Law Department Management Blog
Let’s look at the Fortune 500 companies broken into equal-sized revenue categories and see if there is any pattern about the law school of their top lawyers.
The plot below shows 20 revenue categories increasing from $4.8 billion for the smallest company on the left to $89 billion and up in the farthest-right category. There are 25 companies in each category, plus or minus one.
The blue dots above a revenue category each represent one general counsel and the US News & World Report ranking of that person’s law school, which can be read from the vertical Y-axis. As noted before, when two schools have the same rank, this plot combines their graduate numbers. Unranked schools are not included and the law schools of a few general counsel are unknown.
It is apparent that the law schools with ranks from 1 to 50, which some might consider the elite law schools, produced many more general counsel than did the law schools in the two categories above that (51-100 and 101-150). On the other hand, the general counsel are quite evenly distributed across the various revenue ranges.