How Do You Know Who Interviews Where?

Smart law applicants think about career goals when they choose which schools to apply to. Those who aspire to high-flying legal careers focus on schools that will help them land first internships and then job interviews with prestigious firms.

Collecting that information can be a tedious process. The data is certainly available -- law schools publish annual career placement reports, and a number of firms list the schools they recruit at on their websites. But if you're just beginning your school selection research, you may not even know which law schools or law firms to look up.

The National Association for Law Placement (NALP) has a great website that can help solve that problem. Users can look up employers by field of practice, and then check which schools those employers have recruited at. Alternatively, you can also look up individual schools and see who has interviewed there.

The NALP Directory also posts employer profiles that show how many people the firm or organization anticipates hiring in the coming year -- and what the pay scale for interns and new hires is.

The one caveat about the NALP directory is that employers' participation is voluntary. It's an excellent source of information but may not be exhaustive. If you look up employers who hire prosecutors, for example, you'll only get a list of 11 employers, which certainly doesn't reflect the actual number of government agencies that hire prosecutors.

That said, the NALP database is a great starting point to research the career aspects of law school selection. For more information, go to the NALP Directory's website:

http://www.nalpdirectory.com/index.asp