After the JD (AJD) is the first empirical study of a nationally representative cohort of new lawyers. Designed as a longitudinal study of lawyer careers, AJD is tracking the professional lives of more than 4,500 lawyers during their first ten years after law school. While prior research has identified that significant gender and racial inequality exists within the legal profession, this research has generally been limited to findings based on particular jurisdictions. Moreover, most prior research is cross-sectional in character, which limits the capacity to explain changes in careers over time. As a study of lawyer careers, the AJD study seeks to understand who lawyers are, how lawyers build their careers, which lawyers attain elite positions, and whom lawyers serve. The first wave of the AJD project created a set of baseline data that provide a unique perspective on how legal careers are made. The second wave of the project will build on this significant base, collecting data from the AJD cohort when respondents are about six years into their careers and experiencing many important personal and professional transitions. The longitudinal design of the project will allow us to observe more complex patterns that emerge over time, as lawyers gain expertise, change jobs, draw on social networks, and enter new family relationships. The influence of gender and race or ethnicity, in particular, will likely become more pronounced as these lawyers move out of their initial jobs, begin families, and face changing labor market opportunities. The studys minority oversample will facilitate the analysis of the changing effects of race over a professional career. The second wave of the AJD study will focus on issues of career mobility, tracking movements both within and out of the law. We will seek to understand which lawyers move sectors and settings, and why and how they do so. Beyond its focus on the legal profession itself as an object of study, the After the JD study will address a number of core issues in social science and in law. One is the general pattern of social stratification stemming from social backgrounds, schools attended, grades, and social networks and how these relate to the full range of career outcomes (including practice settings, areas of practice, income and satisfaction). The study is collecting textured data on issues of gender and race/ethnicity in the professional workplace. We will expand our scope beyond factors relating to the workplace, to include issues such as the role of social and community networks, mentorship, and family responsibilities. These data will shed light on the mechanisms that lead to unequal opportunity in employment and the possibilities that inequality may be remedied through legal or other strategies. The longitudinal design will allow us to place legal careers within a broader life course context, providing key insights into the mechanisms that shape professional careers. The After the JD study will not only document these patterns, but will provide the empirical data necessary for devising policy solutions relating to the role of law schools in the job market for lawyers; recruitment and compensation policies within law firms and in the public sector; issues of the retention of women and minorities in law firms; and to broader questions such as the relative availability of legal talent to individuals and corporations, rich and poor. The study includes the careers of public interest lawyers, who play a key social role through their contribution to social reform and social justice through law. Because careers can be thought of as the mechanism that links the supply and demand for legal services, developing a theoretical understanding of the determinants of lawyers careers has significant implications for the distributive effects of law itself. More generally, the studys theoretical lens, with its focus on capital assets, will enable us to better understand the mechanisms that lead to unequal opportunity in employment. In particular, our approach will reveal how different forms of capital come together in the construction of lawyer careers. For instance, social class, credentials, connections, organizational leadership, government service, and expertise are all forms of advantage that are accessed and valued differentially across the legal profession. Research to date does not allow us to say which are the advantages that are most useful to occupational mobility in law. The After the JD project, drawing on its theoretical frame and its longitudinal design, will help uncover the professional rules of the game, which, given the centrality of the legal profession to our processes of governance, are vital to the legitimacy of law as a democratic institution.
