Protected: After the JD (DRAFT)

Robert L. Nelson, Ronit Dinovitzer, Bryant Garth, Meghan Dawe, and Andreea Mogoșanu lead the research project. Swethaa Ballakrishnen, Aaron Taylor, Kellye Y. Testy, Elizabeth Bodamer, and Fiona Trevelyan are current contributors to the project.

The After the JD project pursues complex questions about how lawyers’ careers develop and why. Two new surveys, one to the bar exam class of 2000 and one to the class of 2024, will explore how the legal profession has changed in more than twenty years.

After the JD (AJD) is the first national longitudinal study of lawyers’ careers. Since its inception in 2000, the project has followed the professional lives of a cohort of more than 5,000 lawyers to gain insight into the forces that shape the legal profession.

In 2026, a planning phase for two expansions to AJD began: After the JD Wave Four and After the JD: A New Generation will survey the class of 2000 and survey a new class of lawyers for the first time.

 About the After the JD Project

AJD began with a survey of a nationally representative cohort of lawyers admitted to the bar in 2000. This cohort of more than 5,000 lawyers has been surveyed by researchers in three waves: the first in 2002, the second in 2007, and the third in 2012. In addition to surveys, in-depth interviews with a subsample of survey participants have added important qualitative insights into lawyers’ lives.

In 2023, researchers contributing to the project published The Making of Lawyers’ Careers: Inequality and Opportunity in the American Legal Profession (University of Chicago Press). The book considers the structure of the legal profession and addresses persistent inequalities faced by lawyers in their early careers. Examining group trends and the careers of individual lawyers, the book provides an unparalleled empirical analysis of the legal profession.

Some findings of the AJD project published in The Making of Lawyers’ Careers include:

• A gendered wage gap exists for lawyers at all stages of their careers, even in the first few years after law school. Researchers also discovered a “fatherhood bonus” for men with children, who outearn childless men, childless women, and women with children by a large margin.
• Inequity persists for lawyers of color working in law firms, with almost 30% of respondents reporting that all lawyers employed at their firm are white. When African American lawyers enter law firms, they are overrepresented in lower-status positions and underrepresented among equity partners.
  
• The impact of an elite education is complex. Advantages lead to other advantages: an elite undergraduate education and privileged social background can open the door to an elite law education and a prestigious first job. While these accumulated advantages matter, they matter most at the start; the predictive power of law school ranking declines by midcareer. By then, a lawyer’s first job becomes a more powerful predictor of their current position.

A restricted data set, distributed to certified researchers who commit themselves to maintaining limited access, is available. To gain access, complete the AJD restricted access form and submit it to Meghan Dawe, a Research Social Scientist for AJD, at mdawe@abfn.org.

AJD Wave Four (AJD4)

AJD4 is the next wave of surveys to the project’s original cohort. It will examine the later career of the lawyers in the cohort, who by 2024 are mostly in their early to mid-fifties. This phase will represent the peak earning years for many of the lawyers, who may be occupying senior leadership roles. Some may be planning or beginning to make late-career transitions; others will have followed entirely different paths, including leaving practice or returning to it.

The new wave of surveys will help researchers understand whether earlier career decisions continue to shape late-career outcomes. Extending the scope of the project into a new phase of lawyers’ careers will allow researchers to explore the long-term impacts of inequality on the careers of women and people of color, and to examine how inequality appears in the later years of lawyers’ careers.

Most research on lawyers’ careers relies on short windows into the early practice of recent law school graduates. By extending this project into a third decade of the careers of lawyers, AJD researchers will provide a uniquely long view of the development of lawyers’ careers.

AJD: A New Generation 

The legal profession and the world have changed substantially in the decades since AJD first began. Hybrid work schedules are changing how lawyers work together, providing some lawyers with more flexibility while also altering the collegial nature of legal work. The emergence of AI, legal outsourcing, and gig work could mean that tasks usually assigned to younger associate lawyers are now being dealt with in other ways, changing how lawyers build professional relationships and gain experience early in their careers. Shifts in diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives may have impacted lawyers graduating from law school in the 2020s in ways that the class of 2000 did not experience.

AJD New Generation will capture how much has changed for new lawyers in more than twenty years. The survey will focus on a nationally representative sample of lawyers admitted to the bar in 2024. By expanding AJD with dual-cohort study, researchers will be able to compare the early careers of lawyers from two different generations, revealing how the structures of opportunity, mobility, and inequality documented by the original study have shifted or remained in place.

Researchers aim to begin the data collection process for both new surveys in 2027. The result will be an unprecedented look into the careers of lawyers at all stages of their careers, now including the perspectives of two different generations. Robert L. Nelson, MacCrate Research Chair in the Legal Profession at the ABF, continues to lead the project, with support from many ABF faculty, affiliated researchers, visiting scholars, and others from the ABF community and beyond.

History of AJD

In the 1970s, career services officers at law schools and recruitment administrators at firms wanted information that would help them counsel, recruit, hire, and develop young attorneys. A project like AJD had been suggested by members of the National Association for Law Placement (NALP) for years before the AJD project was funded at the ABF. The ABF and NALP were initial funders of the AJD project. The National Science Foundation, the NALP Foundation for Law Career Research and Education, the Law School Admissions Council, and other organizations have also been sources of funding.

Generations of scholars have contributed to the AJD project over its decades of existence at the ABF. David B. Wilkins, Joyce Sterling, and Ethan Michelson are among the past contributors to the AJD project.