Alumni Network National Reach (UPDATE)

NOTE: Be sure to read my comments on problems with these data before you use them for anything.

New data from an extension of the Alumni Network National Reach study to include 192 ABA Approved law schools in the mainland United States, Alaska, and Hawaii. See the original study for details on what the numbers mean.

This update also includes two sorts of the "skew" figures: A) The same as in the original study; and B) With the largest number for each school thrown out. The (B) sort cancels excess weight in each school's home region and ranks them based on the total skew across all the other regions. We might prefer the (B) sort for two reasons: 1) All schools have the highest skew in their home region (other than Yale, which is heaviest in the Mid Atlantic); and 2) The (A) sort is hard on schools located in small markets.

All things equal, a school in New York will wind up with lower total skew than one in Mississippi, even if their curves are otherwise congruent. Because one school peaks in the smallest market and the other in the largest, the skew for the school in Mississippi will be higher, even if both place the same proportion of alumni in their home regions. This occurs because the school in the smaller market will have a smaller expected value subtracted from the observed value in its backyard, so it gets less "credit" against the number of alumni found there.

Looking at the thumbnail of the (A) sort, it should be clear how schools overweight in the smaller markets cluster toward the bottom of the table. Throwing out the largest value for each schools seems the simplest way to negate this regional bias without abandoning the notion of the national curve. Because the (B) sort seems the better set of values for most purposes, I used it rather than the (A) sort when assembling the overall rankings.

National Distribution



Raw Data

Sorted by number of alumni from each school, with totals. The 48 schools with the largest alumni networks account for half of all lawyers listed in the directory. And 80% of all lawyers listed graduated from the 101 schools with the largest alumni networks. Data by region appears only for those schools with at least 1,000 lawyers listed in the directory. For schools with less than 1,000 alumni, I assigned the total number listed to the school's home region. I did not include any figures for the new provisionally approved schools at Charlotte, Elon, Drexel, and Phoenix.



Scaled Data



Skew (A)



Skew (B)



NOTES (1-5): Because of their close association and problems sorting out alumni from certain schools, I combined figures for the dual campuses of Indiana, Missouri, Rutgers, Arkansas, and Widener. The same figures appear with each listed campus, except in computing totals, where I assigned one of the pair zeros in order to avoid double reporting.