ABA Revises Law School Placement Data Reporting Requirements

Quoting from the July 27, 2011 press release, ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar Will Collect Additional Employment Information from Law Schools in its Annual Questionnaire:

[T]he 2011 Annual Questionnaire will request from law schools information on their graduates’ employment status, employment types and employment locations. It will also request additional and new information on whether a graduate’s employment is long-term or short-term. Finally, it will ask how many, if any, positions held by their graduates are funded by the law school or university.

New data will also be collected in the spring of 2012 (soon after February 15, 2012, the traditional nine-month-after-graduation date), for the graduating class of 2011, including whether the graduate’s job is part-time or full-time; whether the job requires bar passage; whether a J.D. is preferred for the job; whether the job is in another profession; and whether the job is a nonprofessional one. Definitions for these categories will be developed this coming fall. However, rather than wait until August 2012 to collect these new data, our plan is to collect those data from the schools soon after February 15, 2012 and display the data on our website in the late spring/early summer.

About employment locations, the ABAJ reports that law schools "also must identify the top three states in which their graduates are employed, the number of graduates working in each state and the number of graduates working overseas." (Emphasis added.) I'm wondering if the overseas metric is an attempt to measure how many law school grads are working for offshore legal processing operations. If so, many are being hired by TR Legal "Professional," whatever, for work in this country. See "Barred in Any US Jurisdication," Thomson Reuters Still Wants to Hire You But is LPO Regulation on the Horizon. [JH]