Before staring law school, consider the statistics.
Utah is home to two law schools: The University of Utah S.J. Quinney School of Law, and the Brigham Young University J. Reuben Clark Law School. Each law school produces over 100 new graduates every year. With around 250 new lawyers entering Utah's legal market every year (not counting all the attorneys that transfer into the state), attorneys in the Beehive State need to demonstrate their competency or risk relegation.
In 2015 (the most recent year with available data), 126 people graduated from the University of Utah law school; 81 men and 41 women (4 individuals did not report their gender). Within one year of graduation, 75 of those graduates had paying jobs (or 59%), with 49 of those individuals working in the private sector. The mean starting salary of those 49 private sector attorneys is $76,531. The 26 graduates employed in the public sector make less, with a mean starting salary of $52,369.
Brigham Young University law school produced 133 law school graduates in 2015, and had similar employment numbers. In the year after graduation, 52 graduates were working in a law firm, and 36 were working in the public sector. BYU law school also employs 12 of their graduates, and 20 of their graduates went to work in business or another industry. BYU does not report salary statistics (but they tell U.S. News that their mean private sector starting salary is $72,000, and their mean public sector starting salary is $49,500).
So how does Utah's 59% and BYU's 46% compare to national statistics? In 2015, 39,984 people graduated from law schools across the United States. Of those, 17,959 were working as attorneys ("Bar Passage Required"), and 2,478 were working in professions where their juris doctorate degrees gave them an "advantage." That is a 51% employment rate. The mean national private sector salary for first year associates is $105,000, and the mean public sector salary is $55,556. Although Utah's two law schools are ranked well (according to U.S. News, both schools are Tier 1 law schools, with Utah ranked at number 44 and BYU ranked at number 46 out of the 197 accredited law schools in the nation), starting private sector salaries are close to 30% less than the national average.
This translates into a competitive legal market in Utah. Attorneys in Utah recognize that sub-par work will lead to their prompt replacement, as there is no shortage of highly-trained law students waiting in the wings. And the surplus of graduating law students allows law firms to hire exclusively students from the top of their classes. So although it is a difficult time to be a law school graduate, it is an ideal time to be a client. Individuals receiving legal services can be confident that law firms in Utah are hiring the cream of the crop, and the existing attorneys in the firm have track records of legal and professional competency.
