, each supplying a meaningfully larger share of New York associates than of the sample overall. Looked at together, these signatures describe specialization and geography along with or rather than preference. A high index for UCLA in Los Angeles is consistent with several different explanations, office-specific recruiting relationships, regional hiring practices, or simply where UCLA’s graduates choose to practice, and the roster data alone leave those explanations tangled together.
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