This report contains data for Wave II of AJD, with the second survey of the sample population of lawyers completed in 2007. Phase II seeks to illuminate the progression of lawyers’ careers through roughly seven years in practice. The seventh year marks a crucial period in the careers of young lawyers, as they balance major career shifts with significant personal decisions about marriage and having children.
The AJD data will allow the research community to investigate a broad range of these multiple factors and to test their importance across time. The topics the study examines include job mobility, career satisfaction, convergence/divergence in the career patterns of women and minorities, indications of continuing inequity by gender and race, family formation and its effects on professional careers, financing legal education, and changes in fields of practice and legal specialties.
In Phase II, researchers examined indications of inequality by gender in lawyer careers. They found that women were far more likely than men to be unemployed or to work part-time. Women also lagged behind men in income and achieving the status of equity partner in private law firms.