The Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog reports on American Bar Association figures showing that schools in the northeast  of the country were twice as likely to net graduates ‘big law’ jobs as schools in the South, Midwest or West.

Ivy League still top

Using the data to rank the top schools based on the percentage of 2011 graduates that landed full-time, long-term employment at firms with 250 or more lawyers, Ivy League University Columbia in New York took the top spot with 59 per cent. Rounding out the top five are the University of Pennsylvania with 53 per cent; Chicago’s Northwestern with 48 per cent; Ivy League giant Harvard with 46 per cent and the University of Chicago with 44 per cent.
Vivia Chen, of Law.com’s The Careerist web site, comments: ‘These lists cannot be encouraging to anyone whose goal is to land a high-paying legal job out of the gate. When only two of the top schools are sending barely more than half of their class to big firms, this is not a sign of market health.