American History Reflected in U.S. Law School Graduate Employment Outcomes

By James Leipold

The job market for U.S. law school graduates has been exceptionally strong for a number of years, with each class breaking records set by the previous class, as I wrote about most recently in August. Arguably, the strong employment outcomes in recent years have in part driven the surge in applications for law school, particularly as the record-setting job and salary outcomes have received so much press. Less fun are the headlines that call attention to the inequities and disparities in these remarkable employment outcomes.

The National Association for Law Placement, to its great credit, has consistently called out these disparities with its annual release of its complete law school graduate employment and salary outcome analyses. The latest report on the outcomes for the class of 2024, released earlier in October (PDF) , again documents the persistent racial disparities in employment outcomes.  

Nikia Gray, NALP’s executive director, calls out the particular significance of this year’s report: “Because this class graduated just before the wave of challenges to diversity, equity, and inclusion, their outcomes provide a vital reference point to 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 goes on to say, “NALP’s findings for the class of 2024 establish a critical benchmark for understanding how recent policy and cultural shifts may shape the legal employment landscape.”

The gaps and inequities we see in U.S. law school employment outcomes reflect U.S. history and the longstanding racial and ethnic gaps and inequities in wealth, education, health, and justice that we see throughout U.S. society. Not surprisingly, in the NALP data analyses released earlier this month, Asian, Black, Latinx, Native Hawaiian, and other Pacific Islander graduates were shown to have lower overall employment rates than their white peers.  

NALP also measured significant disparities in employment for bar admission-required jobs, and while the data show that gap narrowed slightly for most groups, it increased for Black graduates, with only 74.3% of Black graduates reporting employment in bar passage-required jobs compared to 84.3% of all graduates and 86.5% of white graduates.

Significant gaps were also measured in judicial clerkships, with graduates of color obtaining fewer clerkships of all sorts than their white peers, and the data showed that Latinx graduates were among the most underrepresented racial groups within judicial clerkships. Similarly, within private practice, lower employment rates for Black, Native American, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, and other Pacific Islander graduates were again documented, with Native American/Alaska Native and Black graduates securing the lowest overall rates of employment in private practice.

Many other disparities are documented by NALP. First-generation college students (students who do not have at least one parent or guardian with a bachelor’s or higher degree) had lower overall employment and lower employment in bar passage-required jobs than did their peers who had at least one parent with a bachelor’s or higher degree, and there were similar gaps measured in private practice employment and judicial clerkship placement, with first-generation students faring less well. Similarly, according to NALP, “Graduates who identified as having a disability, gender nonbinary, LGBTQ+, and/or a military veteran were less likely to be employed by a law firm as compared to graduates overall.”

There is a longstanding narrative, one that I have often articulated, and one that has been supported by the data, that over time these gaps in law school employment outcomes have been slowly closing. This is a narrative that mirrors a longstanding narrative often used to explain the United States itself, that U.S. history is a history of inequities, but that over time, those inequities have gotten smaller and will continue to do so. For many Americans, that narrative has never been a lived experience, despite some statistical evidence that some of the most pernicious gaps in wealth and education have narrowed. More importantly for our purposes, lawyers, judges, law schools, and law firms have long worked with great deliberation toward ensuring that those gaps continue to close.

But history is a funny thing (substitute “tragic” for “funny” as you will), and it is by no means certain that the long arc of history does indeed bend toward justice. We live now at a particular moment in U.S. history where many of the tools that we have relied on to bend history itself toward justice — to close persistent gaps in wealth, education, and health — have been removed. Without weighing in on whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, it is a fact, and whatever flows from this moment in history will at least in part be reflected in future law school employment outcomes. That’s how history works. We cannot remove ourselves from history, much as we would sometimes like to, and changes that are happening in U.S. society right now will indeed be reflected in future NALP data analyses.  

NALP’s Nikia Gray is right. This accounting of the employment outcome gaps for the class of 2024 will stand as an important benchmark to help us measure what came before and what comes after, and of this I am certain: future U.S. law school employment outcomes data will indeed reflect and be a part of the U.S. history the data itself helps to document. Come what may.