In a recent First Monday Musings column on Above the Law, Dean Amar weighed in on the change in the ABA employment data form. 

He wrote, "...the issue involves a complicated mix of arguments about substantive policy, procedural thoroughness, and perceptions by the outside world.

"As other commentators, such as Kyle McEntee (for this website) and Jerry Organ (on TaxProf Blog), have documented in great detail, the ABA Council on Legal Education earlier this summer amended the form to be used to depict employment results, beginning with the Class of 2017. The amendments are supposed to promote simplification, but in addition to containing technical mistakes the new form collapses certain categories that many observers think deserve separate treatment. For example, the new form lumps together all law firms that employ 100-500 lawyers, even though some folks think that a firm of 101 lawyers is qualitatively different than one that has 350 lawyers. Much more controversially, the new form does not – in a way the old form did – display the number of jobs a school’s graduates hold that are funded by the law school itself and that are open only to graduates of that law school, so long as the job lasts a year and pays $40,000. So-called 'school-funded' jobs have been a contentious issue for several years, and it is thus unsurprising that when people found out what the Council had done to alter the reporting of such jobs, many folks sat up and took notice."

Full column on Above the Law