<p>HUGE (well, not huge) problem with those rankings: salary.</p>
<p>*People in cities make more, because there is a higher cost of living. This slants your rankings towards schools with high placement in high cost of living areas.
*People with more debt make more money when they start. (If you want, I'll email you my spreadsheet on this - I dumped about 20 law schools into there, computed ratio of average debt of grads to average starting salary. Quite a strong correlation!). Those who graduate with less debt are able to take jobs more conducive to having a real life -fact is, 25-year-old young lawyers work 80 hours a week because they are in debt. Theoretically, a great law school will offer its students some form of debt relief - you fast find out that a young lawyers life is dominated by debt. Not a good thing!
*Starting salary (hopefully they did this) should also only be measured for private practice lawyers, not just everyone - otherwise, you would slam a school that turns out public-service or government types.<br>
*Does that measure salary of judicial clerks who then go to private practice? A school that turns out a disproportionately high # of clerks will drop its 1st year salary (clerkships pay almost nothing) but those clerks tend to command the best jobs afterwards and are often paid a bonus for having clerked, as it is quite an accomplishment.</p>