After The JD

After the JD is the first national longitudinal study of lawyers' careers in the United States. It follows a single cohort — lawyers admitted to the bar in 2000 — across the first two decades of professional life, combining repeated surveys with interviews to document how careers actually unfold rather than how they are imagined. Robert L. Nelson helped lead the project through all of its waves, and it sits at the center of his research on the legal profession, lawyer careers, and inequality.

Rather than treating a legal career as a single path, the study traces the many directions lawyers take — across practice settings, fields of law, geographies, and moves in and out of practice — and asks how race, gender, class, and law school background shape where people end up. Its central finding, developed across two decades of data, is that the profession's patterns of opportunity and reward both reflect and help reproduce wider social inequalities.

The Three Waves

The study collected data in three waves, surveying lawyers at roughly seven-year intervals and supplementing each round with in-depth interviews.

• Wave 1 (2002–2003): an early-career portrait, two to three years after entry to the bar. Published as After the JD: First Results of a National Study of Legal Careers (2004).

• Wave 2 (2007): the same cohort around seven years in, as careers diverged. Published as After the JD II: Second Results from a National Study of Legal Careers (2009).

• Wave 3 (2012–2013): roughly twelve years into practice. Published as After the JD III: Third Results from a National Study of Legal Careers (2014).

In total the study tracked more than 5,000 lawyers, with response rates above fifty percent in each wave. A fourth wave and a new lawyer-cohort study have since been in planning at the American Bar Foundation.

Sponsors and research team‍ ‍

After the JD was directed by a coordinating committee of legal scholars and social scientists and supported by the American Bar Foundation, the NALP Foundation for Law Career Research and Education, and the National Science Foundation, among others. Alongside Nelson, the core research team included Ronit Dinovitzer, Bryant G. Garth, Rebecca L. Sandefur, Joyce S. Sterling, and David B. Wilkins.

Data availability ‍

The After the JD survey data are archived for research use through the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan, where the series is available to scholars studying the legal profession.‍ ‍

ICPSR series: https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/ICPSR/series/1560‍