An Intro to the NALP Directory
The National Association for Law Placement (NALP) is the leading authority on the law employment market in the United States and Canada. We compile a variety of data that informs our members and the legal employment market as a whole. The NALP Directory of Legal Employers is a new compilation of information about legal employers, and is the product of a collaboration between NALP and LexisNexis. As a part of NALP’s longstanding data collection efforts, we have long compiled employer-specific information contained in our annual Employment Report and salary surveys which are considered the definitive sources on employment trends and salaries in the legal profession. This information was previously made available to the public on the NALP website in a directory format. Now, NALP staff manually reviews this information for currency, accuracy, completeness, and consistency in order to ensure that it is standardized, and consistent with the type of information compiled by the Office of National Statistics and corresponding Canadian and provincial agencies for all other professional sectors. Data is then supplied to LexisNexis to be compiled into the NALP Directory of Legal Employers, an exclusive online resource. The NALP Directory of Legal Employers is now available on the LexisNexis platform, and is easily searchable and accessible, making it easier for legal professionals to access this information . Among the information in the Directory is the data that has long been available on the NALP website such as law firm headquarters, official firm names, kind of practice change of firm name(s), headquarters addresses, website URLs, telephone numbers, and charted entries on the size of the firm (firm head count, number of partners, and more). Additional information added to the Directory includes a law firm profile for medium to large firms in the U.S.A. and Canada that provides information about partnerships, number of practicing lawyers and their seniority, offices around the world, national origin of partners, law schools represented in the partnership, number of partner and associate vacancies in the current hiring season, numbers of hires in the current hiring season, and positions available for summer associates. Other information about law firms includes ratios of partners and associate lawyers per office, non-partner lawyer and staff diversity, area(s) of law practiced, languages spoken, and more. Throughout the directory, law school specific information is provided including a list of law schools to which each firm recruits regularly, relationship between each law school and each firm, and whether the firm has ever hired at least one law student from the school in the preceding five years.
Breakdown of the NALP Directory
The NALP Directory is a largely search-based system which allows users to search, view, and sort a variety of legal employers based on year, location, job title, research interest, base salary, fellowship, and degree type. The system also allows for comparisons between multiple employers. From the NALP website, there are four paths into the directory: (1) Search/Filter, (2) Employer Names, (3) Locations, (4) Employers by Special Features. Each path leads to an entry page which will allow you to refine your search in different ways. Once in the system, using a search name will bring up information pertaining to an individual employer.
One particularly useful way of using the system is to search for employers to consider for a judicial clerkship. In the NALP Directory, judicial clerkships are listed within the Employers by Special Feature of the system. Since these positions can be very competitive, prospective law clerks are urged to explore all options when applying and interviewing. More specifically, when companies are looking for law clerks, they are trying to find the best candidates possible. So this means that getting a position as a law clerk takes thorough research and time. Potential candidates should look into all of the available options and maximum their opportunity to be selected from a large pool of applicants.
Employer Benefits
Employers benefit greatly from being listed in the NALP Directory of Legal Employers. Upon entry, employers gain company exposure and recruitment advantages from being listed. They also automatically receive information on their current, registered recruiting contacts that now can be easily updated. By entering a listing on the NALP Directory site, employers are offering real-time updates of their company information. Those recruitment contacts previously registered with NALP will continue to receive all communications sent via the NALP Directory, and employers can update contact information for those individuals through the new website. In addition, employers receive an automatic upgrade to Comprehensive Firm Plus on the NALP Directory, which provides for a wider array of display options as well as the highest-possible visibility. The site also provides employers the ability to highlight special programs and view site activity.
How Students and Graduates Benefit From the Directory
Law students and recent graduates utilize the NALP Directory for a variety of purposes. Law school career services officers report using the Directory as a comprehensive resource on every U.S. law firm. The Directory is also used to determine what to include in web-based research tools, to compare their fields of interest with the practices of law firms, to devise recruitment strategies, and in a number of other ways.
Students find the Directory useful in evaluating different practice settings. This information helps law students decide where to seek employment. For instance, a student with a specific geographic preference can search the Directory by location and decide what firms to consider.
Areas of practice are also a major determining factor in career decisions. The Directory provides practice descriptions that help law students evaluate their interests. One law student noted that this commonality has helped her research firms in which she is interested and provide energy in her job search. Many students and recent graduates have commented that the Directory helps reinforce their motivation in choosing to practice in particular fields of law.
The Directory also helps students be more effective in networking and obtaining interviews. The Directory helps job seekers identify who to contact in order to obtain interviews, and it offers a professional means of tracking progress in reaching out to alumni. As one law school career counselor stated, the Directory "provides a shortcut avoiding unnecessary telephone calls to ask people if they are hiring." A third-year law student commented, "I have learned how to get information about firms, and I work with people who tell me how many alumni are at particular firms."
The Directory can even help law students decide on what firms to target for summer associate positions. One law student said, "I used it to find out about summer associate programs." Many law schools rely solely on the Directory to provide potential employers. A law school career services officer indicated, "We limit starting salaries, for example, comparable to those in the Directory. We also use it to get contacts."
Once a law student secures an offer of employment, the Directory also serves as a guide to which firms are a good match. As one law student described, "When I had offers, I used the Directory to look up firms to see if they were a good fit for me." Often, Directory data is also helpful in determining whether to accept an offer. Law school career officers report using the Directory to counsel students on which firms to research and with whom to network. In short, it provides the best reputation information available anywhere in a compact form.
How the NALP Directory Affects Your Legal Career
The NALP Directory not only provides access to extensive law firm information for students, but it is a real benchmark of trends in the legal hiring marketplace. For starting salaries, secretaries and lawyers are paid in "grades" and the NALP data shows the position and grade for all lawyers in every firm in the directory so it is easy to see clearly that there continues to be a wide gap in salaries between lawyers and support staff. In fact, in recent years, support staff salaries have gone up much more than lawyers’ salaries by grade, except at the highest law firm levels.
Furthermore, the Directory is used by a host of other organizations to gather anonymous data that helps to create statistics about the legal community. For example, some of the leading news magazines and newspapers do salary surveys annually to show trends in annual starting lawyer salary changes and the Directory is the major source for that information. That data is used by the American Bar Association as well. Using the data in the NALP Directory, the ABA’s Department of Research publishes an annual report titled "The National Lawyer Population": a statewide and nationwide review of the lawyer population from 1975 to 2011 . The most recent report, however, noted that "the data for 2011 is incomplete and should be considered preliminary" because many firms should have updated their profiles for 2011 and they did not. This illustrates how important the NALP Directory is for complete lawyer population data.
The Directory’s impact is also felt by outside organizations tracking the industry. An example is Legal Trends, a survey of the 100 largest law firms in the U.S. conducted for 35 years by Leadership for Lawyers, Inc. and published yearly as a 300 page report that is widely available. The company also distributes an E-newsletter of industry news and trends with over 23,000 subscribers. The subscribers to these various products are primarily corporate attorneys, law firm leaders and law firm management professionals.
In addition, surveys conducted by Law Firm Group, Inc. (an independent market research firm) show that 96% of the Global 200 largest law firms obtain their bench strength data for lateral partner hiring from the NALP Directory. The NALP Directory is also the most frequented source for law firm hiring and management professionals surveyed by Law Firm Group. NALP is therefore firmly entrenched as the keeper of the gate when it comes to law firm personnel data.
New Laws and Policies Impacting the NALP Directory
Since the 2010 edition of the Directory, we have made a number of improvements to our data collection processes – including automating many aspects of data collection. The 2011 edition of the Directory includes profiles for over 8,300 employers of lawyers and over 1,400 law schools and pre-law programs.
In 2009, NALP made a major change to how vacancies are reported. Instead of requiring employers to report full-time, permanent vacancies and then indicating whether the job offered summer or regular employment, vacancies must now be reported by type of lawyer vacancy, i.e., law school graduate, summer associate, part-time, full-time, etc. The jobs posted will therefore still be searchable for the type of job, but the search will now return only one posting rather than two or three. We are aware that some law firms continue to engage in the rather common practice of hiring one or two graduates before the final April 1 reporting deadline, which means there are some gaps in listings. However, NALP firmly believes that it is unreasonable to require firms to spend resources providing information on "a job" on September 1 and then, four months later, telling NALP, "Oops. We hired two more people. Please send us a new reporting form and we’ll send you an updated profile." In fact, NALP believes that the current approach is itself counterproductive, as it invites firms to "hide" as many positions as they are comfortable doing, thereby providing fewer jobs for our students to search. Instead, data is being reported based on these categories. Some of the benefits of this system are outlined below.
Accessing the NALP Directory
With the launch of NALP’s new Directory website and especially with its forthcoming upgrade, there are three ways to access the Directory:
- Search NALP’s Directory on the Answers page of this website. You can limit your search results to only those employers in the Directory who are also members of NALP. The default is set to include all employers in the Directory.
- Download the OSF system software to your desktop and search the Directory from your own computer. To learn about this option, go to Answers and search on desktop.
- Log into the NALP Directory of Legal Employers website with your NALP ID and password. You can search and download from the Directory if you have an organizational ID. You will find full descriptions of the three options identified above there.
By statute, no one may have more than one ID as a member, employment professional, or law school. To apply for a different NALP ID, use the Main Contact for the organization for which you seek a new ID. See the ID request instructions in Answers for further details.
Takeaway: The Future of the NALP Directory
As has been elaborated upon throughout this blog, the NALP Directory of Legal Employers is an invaluable resource in that it provides an essential starting point for researching today’s and tomorrow’s law firms. Previously, if a law school or student wanted to research when an employer say that they are "national" what did they have to go by? Well, the answer is nothing other than gut-feeling. Over time the "gut-feeling" approach has become increasingly inaccurate as law firms have obviously opened more and more offices in more and more cities. In fact, back when I graduated in 2012 law firms were really only starting to open up offices in places like Shanghai and had focused more on places like London and Dubai/Abu Dhabi. Nowadays, it is just as if not more common for New York City law firms to have significant operations in Beijing and Hong Kong as it is in Chicago, Washington D.C., and Los Angeles.
That said, no one is going to just take your word for the idea that a law firm is national, and in all likelihood , no one is going to say that they are regional either. The minute a potential job candidate (let’s say an Illinois resident) sees a job post for New York City, Washington D.C., Boston, etc. all of a sudden it doesn’t matter that Chicago has a population of 3 million people, the job is "regional." Similarly, the minute that the same potential job candidate clicks on an ad that says the firm is exclusively Illinois-based, the job is "regional." By examining the number of offices and their locations on the NALP Directory of Legal Employer, a third-party source with a longtime history of credibility, prospective job candidates can research firms without bias.
As we move forward, the NALP Directory of Legal Employers will undoubtedly continue to add more and more features. The most recent upgrade that was mentioned above focuses on diversity, and moving forward who can say what the NALP Directory will be able to provide? One thing is certain though, both the NALP Directory of Legal Employers and its Job Center, are going to have an expanding role within the legal industry.