Explained
Plain-language notes on the law-school numbers, the bar exam, employment outcomes, and the choices behind them. Built on the official ABA Standard 509 disclosures, free to read and cite.
Is it worth it?
Decisions
Is law school worth it? Ask three numbers, not one ranking
A personal break-even, not a ranking: three-year net cost, FTLT employment rate, and local attorney salary, from the ABA 509 data.
Outcomes
The bimodal salary trap
New-lawyer pay is two humps, not a bell curve: ~$70-90K and a spike near $225K. Why the average describes almost no one.
Reading the data
Reading the data
Law school closures, mergers & name changes: a timeline
A year-by-year record of the schools that opened, merged, were renamed, lost accreditation, or closed. Trajectory is the loudest warning.
Reading the data
How to read a 509 disclosure without getting fooled
Separate first-time from ultimate bar passage, read employment by job type, and watch the multi-year trajectory.
Reading the data
How to read a law school’s bar passage rate
First-time vs ultimate pass rate, why jurisdiction and cohort size matter, and what the figure does and doesn’t tell you.
Bar exam
What the UBE is, and what score portability actually buys you
The Uniform Bar Exam explained: what it tests, how a passing score transfers between states, and how NextGen changes things.
Methodology
Methodology
How we validate the 509 dataset: what we corrected, why, and what it changes
A white-paper accounting: the PDF-controlled audit, every class of correction, which year each field describes, and why employment comes from a separate ABA source.
Methodology
The holes in 509 tuition data since 2011, and how we patched them
Stray apostrophes, per-term vs annual reporting, doubled cells: the recurring 509 tuition errors and how Exhibit reconciles each.
Reference & data indexes
The methodology, the glossary, and the ranked data indexes: the pages we point to most when a claim needs a source.
- Methodology, how every number is sourced, classified, and refreshed.
- Glossary, every term defined: LSAT, FTLT, BigLaw, bimodal salary, net price…
- Splitter index, schools ranked by whether they weight LSAT or GPA.
- Bar passage rates, every school ranked by first-time bar passage.
- Tuition, schools ranked from the lowest resident tuition.
- Employment outcomes, ranked by full-time, long-term JD employment.
Exhibit 509's dataset is derived from ABA annual questionnaire compilation spreadsheets publicly released by the ABA under its mandatory disclosure program. No data was scraped from abarequireddisclosures.org, data was manually collected. The underlying facts are not subject to copyright per Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991). Data sourced from ABA Standard 509 required disclosures, submitted by law schools. Data sourced from law school self-reported disclosures, accuracy not guaranteed, raw data may have errors or omissions. State attorney-salary context from U.S. BLS OEWS 2024. Methodology: /methodology.html.