By: Jerry Organ, Bakken Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Holloran Center for Ethical Leadership in the Professions, University of St. Thomas School of Law

One of the first blog posts I had on The Legal Whiteboard focused on the location of employment for graduates in the Classes of 2010 and 2011.  I reprised this in 2017 for the Classes of 2014 and 2015.  In both instances, the data showed that the vast majority of law schools function as regional law schools – with 67% or more of their employed graduates taking jobs in the state in which the law school was located or an adjacent state.

I have now updated this analysis using data from the Class of 2023 and the results remain remarkably consistent.  These calculations are drawn from the Employment Summary reports for each law school, which indicate the top three states in which graduates were employed in descending order.

For the Class of 2023, 147 of the 195 law schools (75.4%) saw 67% or more of their employed graduates take jobs in the state in which the law school was located or an adjacent state or states. Of these, 110 (roughly 56% of all law schools) saw 67% or more of their employed graduates take jobs in the state in which the school was located.

As shown in Table 1, the numbers for the Class of 2023 closely track the numbers for the Classes of 2014 and 2015 (76% in region and 60% in state) and the numbers for the Classes of 2010 and 2011 (76% in region and 60% in state). This means there continues to be relative stability in the geographic markets in which graduates are employed for the vast majority of law schools over the last decade plus.

The vast majority of law schools function as regional law schools in terms of employment outcomes.

For the Class of 2023, 128 law schools (roughly 66% of all law schools) saw an even higher percentage – 75% or more of their employed graduates – employed in the state in which the law school was located or an adjacent state, with 85 of those (roughly 44% of all law schools) having 75% or more of their employed graduates in the home state of the law school.  These numbers also closely track the results for the Class of 2014 and Class of 2015.

For the Class of 2023, 40 law schools saw 90% or more of their employed graduates employed in the state in which the law school was located or adjacent states, down slightly from numbers in the upper 40s for the Classes of 2014 and 2015.

Three of the states with the largest number of law schools are particularly regional.  For the Class of 2023, all ten Florida-based law schools had at least 74% of their employed graduates in Florida or an adjacent state.  Similarly, every law school in Texas except for UT Austin (69.8%) had 83.9% or more of their employed graduates in Texas or an adjacent state. Likewise, every California law school except California-Berkeley (68.5%) and Stanford (44.4%) had more than 80% of their employed graduates in California or an adjacent state.

The lesson for those considering law school should be pretty clear.  For many law students, geography should be an important consideration in choice of law school, given that the clear majority of law school graduates who find employment tend to take jobs in the state in which the law school is located or in an adjacent state.

Posted by Jerry Organ (I am grateful to Cameron Fair for his research assistance in preparing this blog post.)