Where Graduates Work
BU Law: Far and Wide
Where do BU Law grads go? Everywhere. The National Law Journal's (NLJ) annual survey of the nation’s largest law firms, the “NLJ250,” ranks BU Law #21 based on the number of graduates working in the nation’s largest law firms. A recent Journal of Legal Education article ranks BU Law #12 for the number of partners within the NLJ Top 100 large law firms. Beyond "Big Law," our alumni practice in small and medium sized firms across the nation.
Many alumni also work outside law firms: they are elected federal and state officials, ambassadors, attorneys general, career federal and state prosecutors, business executives and entrepreneurs, federal and state judges and magistrates, and public interest attorneys in every imaginable area of the law. Our alumni litigate, make deals, enact policy, create and run businesses and social enterprises, provide financial advising for major companies as well as individual clients, legislate and adjudicate – we have 20,000 BU Law grads leading the way for our students.
Boston University School of Law is committed to supporting our students during this difficult economic cycle. To that end, the law school has provided some part-time graduate fellowship opportunities that are reported as positions in academia/higher education. Thus, the current percentage of graduates in that category is unusually high. The difficult economy also has affected the availability of public interest and government positions, so the current percentage of graduates in those positions is unusually low.
BU Law alumni work in 50 states, Washington, D.C., two U.S. territories and more than 65 countries.
BU Law graduates command highly competitive salaries wherever they work. For example, among the students from the Class of 2010 who reported their starting salaries, the median salary in large law firms was $160,000. On the other hand, the average reported salary for students working in all types of private practice was $145,000 and the range is quite broad. The median starting salary for those in government was $62,000. There was insufficient data on starting salaries in public interest, clerkships and businesses.
Please note that students are not required to report salaries; thus, while we know where our graduates work, most often we receive salary information only from students whose employers make that information public as part of their recruitment practices.