For several years, the ABA has had a required employment data reporting protocol as a part of all law school's accreditation. NALP and of course US News also have long standing protocols for reporting job data. The gold standard of jobs are jobs that either require the bar exam or prefer a J.D. Schools that do not have a high percentage of students landing these gold standard jobs are not considered competitive in the law school marketplace. So, law grads that enter investment banking, start/run their own business or “practice” in any other non-traditional way are not counted in that golden number. I do not think it is a revelation to anyone that there are law students who come to law school with no intention to practice law in a traditional way. In fact, more and more millennials intend to earn a J.D. to use the knowledge it offers in more novel, entrepreneurial venues. Most people agree that a J.D. is a flexible degree, so are we losing the forest for the trees with what we count and how we count it?

What We Count

The law can be a nimble and future-looking profession, yet we are still defining a lawyer in the same way we have for hundreds of years. Can there be no evolution of a lawyer beyond those depicted in the movie Inherit the Wind (a 1960 movie taking place in 1925)? With the complete understanding that we cannot have law schools counting a student working as a barista in their employment stats (because this would cause misrepresentation in their graduates' employment statistics and is just wrong), is there no better way to provide job data than counting only the Clarence Darrows among us? I hypothesize that the legal market would be better for counting in some way those law school graduates that choose alternative paths that are not specifically J.D. advantage in their golden number. Attend any legal tech event and you will find hundreds of non-practicing attorneys in lucrative and game changing roles that neither the ABA, NALP nor US News validate with their golden number. In turn, the lack of validation hurts the law schools that graduate these entrepreneurs, financiers, etc.

With summer programs decreasing nationally and far less call for traditional first-year associates, the narrow definition of what we “count” as lawyers has to evolve.

How We Count

In general, the legal profession is unaware of the actual reporting requirements of law schools in regard to their job statistics. Everyone can agree that there should be transparent and not misleading reporting on employment numbers, but what has been really lacking are concrete ideas on how exactly to achieve transparent reporting. Currently, law schools are required by the ABA, US News and NALP to provide employment statistics. (The ABA is a required regulator as they are the law schools' accreditors. The NALP and US News submissions are constructively required by the marketplace.) Each regulator asks different questions and uses different methods, resulting in what publicly looks like career centers “cooking the books” because the numbers for an individual law school look different for each regulator. Due to this “cooking the books” concept and other outside influences, the ABA instituted its comprehensive review of law schools' jobs statistics three years ago. In those three years, they have yet to find any evidence of malevolent or intentional misreporting or misrepresentation.

The ABA asks for many points of data to be collected on each graduating student. They even require notes on when, how and by whom each point of data is acquired. This means hundreds of hours a year are spent by career centers acquiring and entering such data. The real kicker of this whole reporting situation is that while the law schools are required to gather and report this data, no law student is required to provide this information to their law school. In what world does that make logical sense? As a requirement of an ABA law school approved diploma, students providing this information should be mandatory. Without any requirements for the students to report this information, career centers nationwide have been forced to turn dwindling human capital into detectives—begging, pleading, cajoling the information out of reluctant or sometimes defiant students has become the norm. In addition, career services personnel have become expert online stalkers to obtain required data from social media.

Different law schools have handled the reporting burden differently. Some have gone as far as holding diplomas until the student provides the data. Polling the students right at graduation time is somewhat the easy part of the data gathering process. However, only about 50 percent of the new grads nationally have a job at graduation. Therefore, it is up to the career centers to keep track of the other 50 percent as they conduct their job search. This has proven very difficult, especially if the students do not want the career center's help or simply do not wish to tell them anything for whatever reason.

Some law schools have simply put their career counselors on the task from graduation time thru the reporting deadline of March 15th to badger the students into compliance with texts, emails and calls. This takes career counselors from their important one-on-one work with students plotting their internships and working on their documents—the true career counseling that every law student needs. The reporting requirements have made career counselors by and large “bean counters vs. counselors.” No one thinks this is a good evolution.

Career centers at law schools are faced with the sometimes competing interests of reporting data and building a service relationship with their new graduates. The regulators and indeed the legal profession as a whole need to decide what is important. They also need to step up to the plate and provide a system where reporting of this data is mandatory instead of putting it on the career centers.

Until such time as multiple entities, including the 200+ law school career centers, NALP, the ABA, US NEWS and even the local bars, can figure out a transparent, efficient and universal data collection and reporting system, nothing will change. In fact, each year the requirements get more and more diffuse. Until that time, I have to go stalk some new grads online for employment information.

Jill Backer is Assistant Dean for Career and Professional Development at Pace University, Elisabeth Haub School of Law.