Who the nation’s 50 highest-grossing firms hired from the Class of 2024 — and the schools, clerkships, and lateral moves that brought them in.
Legal recruiting runs on a familiar story: a handful of elite schools feed a handful of elite firms, the best graduates go there, and they stay. Most of it has never actually been measured.
The market moves on reputation, relationships, and recruiter shorthand — each firm seeing only its own corner of it. The profession manages its most valuable asset, its talent, largely on instinct.
This report starts from the data instead. Firm Prospects identified every Class of 2024 associate now practicing at an AmLaw 50 firm — 5,291 lawyers across all fifty firms and 157 law schools — and traced each back to the school they attended. No survey, no sample: the entire class. And each school is measured against its own graduating-class size, so a school that sends most of a small class to BigLaw is judged on the same terms as one that sends a smaller share of a much larger class.
Read that way, much of the conventional wisdom doesn’t hold. For firms competing for talent, where it actually comes from matters more than where it’s assumed to.
Most of the AmLaw 50’s newest associates didn’t come from the T14 — and two schools the 2026 rankings pushed outside the T14 out-produce nearly every school still in it. The schools are only half of it: the most prestigious firms hire overwhelmingly from one city, and the single largest hirer runs a strategy unlike any peer.
Attrition looks different up close, too. At the top of the market, the associates who leave are disproportionately leaving to clerk — not leaving practice. A step up that registers in the data as a departure.
This isn’t an argument for where firms should recruit. It’s an evidence-based picture of where elite legal talent actually comes from.
This report tracks three measures the market often treats as interchangeable — prestige rankings, AmLaw 50 placement, and overall law-firm placement — and finds them increasingly diverging. Across 5,291 Class of 2024 associates at all AmLaw 50 firms, T14 schools supplied 44.9% of the class. That looks like a sharp fall from the ~52% of recent years — but it happened almost entirely because the 2026 rankings moved two long-standing T14 schools, Georgetown and Berkeley, out of the tier. The label changed; the hiring barely did.
Lower than past years only because the 2026 ranking dropped Georgetown and Berkeley from the tier — not because hiring changed.
Placed more graduates than 12 of the T14 schools — yet the 2026 ranking moved it out of the T14.
199 → 275 year-over-year, leapfrogging Latham into #2 as Kirkland slipped for the first time.
of all AmLaw 50 hires landed in New York — D.C. a distant second at 12.3%.
Ten things the data changes about how the Class of 2024 actually moved — and which of the year’s “shifts” are real.
T14 schools supplied 44.9% of the class. That sits below past years only because the 2026 U.S. News ranking moved Georgetown and Berkeley out of the tier — firms did not change who they hire.
Georgetown placed 291 graduates — more than 12 of the T14 schools — and Berkeley (188) more than 11. Seven of the top-18 feeders sit outside the T14.
#1 by volume (320, overtaking Georgetown), #1 on direct placement (59.5%), and #1 with indirect hires (67.4%) — the most complete feeder in the country.
Yale sends just 42% of its class to law firms of any size — the lowest of the elite — and 30% to clerkships; Stanford, 56.5% to firms and 20% to clerkships. Those are the two highest clerkship rates of any top school, and for both the smaller law-firm rate appears to reflect career preferences more than placement limitations.
+38% year-over-year (199 → 275), leapfrogging Latham into #2. Kirkland held #1 but slipped for the first time (411 → 385).
BigLaw’s largest hirer (385) recruits like the broad market: a strikingly low 39.5% T14 share and the most first-year laterals (61).
Traditionalists take zero first-year laterals (Cravath, Debevoise, Wachtell). Hybrids lean on them — Orrick 45%, Greenberg 30%, Cooley 19% of the class from other firms.
39% of all AmLaw 50 hires (2,060) landed in New York; D.C. a distant second (12.3%). The most prestigious firms remain largely a single-city phenomenon.
Of 620 who left, 38% went to clerkships (84% federal) — at the top, “leaving” often means clerking. Within BigLaw, Kirkland was the #1 destination (47).
269 hires came via clerkships (77% federal); Kirkland hired the most former clerks (27) — yet none came straight from a U.S. Supreme Court clerkship.
A handful of firms dominate hiring, but the market runs much deeper than the headline numbers suggest. From Kirkland’s 385 associates to firms hiring classes in the twenties, every AmLaw 50 firm contributes to the pipeline.
Kirkland & Ellis led with 385 hires, with Sidley (275) and Latham (240) next. The ten biggest hirers alone account for a large share of the entire Class of 2024.
Expanding to the top 25, the volume spreads across full-service giants — Jones Day, Skadden, Davis Polk, Gibson Dunn, Paul Weiss — each hiring well over 100 graduates.
Across all 50 firms the long tail comes into view, down to highly selective firms like Wachtell.
A recurring, citable Index of how elite legal talent moves — built on proprietary data competitors structurally lack, in the tradition of the AmLaw 100, Chambers, and Vault.
Which leading firms draw which schools — T14 and beyond.
live in this reportPartner-level movement in and out of the top firms.
Team and practice-group transitions across the market.
Where firms lose associates — and where the talent that leaves actually lands.
Compare every AmLaw 50 firm’s Class of 2024 across hiring volume, school composition, sourcing mix, and early attrition. Each metric is benchmarked against the AmLaw 50 median.
| FIRM▲▼ | HIRES▼ | % T14▲▼ | % T25▲▼ | CLERKS IN▲▼ |
|---|
The T14 pipeline is more predictable than it first appears. The same school-to-firm pathways emerge repeatedly—for example, NYU to Debevoise (28), Harvard to Skadden (26), and Northwestern to Kirkland (26).
Some firms build their incoming classes almost entirely through on-campus recruiting. Others supplement those classes with first-year laterals from the open market. The approaches differ, but the outcome is remarkably consistent: nearly every AmLaw 50 firm builds its incoming class around New York.
Rank schools by the number of graduates they placed into the AmLaw 50 and the rankings begin to diverge from hiring outcomes. Two schools removed from the T14 in the 2026 rankings—Georgetown and Berkeley—remain among the strongest performers, while several schools now inside the T14 place well behind them.
If recruiting teams screen primarily by prestige tiers, they risk overlooking two of the largest actual sources of AmLaw 50 talent — Georgetown and Berkeley — while over-weighting schools that produce materially fewer hires. And not simply because they are large: Georgetown placed about 51% of its class into the AmLaw 50, Berkeley about 48%.
Yale tops every ranking and sits at the bottom of the elite for law-firm placement. Both are true. Just 42% of the Class of 2024 went to a law firm of any size — the lowest share of any top school — while 30% took clerkships and 17% entered public-interest work. By rate, more of the class enters clerkships, public interest, government, and academia combined (53%) than law firms (42%). The pattern appears to reflect career preference more than placement limitation.
Under the 2026 labels, the T14 supplied 44.9% of the class. Schools ranked 16–25 added another 18.8%, and schools outside the top 25 supplied 36.3% — more than a third of AmLaw 50 hiring comes from outside the names that dominate recruiting screens.
44.9% of all Class of 2024 AmLaw 50 placements.
Most graduates placed of any school, ahead of Harvard (311) and Georgetown (291).
Volume favors big schools; rate is the fairer test. On direct hires, Columbia (59.5%), Northwestern (57.2%) and NYU (56.2%) lead. Count the graduates who reach BigLaw by clerkship or lateral move and Columbia places 67.4% of its class at an AmLaw 50 firm — the deepest pipeline in the country.
Elite schools still anchor BigLaw hiring, but more than a third of the Class of 2024 came from outside the top 25 — and at the top of the market, a clerkship remains the credential that sets the elite hires apart.
Most associates came straight from law school, but 786 — 14.9% of the class — arrived another way: from another firm (44%) or a clerkship (34%).
620 associates have already left an AmLaw 50 firm — 11.7% of the class. More than half moved to another firm (53.4%); 38.4% left to clerk, 84% of them in the federal courts. Kirkland alone took in 47 of the departures. At this level, leaving is often a step up, not out.