Lawyer Satisfaction in the Process of Structuring Legal Careers-2

Lawyer Satisfaction in the Process of Structuring Legal Careers-2

Data and Methods-The After the JD Study

This article relies on the first wave of data from the After the JD (AJD) study, a national longitudinal survey of law graduates designed to follow a sample of slightly more than 10 percent of all the individuals who became lawyers in 2000 (Dinovitzer et al. 2004). The study is based on a sample representative of the national population of lawyers who were admitted to the bar in 2000, and was designed by using a two-stage sampling process. In the first stage, the nation was divided into 18 strata by region and size of the new lawyer population. Within each stratum, one primary sampling unit (PSU)-metropolitan area, portion of a state outside large metropolitan areas, or entire state-was chosen. The PSUs included all four "major" markets, those with more than 2,000 new lawyers (Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, DC); five of the nine "large" markets, those with between 750 and 2,000 new lawyers (Boston, Atlanta, Houston, Minneapolis, and San Francisco); and nine of the remaining, smaller markets (Connecticut, the remainder of New Jersey, the remainder of Florida, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Indiana, St. Louis, Utah, and Oregon). In the second stage, individuals were sampled from each of the PSUs at rates that would, combined, generalize to the national population. In addition, the study included an oversample of 1,465 new lawyers from minority groups (black, Hispanic, and Asian American).1 The final sample included 9,192 lawyers in the 18 PSUs.

Data collection was based on a mail questionnaire that included sections on the respondent's job history and search process; the nature of the respondent's current job, including its content, the work environment, and the respondent's satisfaction with it; the respondent's law school history; and a variety of background and contextual information. Following the initial mailing of surveys in May 2002, nonrespondents were followed up by mail and telephone (with the telephone survey using a somewhat abridged version of the mail questionnaire). Approximately 100 in-depth-face to face interviews were conducted with a subset of respondents.

About 20 percent of the individuals in the sample could not be located, and roughly 20 percent of those located proved to be lawyers moving from one state bar to another rather than lawyers entering a bar for the first time. These "movers" were included in the sample so long as they had graduated from law school no ear lier than 1998. (Consequently, about 6 percent of the AJD sample began law practice in 1999, and 1.5 percent began practice in 1998.) Of the original sample members who were located and who met the criteria for inclusion in the study, 71 percent responded to either the mail questionnaire or a telephone interview, for a total of 4,538 valid responses. The analyses in this article rely on data from the national sample only (i.e., the minority oversample is not included), comprising 3,950 respondents.2

Comparisons with external data indicate that the AJD sample is representative of the general population from which the sample was selected. When comparing the sample with young lawyers in the 2000 U.S. Census, we find that the racial composition of the sample is almost identical (US Census Bureau 2002, 5% Public Use Microdata Sample Census 2000, all lawyers and judges, ages 27-32). To the extent that practice settings can be inferred from census data, the sample also closely approximates the distribution of lawyers across firms, government, and business employers (US Census Bureau 2002, 5% Public Use Microdata Sample Census 2000, all lawyers and judges; Carson 2004). Finally, the gender distribution in the sample closely matches data published by the American Bar Association (ABA; American Bar Association 2005).