Law Schools Ditch U.S. News Rankings in Favor of Equitable Hiring Metrics

AI, new data, and metrics are all essential tools for predicting success in recruiting for law firms and can help promote equity in hiring beyond traditional ranking methods.
 

Why Top Law Schools are Abandoning the U.S. News Rankings
 
Several top law schools, including Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Georgetown, NYU, UC Berkeley, and Stanford, have announced they will withdraw from the U.S. News & World Report Law School Rankings. The report, which has been used to rank the country's top law schools, has come under criticism for potentially encouraging schools only to admit students with perfect grades and push them towards high-paying jobs, rather than public service or interest jobs that benefit society. Critics also argue that the ranking system perpetuates an unhealthy prestige system and does not correlate with actual on-the-job success in the legal field. Instead, they suggest using data and metrics that focus on creating more equitable recruiting for law firms.
 
Correlation between Law School Rank and On-the-Job Success
 
The ranking of a law school only explains 0.8% of an attorney's on-the-job performance, according to data from assessments of thousands of practicing attorneys. Despite this, law school rank is frequently used as a criterion for firms to determine who to interview for their associate positions. However, it can be challenging for decision-makers to remove this marker from consideration without an alternative. However, other factors such as "essential" traits and competencies can be used to predict performance. Strong correlations to performance are revealed when firms explicitly look for and measure competencies such as attention to detail or logical reasoning, or firm-specific traits such as cooperation, conscientiousness, and initiative. According to data, these measures can increase the correlation to the performance by more than seven times compared to resume-based factors.
 
Alternate Ways to Compare Schools and Students

Alternate ways to compare schools have been proposed by those who criticize the U.S. News & World Report’s list. Colin Diver, President of Reed College, suggests using social mobility as a metric, specifically looking at the percentage of students from lower-income or lower- and middle-income groups who graduate. Another idea he presents is measuring how many students end up earning more than their family's income after college. Additionally, an article in the Rutgers Law Review suggests "Equity and Access" rankings, in which all public Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) would be at the top of the list. The article notes that these institutions are primarily responsible for educating and providing access to underrepresented populations. The top five public HBCU law schools alone enroll 1,303 Black students, while the next 40 public law schools ranked 6-45 combined only enroll the same number of Black students. These institutions are doing a significant amount of work to propel Black law students into the industry, yet they are not considered as prestigious as other schools.
 
Alternate Ways to Compare Students and Graduates
 
Many law firms want to change their hiring practices but are unsure how to do so. One solution is to use AI-assisted personality and competency assessments. This can help identify the specific traits and skills that lead to success in a non-linear way, and also reveal which combinations of characteristics work well together. This approach can help avoid homogenous hiring by identifying candidates with unique combinations of traits who may excel at the firm. Additionally, using data and metrics that are more equitable and predictive can help address the underrepresentation of people of color in the legal industry. However, it is important to recognize and remove any systemic biases in these metrics to truly achieve representation. Suited, is a hiring intelligence platform that offers independent evaluations of candidate potential using objective data and predictive analytics to aid in making accurate and equitable hiring decisions.
 
REFERENCE:
What to Make of Law Schools Withdrawing From the U.S. News Ranking
https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2023/01/17/what-to-make-of-law-schools-withdrawing-from-the-u-s-news-ranking/