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All About NALP

Published on October 1, 2020

What is NALP?

NALP, or the National Association for Law Placement, is an association of over 2,500 legal career professionals who advise law students, lawyers, law offices, and law schools in North America and beyond. NALP's goal is to ensure that the lawyers and law students NALP members serve have ethical recruiting systems, employment data they can trust, and expert advisers to guide and support them in every stage of their careers.

Why NALP is Important

A prospective law student's primary interest in NALP is usually in the yearly Employment Report and Salary Survey (ERSS), which NALP uses to produce statistical reports of post-graduation employment outcomes for individual schools and for the public. Specifically, NALP produces reports with aggregate findings on its website (example and in a publication entitled Jobs & JDs. NALP also produces a "NALP Report" for each law school.

Since 1974, NALP has processed annual graduate employment and salary data collected by individual law schools. All ABA-accredited law schools are surveyed by NALP, and the schools use NALP graduate survey forms or something similar to collect data from their graduates and then pass the data on to NALP. NALP checks the data for discrepancies or obvious questions, and returns analyses back to law schools. NALP does not make individual school reports public, but individual law schools may make their respective NALP reports public and many have.

The NALP Report

The NALP report is valuable to prospective law students because of the amount of information it contains. An individual school report has employment information that goes well beyond American Bar Association (ABA) standards and includes salary data (aggregated in categories, not individual salaries) and employment outcomes data about job source (e.g., OCI, networking, or direct mailings), job offer timing (before graduation, before bar results, after bar results), employed graduate search status (employed graduates who are either still seeking or not seeking), job region and job states, and job type breakdowns by employer type (e.g., Government–JD Advantage). When a school chooses to publish its NALP report and make it easily accessible, the school makes it easy to compare its graduates' outcomes with those from other schools that also choose to make the report public.

To see a list of publicly available NALP individual school reports, view our NALP Report Database.

By Zien Halwani with input from NALP