If there is a crisis in legal education, it is not happening at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.

Statistics released this month from the American Bar Association show 82 percent of the school's 2017 graduates were fully employed in positions requiring a law degree, which compares favorably to 66 percent of graduates across the country. Northwestern sent 137 graduates, 55 percent of the class, into Big Law, where they will begin paying down law school debt with the help of $180,000 annual salaries.

Yet even as the gilded age still is paying off for many at Northwestern, the prestigious school on Chicago's lakefront is making plays into the growing, and as-yet-often-confounding, business of changing the legal market.