lawyer

#The 2015 ATL Top 50 Law School Rankings

Most people attend law school

to obtain jobs as lawyers.

(Paid, full-time attorneys, not people looking for clients on Craigslist.)

Out of respect for the 40,000 new law students who still, you know, exist, we welcome you to the third annual installment of the Above the Law Top 50 Law School Rankings. These are the only rankings to incorporate the latest ABA employment data concerning the class of 2014. The premise underlying our approach to ranking schools remains the same: that given the steep cost of law school and the new normal of the legal job market, potential students should prioritize their future employment prospects over all other factors in deciding whether and where to attend law school. The relative quality of schools is a function of how they deliver on the promise of gainful legal employment.

Our list is limited to 50 schools. We want to look at "national" schools, the ones with quality employment prospects both outside of their particular region and/or for graduates who don’t graduate at the top of the class.

This year, we’ve added a new wrinkle to our methodology: a “debt per job” metric which measures how much student debt is accrued by a school’s graduates for every actual legal job obtained. We term this data point the “M7 Ratio” to acknowledge our friends at M7 Financial. whose idea it was, and who crunched the relevant numbers on our behalf. This data point aligns nicely with the spirit of the ATL Top 50 Law School Rankings, which keeps an exclusive focus on the only thing that really matters: outcomes.

There have been some major shakeups in this year’s rankings. It looks like one law school is not feeding 3Ls to federal clerkships like it used to.

Enjoy the rankings, but please use them responsibly.