According to data released by the American Bar Association, very little has changed for graduates in the hiring market. 57 percent of the 46,776 students who graduated in 2013 found full-time, long term jobs that required bar passage within nine months of graduation, compared to 56.2 percent the previous year. Recent graduates who were still looking for a legal job rose form 10.6 percent last year to 11.2 percent for the class of 2013.
“The legal employment market has remained almost the same as last year, with a very modest uptick in outcomes, said Scott Norberg, deputy consultant to the ABA’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar. “Unemployed and seeking went up slightly from last year.”
Law school career services departments did a better job of accounting for graduates this year, he said, collecting jobs data 97.7 percent of all recent graduates. The class of 2013 was the largest graduating law school class ever, with about 400 more newly minted lawyers than the previous year.
During the NALP (formally known as the National Association for legal Placement) Norberg presented the findings at the annual conference in Seattle. New lawyers employed in law firms of more than 500 attorneys increased by 10 percent, from 3,643 to 3,989. The number of new graduates at law firms of between two and 500 attorneys grew by less than 1 percent. Graduates in jobs in business and industry grew from 14.9 percent to 15.2 percent.
Slightly increasing from 10 percent to 10.6 percent, are graduates in government jobs, but public-interest legal jobs are down from 5.9 percent to 4.8 percent.. The ABA blamed some of the decline to the changing definition of public defender positions: They are called government jobs now.
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