Bar pass rates are here, summer associate recruiting hits 11-year low, OpenAI hires former US senator, and more ??

?? Good morning from The Legal File! Here is the rundown of today's top legal stories:

?? These US law schools had the highest bar pass rates in 2023

The American Bar Association released a trove of 2023 bar exam data detailing national results for the 197 individual U.S. law schools it accredits.

The University of Michigan Law School scored the highest first-time bar pass rate in 2023, with 97.27% of its latest Juris Doctors crushing the attorney licensing exam on their first try.

The University of Chicago Law School was close behind with a pass rate of 97.1%, while Vanderbilt University Law School rounded out the top three at 96.97%.

The nationwide pass rate for first-time test takers ticked up to 79.18% in 2023 from 78% the previous year. But the “ultimate bar pass rate,” which reflects the percentage of law graduates who passed the bar exam within two years of graduation, fell from 91% among 2020 law graduates to 90% for the class of 2021.

Read more on the bar pass rates here.

?? Law firm summer associate recruiting hits 11-year low in 2023

Landing a Big Law summer associate position was tougher in 2023.

Offer rates to law students interviewing for those temporary jobs last year were the lowest since 2012 with firms collectively extending 19% fewer offers than the previous year, according to a report released on March 12 by the National Association for Law Placement.

The average number of offers extended by law firms went from 28 in 2022 to 22 in 2023, while the median fell to seven from nine. The NALP figures include hiring data from more than 180 firms, with the vast majority having 500 or more lawyers.

Law firms’ pullback on summer associate hiring in 2023 is likely the result of slowing demand from clients as well as excess capacity from higher-than-normal summer associate hiring in 2022, wrote NALP Executive Director Nikia Gray in the report.

Read more.

?? US federal judiciary moves to curtail 'judge shopping' tactic

The U.S. federal judiciary adopted a new policy aimed at curtailing "judge shopping" by state attorneys general, activists and companies who file lawsuits challenging government policies in courthouses where one or two sympathetic judges had been virtually guaranteed to hear their cases.

The policy adopted by the U.S. Judicial Conference, the judiciary's policymaking body, followed calls by Democratic lawmakers and others for an end to a system used by conservatives to successfully block major elements of Democratic President Joe Biden 's agenda in court.

Local court rules had allowed conservatives and others to target small courthouses in Texas, essentially enabling them to choose judges who have reliably issued rulings stymieing Biden's policies on issues like immigration, gun control and LGBTQ rights, to hear their lawsuits.

The new judicial policy would require lawsuits seeking to block state or federal laws to be assigned a judge randomly throughout a federal district and not be heard just by judges in a specific courthouse, or division, within the larger district.

?? OpenAI expands lobbying efforts, hiring former US senator

Artificial technology company OpenAI has expanded its stable of federal lobbyists, retaining former Republican U.S. Senator Norm Coleman to advocate on research and development issues for the Microsoft-backed startup.

Coleman's law firm Hogan Lovells disclosed the hire in a U.S. lobbying registration filing last week, showing San Francisco-based OpenAI retained the former Minnesota lawmaker in January.

OpenAI, which owns the chatbot ChatGPT and has become the face of generative AI, is embroiled in myriad legal fights , including copyright infringement claims from authors and others. It has denied any intellectual property violations.

Read more.

?? That's all for today, thank you for reading?The Legal File, and have a great day!

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