The Secret of My Success: How Status, Eliteness, and School Performance Shape Legal Careers

• Author: Jane Bambauer,Richard Sander
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1740-1461.2012.01267.x
• Date: 01 December 2012
• Published date: 01 December 2012

The Secret of My Success: How Status,

Eliteness, and School Performance Shape

Legal Careers

Richard Sander and Jane Bambauer

If we study the 40,000 law graduates who join the legal profession each year, how well can we

predict their future careers? How much of their future is predicted by their social class? The

law school they attend? Their law school grades? This article undertakes the first in-depth

examination of these questions. Drawing on several large and recently released data sets, we

examine the role of class, school prestige, and law school grades on the career earnings of

lawyers and the success of big firm associates in becoming partners. We find that social class

strongly conditions who goes to law school, but no longer predicts much about postgraduate

outcomes. Law school prestige is important, but it is generally trumped by law school

performance (as measured by law school grades). Law school grades reflect both personal

characteristics not well captured by prelaw credentials, and one’s relative position in a law

school class as measured by prelaw credentials. Our findings suggest that there is little

empirical basis for the overwhelming importance students assign to “eliteness” in choosing

a law school.

The contests begin each fall. Some 100,000 college seniors and graduates decide to apply

to law school; they take the LSAT, begin writing essays, and send applications to a range of

institutions. For most, the object of the game is to gain admission to the most elite law

school possible, regardless of location and cost, on the theory that the name brand of the

school they enroll in, and its reputation among employers, will be the surest propellant in

launching their legal careers. Two years downstream, most of the second-year law students

at each of these schools join in another competition for the attention of employers. At some

law schools, employers are required to interview any student given a slot by the school’s

placement office; at others, the employers interview whomever they choose; but in either

case, many of the employers—especially the big law firms offering the highest salaries—

seem disconcertingly focused on law school grades, and the students with the most appeal-

ing transcripts tend to be those invited to coveted “call-back” interviews and eventually

*Address correspondence to Richard Sander, Professor of Law, UCLA, 405 Hilgard Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90095-1476.

Bambauer is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Arizona College of Law and was, from 2007 to 2010, the

Director of Project Seaphe at UCLA.

We have benefited from careful critiques of earlier drafts by Patrick Anderson, Bryant Garth, Jack Heinz, Gabriel

Rossman, and Ronald C. Den Otter, and by the anonymous reviewers at JELS. Tal Greitzer provided invaluable

technical assistance.

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Journal of Empirical Legal Studies

Volume 9, Issue 4, 893–930, December 2012

893

given job offers. Yet another two years downstream, law school graduates, fresh from their

bar examinations, begin their professional careers in earnest. Although all the new associ-

ates at a firm, or all the new attorneys at a government office, receive the same orientations

to their jobs, it becomes quickly apparent to most that social networking is helpful in

finding a good mentor or landing a plum assignment; how much of this process is lubri-

cated by the right social background, helpful family connections, or other concomitants of

class? In the competition for success as a lawyer, how much will social status smooth the way?

Rewards are distributed more unevenly within the legal profession than in virtually

any other occupation.1Most of those who study the careers of lawyers would agree that law

school eliteness, law school grades, and social status each play a role in determining which

lawyers capture the greatest rewards, but remarkably little effort has been made to directly

compare these inputs in explaining career outcomes, to see which of the three matters

most, and how they interact.2Most of those who have written about the topic have been

content to give anecdotal examples that support one factor or another.3In this article, we

draw on several of the best-known databases on lawyers to try and ground the discussion in

concrete findings and comparisons.4While the available data are not sufficient to provide

clear answers to all of the interesting questions, we believe that much can be learned—

enough, at least, to challenge many of the assumptions that guide the strategies of pro-

spective students and much of the research in the legal academy.

This article has three parts. We first examine general beliefs about the importance of

each of these three factors (social class, law school eliteness, and law school grades) in

shaping lawyer careers—beliefs among academics as well as beliefs among the law students

and young lawyers going through the sorting process. We next present some specific

findings about each of the three factors. Finally, we directly compare the three factors in

regression models of career outcomes.

Throughout, we generally avoid a specific focus on race and gender, for several

reasons. These are uniquely controversial and sensitive subjects, and we have written about

1Jack Ladinsky described the highly stratified urban bar in his 1963 study of Detroit lawyers (Ladinsky 1963b). Since

then, income inequality among lawyers has increased significantly. Using American Community Survey data for 2009,

we found that among all respondents with earnings who gave “lawyer” as their occupation, the Gini coefficient was

0.43 (this is roughly the same as the Gini coefficient across all U.S. households!). For physicians, it was 0.413; for

engineers, 0.276. The lawyer Gini coefficient is an underestimate because the ACS “top codes” incomes above roughly

the 99th percentile in each state, and many big-firm partners have incomes far above the 99th percentile. Another

measure of income inequality is the ratio of a group’s median income to its average income; the lower the ratio, the

more unequal the income distribution. For lawyers in 2009, that ratio is 0.73; in 1979, the ratio was 0.77, and in 1969

it was 0.83.

2Heinz et al. (2005) come close to a direct comparison in their analysis of Chicago lawyers over time, and we build on

this analysis in Section III of the article. However, their results are obscured by the inclusion of outcome variables in

their models, which turns out to matter a lot.

3A recent exception is Oyer and Schaefer (2009), which uses the After the JD database to assess the earnings effect

of attending an elite school. However, we consider this paper so fundamentally flawed that it confuses more than

enlightens discussion. We discuss it infra at pages 897-898, 907-908, and notes 33, 40, and 42.

4The Appendix provides background on the five principal databases we rely upon.

894 Sander and Bambauer

them extensively elsewhere. Moreover, they have to some extent overshadowed discussions

of class, religion, and other forms of social stratification. We would like to focus here on a

number of patterns we think have been overlooked, and that affect lawyers generally.

The consistent theme we find throughout this analysis is that performance in law

school—as measured by law school grades—is the most important predictor of career

success. It is decisively more important than law school “eliteness.” Socioeconomic factors

play a critical role in shaping the pool from which law students are drawn, but no longer

play a discernible role in shaping postgraduate careers. Since the dominant conventional

wisdom says that law school prestige is all-important, and since students who “trade up” in

school prestige generally take a hit to their school performance, we think prospective

students are receiving the wrong message.

A Note on Data Sources. Throughout this article, we regularly draw on information

from six major databases about law students and lawyers; all our tables are based (at least in

part) on one of these sources. We discuss these in more detail in the Appendix, but a brief

rollcall here may be helpful to the reader in following our discussion. The “Chicago

Lawyers” databases are based on two waves of face-to-face interviews with separate samples

of lawyers practicing in the City of Chicago, covering 777 interviews in 1975 and 787

interviews in 1994–1995. The “After the JD” (first wave) database comes from surveys

administered to a national sample of about 4,500 attorneys two to four years out of law

school in 2002–2003. The University of Michigan Law School (UMLS) Alumni Project has

generated a wealth of data on various cohorts of UMLS alumni; in this article we draw on

some 10,000 surveys administered to alumni 15 years after graduation from the early 1970s

to 2000. The Bar Passage Study (BPS), conducted by the Law School Admissions Council,

tracked 27,000 students who started law school in 1991 through their graduation and

postgraduate attempts to pass bar exams, administering surveys to the entire sample in 1991

and follow-up surveys to subsamples in 1992–1994. The Public Law School Admissions data

set (PLSA 2005–07) was developed by the authors through public records requests to state

law schools throughout the United States; it contains records from over 150,000 applica-

tions considered in the 2005–2006 and 2006–2007 admissions cycles of 41 public law

schools. The National Study of Law Student Performance, created by one of us (Sander) in

collaboration with two colleagues, gathered survey, transcript, and background data on

over 4,000 first-year students at 19 law schools in the fall of 1995.

A key advantage of having multiple data sources is their independence from one

another; almost every significant finding in this article has been derived from at least two

databases, even if we only discuss one source in the text.

I. Guiding Assumptions of the Players and Observers

A. Law School Eliteness

As we suggested in the introduction, the typical applicant to law school seems to believe that

the key to a successful career lies almost entirely in gaining admission to the most elite

school possible. Anyone who has spoken to even a handful of law applicants will pick up on

Status, Eliteness, School Performance, and Legal Careers 895