This is for all you ranking-obsessed lawyers and lawyer-wannabees: Our annual listing of law schools with the best and worst employment figures based on information from the American Bar Association.

First, let’s take a look at the general picture for the class of 2015. Here’s how The National Law Journal summarizes the situation:

A slightly higher percentage of graduates landed in long-term, full-time jobs that require bar passage 10 months after graduation: 59.3 percent had such jobs, compared with 57.9 percent for the previous class. But the overall number of those gold-standard law jobs declined by nearly 1,700 year-over-year. In short, the employment rate went up because of the 9 percent decline in the number of new law graduates, not because of growth in the market for new lawyers.

Bottom line: The market for bona fide legal jobs continues to shrink. So if you’re looking to make a solid upper-middle class living, you might be better off going to dental school.
That said, some law schools are definitely worth the investment more so than others. ( Click here for NLJ’s chart of top 50 schools for jobs—interactive too!)
1. Best schools for jobs: The following law schools placed at least 80 percent of their graduates into “gold-standard” jobs (full-time positions requiring bar passage that are not funded by the schools themselves)—

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