How do I pick a Law School? Disbarment Metric Analysis?

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How do I pick a law school? 

The methods to select a law school are as nearly varied as the reasons for attending one.  Clinic options, professorial notoriety, attractiveness and marriageability of the student body, starting salary, prestige, parental edict, etc., the list goes on. 

However, one metric that I don't hear all that often is "likelihood of disbarment."  Sure, it is not as fun to contemplate the odds that your highly expensive investment in upper-middle class lifestyle preparation will be snatched away due to some fiduciary or ethical indiscretion, but some thought should be given to the possibility. 

Recently, NYS opened up the attorney registration database for programmatic access (meaning you can download and manipulate the fields as a Excel, JSON, CSV and other format types, as well as access the data directly from a web app). Nominally, this will allow you to check your reg status without having to go to your department website, but I digress. 

Of course, the first thing I did was manipulate the data to find out how many attorneys were disbarred who were admitted to the NY State Bar. According to the list, about 1800 people have been disbarred out of 350,000 records going back to 1899. 

The next thing I did was try to chart the data via school. What I got was hundreds of records, some for schools I had never heard of (Northumbria - I am looking at you).

The next problem was that people arbitrarily decided how to write their school (NYU vs N.Y.U vs New York University School of Law).

To solve that, I ran some regex fixes to condition the edge cases I could see. I tried to format the data by stripping out "Law", but when you try to strip out "School" - weird things happen. So there are some duplicate entries (like Brooklyn and Brooklyn School (i.e. stripped out 'Law').  Once I got a super-set, I manually conditioned the data to a top 20 set. Here are the results. 

Yea Alma Mater! 

Now, on its face, Brooklyn is the highest, but I would provide some caveats. The records go back to 1899, and the first Brooklyn Law reference I can find is in 1918. That means that it is possible that the 160_+ disbarment for BLS grads could be amortized over the course of nearly 100 years, the same goes for NYL. However, I am not sure what happens when you are disbarred and then deceased. 

***The data documentation does not give info about current status vs historical stats.  I would suggest that the Brooklyn number represents those persons that are still alive, but I have no way of knowing.***

However, when you restrict the entries to people who were admitted in 2000 or later, you get a different chart.

So what accounts for the difference? 

I mean we could just default to "Touro et al are lower ranked schools, of course their alums get into more problems", but that seams like the intelligent design answer to this science questions.  Maybe the fact that top law school grads in NY go into politics, business and large firms where there is a less chance that they will get into trouble? More lower ranked grads go solo (by choice or by default) and solos always have a higher chance of getting into trouble? 

Who knows. Any Theories, drop them in the comments. 

 t