Adam Feldman (President, EmpiriLaw), How National Are America’s Law Schools?:
How far can a law school’s professional network take its graduates? Geographic placement would seem one way to find out. A school whose graduates work across many states might appear to have greater reach than one whose graduates overwhelmingly remain in the same state. But the most substantial legal employment markets are not distributed evenly across the country, and schools can connect graduates to nationally prominent employers without sending them far from campus.
Consider Columbia and Duke. According to the ABA’s Class of 2025 disclosures, 71.8% of Columbia’s employed graduates and 71.2% of Duke’s entered firms with more than 500 lawyers. Yet 74.3% of Columbia’s employed graduates worked in New York, compared with only 34.9% of Duke’s, even though New York was also Duke’s leading destination. Columbia’s three largest destination states accounted for 88.6% of its employed graduates; Duke’s accounted for 57.2%.
The disparity is not unique. NYU placed 62.6% of employed graduates in the largest firms and 74.2% in New York. Virginia’s large-firm share was a comparable 64.8%, but its leading destination, Washington, D.C., accounted for only 28.6%. USC and Michigan likewise had relatively similar large-firm shares—60.2% and 55.7%—while 81.9% of USC graduates worked in California, compared with 33.3% of Michigan graduates in New York. Fordham’s 86.0% New York concentration contrasts with Vanderbilt’s 19.9% in Tennessee, despite large-firm placement rates of 48.8% and 47.0%. …
Columbia and Duke illustrate the central lesson: nearly identical large-firm placement can coincide with dramatically different geographic distributions. Across California, Texas, Georgia, the Northeast, and the Washington area, other schools show variations of the same pattern. National reach cannot be reduced to the number of state lines crossed, especially when the largest legal markets themselves attract graduates from across the country.
The better way to examine the figures is together. Geographic concentration identifies where a school’s graduates work; employer size and clerkships add information about the professional routes they take. Viewed jointly, they reveal a varied national landscape of employment pathways without treating one pattern as the model every school should follow.
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