ABA releases employment data for 2016 graduating law class

Employment data for the graduating law class of 2016 as reported by American Bar Association-approved law schools to the ABA Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar is now publicly available.

The ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has released aggregate national data on law graduate employment outcomes for the class of 2016. An online table provides select national outcomes and side-by-side comparisons between the classes of 2016 and 2015. Individual law school outcomes are available online. Further reports on employment outcomes, including spreadsheets aggregating the individual school reports and comparing outcomes for the past three years, are available on the Legal Education Statistics page of the Section’s website.

The aggregated school data shows that 73 percent of the 2016 graduates of the 204 law schools approved by the ABA to offer the J.D. degree were employed in full-time long-term Bar Passage Required or J.D. Advantage jobs roughly 10 months after graduation. That compares to the approximately 70 percent of the graduates reporting similar full-time long-term jobs last year. The higher percentage of students so employed, however, results from an approximately 7 percent decrease in the size of the graduating class. The actual number of full-time long-term Bar Passage Required or J.D. Advantage jobs declined by 4 percent from 28,029 for 2015 to 26,923 in 2016.

The Council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar and its accreditation committee are recognized by the U.S. Department of Education as the national accrediting agency for programs leading to the J.D. The section’s 14,000 members strive to improve legal education and lawyer licensing by fostering cooperation among legal educators, practitioners and judges through workshops, conferences and publications. The section also studies and makes recommendations for the improvement of the bar admission process, and the section and its governing council operate for accreditation purposes as independent arms of the ABA.