Ben Thomson, LawFuel Contributor

The 2024 Above the Law (ATL) Top 50 Law Schools Rankings focus on evaluating law schools based on their ability to deliver gainful legal employment to graduates, an approach that prioritizes practical outcomes over traditional metrics such as library size or undergraduate grades.

It’s a nice change from the metrics that characterize the much-criticized US News Law School rankings that had such a controversial time recently.

As we reported in May, University of Kentucky law professor Brian Frye and Indiana University law professor Christopher Ryan released a report on the US News law school rankings that looked at t the relationship between the academic credentials of the entering classes rising or falling in correlation with the law school’s movement so as to measure the desirability of the schools for applicants. They found the rankings to be largely irrelevant when it comes to law employment prospects for students.

The ATL rankings incorporate the latest American Bar Association (ABA) employment data for the class of 2023, emphasizing employment outcomes as the primary measure of a law school’s quality.

The ATL rankings assign significant weight to employment, dividing it into two key criteria: legal employment, which includes full-time, long-term jobs requiring bar passage, and “quality jobs,” which encompass positions in large law firms and federal judicial clerkships.

This year, the rankings have removed student debt as a separate factor but continue to consider the cost of obtaining a law degree.

ATL have also added the first-time bar passage rate to the formula, reflecting the importance of passing the bar exam for practicing law.

The top ten law schools for 2024,(shown below) are the University of Virginia, University of Chicago, Duke, University of Michigan, Columbia, Penn, Cornell, Northwestern, Notre Dame, and Vanderbilt.

Top 10 Law Schools

Notably, prestigious schools like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and NYU are absent from the top ten, not due to a lack of quality, but because they did not perform as well in ATL’s criteria, which focus on concrete data such as job placement and cost of attendance.

The rankings highlight schools that may not traditionally be seen as prestigious but excel in placing graduates in well-paying legal jobs at a lower cost.

Newcomers to the Top 50 include Baylor, Tulane, and West Virginia University.

Harvard No 11

The top law schools that we are so used to seeing atop these lists are further down – such as Harvard at #11.

More Law Jobs

The 2023 graduating class showed improved job placement rates, with the percentage of unemployed graduates dropping from 5.3 percent to 5.0 percent, and those securing full-time, long-term jobs requiring bar passage increasing from 76.8 percent to 79.3 percent.

ATL’s methodology for its top law schools’ list emphasizes employment outcomes, with the quality jobs score accounting for 40 percent of the ranking, the employment score for 30 percent, projected cost for 10 percent, first-time bar passage rate for 10 percent, and the presence of graduates in federal judgeships and Supreme Court clerkships for 5 percent each.

This outcomes-based approach aims to provide a more practical evaluation of law schools, helping prospective students make informed decisions based on their career goals.