Santa Clara University

Dean's Message

Dear Friends of the Law School:

Donald J. Polden

The School of Law values the contributions it makes, through its curriculum and the faculty’s teaching and mentoring of students, to the professional development of our students. We are very interested in our graduates’ experience after they leave law school.

A new study, titled After the JD, provides some important, and interesting, information about what new lawyers are doing and how happy they are with their work. Conducted by the National Association of Law Placement (NALP) Directors’ Foundation, the study solicited information from 5,000 lawyers who had graduated from about 200 law schools in the last 3 years. The NALP researchers will continue to interview and survey these new lawyers in the next few years in an effort to provide a comprehensive look at the first ten years after completion of law school. I want to share some of the interesting revelations in this recent, candid look at attitudes of new law school graduates.

The Changing Face of the Profession

The surveyed group included 46 percent women (up from 5 percent in 1970), 17 percent non-white (up from 5 percent in 1970), and 2.5 percent who reported they were gay or lesbian. They are smart: 75 percent report that they graduated in the top quarter of their undergraduate class. The “face” of the legal profession is changing, and increasingly it reflects contemporary American society.

Where do they work?

Almost 7 percent report that they work in firms of 250 or larger (compared to 8 percent of all lawyers) and 5 percent practice solo (compared to 32 percent of all lawyers). Another 28 percent work in private law firms of 2 to 20 lawyers (compared to 19 percent of all lawyers). Only 6 percent practice public interest law (including legal services, non-profits, public defenders, etc.) and 9 percent practice in corporate settings. It will be interesting to see if the survey group of new lawyers will change their practice settings significantly in the future and to learn their reasons for the changes.

Are they satisfied?

The most interesting set of findings concerned overall satisfaction with career choice. About 80 percent of the young lawyers stated that they were “moderately” or “extremely” satisfied with their decision to become a lawyer. They were asked to rate their satisfaction (on a scale of 1 to 7, with 7 being “highly satisfied”) with sixteen specific aspects of their jobs. The respondents expressed great satisfaction with “relationships with colleagues” (mean =5.69), the “level of responsibility” they had at work (mean =5.58), the “control over how” they did their work (mean=5.39), and “the intellectual challenge” of their work (mean=5.38), among others.

Satisfaction with their career choice was highest among Black respondents and almost as high among Hispanic respondents. More than 80 percent of each group of respondents reported that they were extremely or moderately satisfied with their decision, slightly higher than other racial and ethnic groups.

The School of Law will be conducting its own study of how our graduates perceive that their education prepared them for the work they are doing and the communities and clients they are serving. I look forward to the opportunity to report back to you with this information about our graduates and to later reports on After the JD.

I hope you enjoy this issue of Santa Clara Law.

Sincerely,

Donald J. Polden
Dean