That is literally the same headline I had for the class of 2022, but it’s another year of incremental improvement. Outcomes improved incrementally once again. Below are figures for the ABA-disclosed data (excluding Puerto Rico’s three law schools). These are ten-month figures from March 15, 2024 for the Class of 2023.

Placement continues to be very good. There was an increase of over a few hundred full-time, long-term bar passage-required jobs year-over-year, and the graduating class size was dipped a bit. Those factors combined for a placement rate of 79.9%. J.D. advantage jobs decreased somewhat, perhaps consistent with a hot law firm market last year.

It’s remarkable to compare the placement rates from the Class of 2012 to the present, from 56% to 80%. And it’s largely attributable to the decline in class size.

Here’s some comparison of the year-over-year categories.

The trend continues a longstanding uptick in public interest placement, which is not an outlier. Public interest job placement is up over 100% since the Class of 2017. These eye-popping number continue to rise. It is likely not an understatement to say that law students are increasingly oriented toward public interest, and that there are ample funding opportunities in public interest work to sustain these graduates. (I include a visualization of the trend of raw placement into these jobs here.)

Sole practitioners continue to slide significantly (they were in the low 300s not long ago in raw placement).

Additionally, large law firm placement continues to boom. Placement is up more than thousands graduates in the last several years. Placement in firms with at least 101 attorneys is around 8800. A full 25% of all law school graduates landed in a “Big Law” firm, and more than 30% of those who were employed in a full-time, long-term, bar passage-required job landed in a “Big Law” firm. (Charts showing both the raw placement and the percentage of graduates are included here in another visualization (charting both on two different axes to see similar trends).

How did law schools and law firms survive the purported “death of Big Law”? Well, Big Law seems to be doing better than ever. It’s not clear we’ll have as hot a market for this year’s class, but it’s something to watch.

One slightly interesting observation is a sharp decline in “business” placement. These tend to be JD advantage positions, and if there’s a decline in JD advantage placement we’d expect to see a decline here, too, but it seems more significant than just JD advantage jobs.

Federal clerkship placement improved a bit but has remained mostly steady.

There’s a lot more to examine in light of USNWR methodology changes, but I’ll save that for another post.