The Jobs & JDs report for the Class of 2009, just released by the National Association for Legal Career Professionals, marks the 36th consecutive year in which NALP has gathered information on the employment status and earnings of recent law school graduates,

In an age when much analysis is based on small samples, the report is based on information submitted by 192 ABA-accredited law schools on 96 percent of the graduates in the Class of 2009.

The national median salary, based on those working full time and reporting a salary, was $72,000, unchanged from that of the Class of 2008, and the national mean was $93,454. However, because some large law firm salaries cluster in the $160,000 range while other salaries cluster in the $40,000-to-$65,000 range, relatively few salaries were actually near the median, the report said. The national median salary at law firms based on those reporting a salary was $130,000, compared with $125,000 the prior year, and the national mean at law firms was $115,254.

With the Class of 2009 report, NALP introduces the concept of an adjusted mean as an additional way to provide a broad measure of salaries for full-time jobs as a whole and for full-time jobs in law firms. Essentially, the adjusted mean compensates for the fact that the distribution of reported full-time salaries is not the same as the distribution of reported full-time jobs, particularly when it comes to law firm jobs.

Whereas salaries for most jobs in large law firms are matters of public record and reported, fewer than half the salaries for jobs in small law firms are reported. The calculation of adjusted means is accomplished by giving more "weight" to the mean or average salary in small firms and less weight to the mean salary in large firms to calculate the overall law firm mean, as well as the adjusted mean for all full-time jobs.

In other words, adjusted means are based on estimates that account for the unreported salaries. The adjusted mean for all full-time jobs reported was $85,198 (in contrast to the unadjusted national mean of $93,454), and the adjusted mean for full-time law firm jobs was $102,959 (in contrast to the unadjusted mean of $115,254).

"As a matter of consumer information, especially for students who are considering applying to law school, the adjusted mean provides a better benchmark than the unadjusted mean, because it accounts for the larger number of lower salaries that are not reported," said James Leipold, NALP's executive director. "Nevertheless, the overall mean for starting salaries, whether adjusted or unadjusted, is best used to measure the rise and fall of aggregate salaries over time, and not the likelihood of earning a particular salary when graduating from law school.

"As the distribution of starting lawyer salaries makes clear, very few new law school graduates earn anything close to the mean. Instead, many graduates will earn much more than the mean salary, and many more will earn much less," he said.

Holding steady

Medians for government, judicial clerkships and public-interest jobs changed little from 2008 at $52,000, $50,000 and $42,800, respectively. And because salary figures in these employment settings are much more homogenous and not particularly subject to disproportionate reporting, adjusted salary means are not calculated for these employer types.

The overall employment rate of 88.3 percent for Class of 2009 graduates for whom employment status was known represents a 3.6 percentage point drop from the recent historical high of 91.9 percent for the Class of 2007, and it masks a number of weaknesses in the job market faced by this class. For example, separate research from NALP found that between 3,200 and 3,700 graduates who reported jobs in law firms had their start dates deferred beyond Dec. 1, 2009.

"The job market for the Class of 2009 was very different than it was for the classes that immediately preceded it," Leipold said, "and we have gone to great lengths to try to measure and describe some of those differences. Members of this graduating class were more likely to be working part-time, working in a temporary job, working in a job that does not require a JD, working as a solo practitioner or working but still looking for another job than their peers who graduated in the classes before them. This volume of Jobs & JDs describes those differences in great detail."

Private firms leading the way

As in all prior years that NALP has collected job information for new graduates, the most common employment setting was that of private practice at law firms, reported by 55.9 percent of the members of the Class of 2009 who provided employment information. This figure has fluctuated only between 55 percent and 58 percent since 1993. Over one-quarter (25.8 percent) of Class of 2009 graduates who reported being employed on Feb. 15, 2010, were working in public-service positions, including government jobs, the military, judicial clerkships and public-interest positions. This percentage remained relatively stable for almost three decades. At 3.5 percent, the percentage of jobs in academia was the highest ever recorded by NALP, with the number of jobs up by more than 400 compared with the Class of 2008.

"There is not a single legal employment market for new law school graduates," Leipold concluded. "Instead, there are many micro job markets that vary greatly by geography, sector and size of the employer. Each of these markets varies as to starting salary, the timing of hiring and the profile of the graduates who find work in them.

"Just as an average starting salary cannot describe the likelihood of a particular starting salary for any one law school graduate, there is no single set of statistics that can predict employment opportunities for a single graduate. Consumers of legal education and those who study the legal employment market need to consider the broad array of factors that influence the initial employment outcomes for new lawyers," he said.

"NALP's annual employment report remains the most comprehensive source of data and information about the entry-level market for law school graduates, and this latest edition is particularly helpful," Leipold said.