JD other

We've been talking for the last year about the "JD Other" graduates, the ones who hold jobs that don't require bar admission. According to NALP, almost a quarter of the Class of 2011 fell in this category: they were employed nine months after graduation, but not in jobs that required a law license. NALP's official publication, Jobs and JDs, reports that 5,214 members of the class held "JD Advantage" jobs; 2,199 held "Other Professional" jobs; and 805 held "Non-Professional" positions. Taken together, those 8,218 graduates held 23% of the 35,653 jobs reported to NALP. (More than 5,000 graduates reported no job at all, but for today I'm focusing on the employed.)

Do these graduates want JD Advantage, Other Professional, or Non-Professional jobs? Or are these Plan-B positions? Professors have pontificated at length on this issue, with many noting the versatility of the law degree.

It turns out that NALP offers some empirical insight on this question. In addition to collecting details about the jobs that graduates hold, NALP asks graduates whether they are still seeking other work. Nine months after graduation is a little early to be making a lateral move or seeking a promotion. A JD who is employed nine months after graduation, but still actively looking for a job, probably isn't too pleased with the first job.

By that measure, graduates who hold JD Advantage, Other Professional, and Non-Professional jobs are not very happy with their positions. Here's how many of them were still looking for other jobs--compared to their colleagues who held jobs requiring bar admission:

Percentage of Employed Law Graduates (Class of 2011)

Seeking Another Job Nine Months After Graduation

            Bar Passage Required             16.5 %
            JD Advantage                           46.8 %

            Other Professional                   52.1 %

            Non-Professional                     85.9 %

           

Graduates holding JD Advantage or Other Professional positions are three times more likely than their law-practicing classmates to be seeking other work. About half the graduates in these two categories are sufficiently dissatisfied with their jobs to be actively job hunting --just nine months after graduation. The graduates in non-professional positions, unsurprisingly, are even more dissatisfied; five out of six of them are hunting for other work.

You may wonder, in fact, why some of the JDs in non-professional jobs are not seeking other work. Are there people who complete three years of law school in order to sell sweaters at the Limited or to work as home health aides? Anything is possible, but the figure probably represents the fact that job-hunting is hard. Some graduates are sufficiently discouraged by the job market, as well as by the disappointing pay-off from their degrees, that they have given up looking for more professional work.

The same factors, of course, also affect graduates in other job categories. Half of the graduates in JD Advantage and Other Professional jobs are not actively seeking other work--but that doesn't mean they're satisfied with their outcomes. Some of them may well be, but others may simply be discouraged.

I wondered, finally, how these 2011 figures compare with earlier years: Have graduates in non-practice positions always looked more actively for work? Or was there a time when some percentage of JDs actively sought employment that did not require bar admission?

I don't have the Jobs and JDs book for every year, but I found two earlier volumes in my law school's library. NALP has changed its job designations over the years: In 1996, it distinguished only among "Legal," "Other Professional," and "Non-Professional" jobs. In 2004, it distinguished among "Bar Passage Required," "JD Preferred," "Other Professional," and "Non-Professional." But the trends are consistent: the further removed a job category is from law practice, the more likely that JDs are looking for other work:

Percentage of Employed Law Graduates

Seeking Another Job Nine Months After Graduation

                                                  
                                                    1996                                 2004

Legal/Bar Passage Req'd           10.1 %                               8.5 %

JD Preferred                                                                       37.0 %
Other Professional                      38.3 %                           43.4 %
Non-Professional                        55.9 %                            73.5 %


To me, these numbers confirm a common-sense assumption: People who go to law school would like to practice law. Even in 1996, when law school tuition was much lower and graduates could afford to pursue jobs that did not fully use their degrees, graduates in "other professional" positions were four times more likely than graduates in "legal" jobs to be seeking different work. The same was true in 2004 and 2011: graduates in positions that did not require a law license were much more likely to be seeking new work than graduates in jobs that did require a license.

There have always been law school graduates who sought jobs that did not require bar admission, landed those jobs, and happily pursued their careers. But we shouldn't fool ourselves that all graduates in that category are content with their non-law work. The best data available to us suggest that a large percentage of those graduates are not happy as "JD Other" workers.