Solid Placement: Columbia, Northwestern Top Law-Firm Recruiting Survey

[WSJ_law_blog]

So let’s say you’re one of those college juniors or seniors who’s known since diaperdom that you wanted to be a lawyer. Not just any lawyer, a big firm lawyer. And let’s also say you’ve got stellar grades from a top school and that you missed all of one question on the LSAT. And now you’re faced with this conundrum: Where should you go to law school? Harvard? Yale? Stanford?

Not so fast there, High Achiever. According to this report out today in the National Law Journal, your choice should be Columbia or Northwestern. Columbia Law School landed in the No. 1 spot again as the school that sent the greatest portion of graduates to NLJ 250 law firms, with nearly 75 percent of its students in 2007 taking jobs among the nation’s largest law firms. Northwestern finished in the No. 2 spot, with some 73.5 percent of its graduates accepting slots at NLJ 250 firms. Boston College Law School rounded out the list of the top 20 go-to law schools, with 36.8 percent of its 261 juris doctor grads heading for full-time jobs at NLJ 250 law firms.

The big movers this year: Northwestern, which moved to No. 2 from No. 11; Southern Cal., which moved from No. 20 to No. 14. New to the list: UCLA (No. 17) and Boston University (No. 18). Heading in the other direction were University of Texas and Fordham, both of which fell off the list.

The secret sauce behind Northwestern’s success? It could be that the school has also focused on enrolling students with significant postgraduate work experience, says dean David Van Zandt. And the school has worked to accept students in recent years from geographically diverse areas, with an emphasis on those from the Northeast, which has helped to boost recruiting from NLJ 250 firms, he said. Michael Schill, the UCLA law school dean, also attributed his school’s popularity among NLJ 250 firms to an increased effort to geographically diversify the student body. Said Schill: “We’re being more aggressive.”