By: Jeff Kauflin , FORBES 

For anyone contemplating a career as an attorney, researching law schools is a critical part of the process. And to help with the search, the Princeton Review released its annual list of the best law schools for career prospects. It used several factors to create the ranking, including graduates’ median starting salaries, schools’ employment outcomes and the number of students who pass the bar on their first try. It also incorporated student survey responses, such as how prepared they felt upon graduation. The Princeton Review polled 19,900 students at 169 law schools for the list. Full methodology details are available here.

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By : Stephanie Ward, ABA Journal

After recent announcements from various law schools that they will accept the GRE from applicants in addition to the LSAT, an American Bar Association section committee recently made various accreditation standard recommendations (PDF), including doing away with the separate admissions test rule entirely.

In March, the council of the ABA’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar sought notice and comment for a proposed revision to Standard 503—which covers admission tests—that called for the council to establish a process that determines the reliability and validity of other tests besides the LSAT. That’s a change from the current version, which directs law schools using alternate admissions tests to demonstrate that the exams are valid and reliable.

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Follow Us

By:  Katelyn Polantz, The National Law Journal

Sean Marotta put on Twitter an open offer to have coffee, thinking that one or two young lawyers in Washington, D.C., might have interest in meeting him, a seventh-year associate in Hogan Lovells’ appellate practice.

But then the requests multiplied. Marotta, whose Twitter presence is among those central to the #AppellateTwitter online community, ultimately met with 15 summer associates this year from a variety of law programs in the nation’s capital. He would greet them in Hogan Lovells’ concourse, walk them over to a nearby Starbucks and then talk for an hour.

After two separate summer legal interns with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission requested coffees, he upgraded their chat to Shake Shack. After each meeting, the summers posed for selfies with Marotta to prove to their tweeps the power of online connections

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The American Lawyer

By: Chris Johnson

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) is set to launch a law firm in the U.S., a clear sign that the concerted push into legal services by the Big Four accounting firms continues.

PwC to Launch US Law Firm

By: Michelle Kim Hall, Contributor, U.S. News & World Report 

With the new law school application cycle underway, prospective law school students may wonder what admissions committees are looking for from applicants this year. Fortunately, recent data can help applicants gauge what to expect. Here are our predictions for law school application trends in the 2017-2018 submissions cycle.

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By Elizabeth Olson, New York Times

Law schools, which have been plagued by a shortfall of students in recent years, are changing their admissions requirements.

Two top-ranked schools — Georgetown University Law Center and Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law — this week joined Harvard Law’s recent move to make it simpler to apply.  Applicants can submit the results of the more widely available Graduate Record Exam, the GRE, instead of those from the Law School Admissions Test, which long has been entrenched as the numeric gauge of law school success.

Many law schools are casting wider nets to attract students who would not otherwise set their sights on a legal education. The schools hope that by making it easier for the engineers, scientists and mathematicians who typically take only the GRE, more of them will enroll. With the two this week, there are now four law schools, including the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law, that admit students with GRE scores.

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By: Christine Simmons, New York Law Journal

Despite perennial complaints among associates about life in Big Law, a combination of rising paychecks, greater attention to associate satisfaction and a more cautious lateral market may be keeping young lawyers at their firms longer.

On average, 16 percent of associates left their firms in 2016, compared with 20 percent in 2015, according to NALP Foundation data for its Update on Associate Attrition Study.

That's the lowest attrition rate in the last four years of the study, according to the NALP Foundation, which gathers information on law firm associate departures from firms of all sizes in the United States and Canada.

Gretta Rusanow, head of advisory services at Citi Private Bank's Law Firm Group, said law firms are repeatedly reporting this year that associate attrition is falling, driven in part by widespread salary increases that were sparked when first-year associate pay at leading New York firms rose by $20,000 to $180,000 last year.

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By: Stephanie Francis Ward, ABA Journal

The requirement that ABA-accredited law schools use some sort of entrance exam in the admissions process hampers innovation and does little to guide schools toward the admission of students capable of mastering legal education and passing a bar exam, according to a group of law school deans.

The six deans–who include Erwin Chemerinsky, now at the University of California Berkeley School of Law; Daniel B. Rodriguez of Northwestern University; and Blake Morant of George Washington University–submitted their statement (PDF) focusing on whether the council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar should devise a process to validate non-LSAT entrance exams. The public hearing took place Thursday in Chicago.

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By: Ian Lopez, Legaltech News

In almost every sense, technology has changed the way we both provide and consume information. The same is currently happening in legal services , albeit slowly.

Mark Klein, general counsel and chief compliance officer at Marketfield Asset Management, said he's been watching this advancement for the past 25 years of his career. Along with this change, he said, has come change to the demands of consumers—for law firms to provide services that are " more efficient, more cost-effective and timelier."

At Thomson Reuters' Law Firm CFO/CIO/COO Forum , Klein partook in a panel aptly titled "Exploring Future Drivers of Change in Legal Services—Defining Client Expectations." Here, corporate and law firm professionals discussed technology's role in the changing nature of delivering and receiving legal services, as well as shopping for them.