A law degree opens more than one door: private practice at a law firm, government legal work, in-house counsel roles, public interest and judicial clerkships — plus roles where the degree itself is the asset, from compliance to policy to business.
NALP counted 84.6% of Class of 2025 graduates in jobs requiring or anticipating bar admission about ten months after graduation; this page maps that licensed core and the paths around it.
Practicing law: law firms, government, in-house and public interest
Start with the biggest block: practicing law itself — the core lane of attorney careers.
BLS counted about 863,700 lawyer jobs in 2025, and its employer breakdown shows where they sat — legal services, the industry category that includes law firms, employed 52% of lawyers, followed by self-employed lawyers at 11%, local government at 8%, state government at 7% and the federal government at 5%.
Private practice runs from a solo office to firms of more than 500 lawyers — the band NALP counts as the single largest employer of new graduates, as the Class of 2025 split below shows — and the work splits into broad families.
The types of lawyers guide maps those families one at a time, from litigation to transactional work; the family you aim at should shape how you search.
Government is the other large block.
BLS describes government lawyers' titles as including prosecutor, public defender and general counsel, and notes that public defense attorneys represent criminal defendants who cannot afford a private attorney.
In-house counsel work inside a single employer rather than at a firm — NALP's business-sector data counts in-house lawyer as a job type there, and the numbers below show how that sector splits.
Each of these settings runs its own ladder; the attorney career path guide maps the rungs from first job through partner, general counsel and the bench.
Public interest is the third lane in NALP's public-service grouping — it took 9.0% of Class of 2025 jobs, as the split below shows.
Judicial clerkships sit adjacent to it — BLS notes they are typically 1- or 2-year terms that some graduates take before working as a lawyer — and NALP counts them within public service in its outcomes data.
JD-advantage roles
Not every graduate practices, and NALP keeps a separate classification for jobs that want the degree without making admission a requirement of the role: JD Advantage.
The most recent verified share is 6.9% of Class of 2024 graduates.
What the category covers, which roles fit it and how employers treat the licensed-versus-not line is its own topic — the JD advantage jobs guide breaks it down.
Business, policy, compliance and tech roles
Beyond that named category sit the business-side lanes — compliance, policy, business and legal technology among them — that also hire JD holders.
Whether any single posting requires admission is decided by that posting's requirements line, not by the function's name.
NALP's business-sector data shows the lane's size in the entry market.
In the Class of 2024 data, in-house lawyer was the most common job type at 22.6% of business-sector jobs, 47.0% of business-sector jobs were JD Advantage, and only 32.6% required bar admission.
Those figures describe one class, about ten months out, in one sector — not the whole market for experienced JD holders.
Which paths need bar admission
Practicing law is the licensed path.
BLS notes lawyers typically need a law degree and a state license, which usually requires passing a bar examination — the requirement behind the firm, government and public-interest lanes above.
Where any single job sits — including in-house roles — is set by that job's requirements line, not by the setting's name; the business-sector split in the previous section shows how much of the entry market sits on the other side.
For the entry market overall, NALP's number is 84.6%: that share of Class of 2025 graduates got jobs requiring or anticipating bar admission, the highest level recorded since NALP introduced its current job classifications in 2001.
Admission is decided jurisdiction by jurisdiction
How law graduates actually split: NALP's Class of 2025 data
The best evidence for how this map converts into outcomes is NALP's annual class study.
Its Class of 2025 Selected Findings, published August 5, 2026, is the preview release — the full Jobs & JDs report is scheduled for October 2026 — and it measured outcomes as of March 16, 2026, about ten months after graduation, covering more than 97% of graduates of ABA-accredited schools.
Employment came in at 92.8%, the second-highest rate on record after the Class of 2024's 93.4%.
Among employed graduates, private practice took 60.9% of jobs — the highest share since the Class of 1990 — while public service as a category took 31.0%.
| Destination, Class of 2025 | Share of jobs |
|---|---|
| Private practice | 60.9% |
| Government | 12.0% |
| Judicial clerkships | 10.0% |
| Public interest | 9.0% |
Within private practice, firm size splits the entry market in two.
Firms of more than 500 lawyers are the single largest employer of new law graduates, taking more than one in five employed Class of 2025 graduates — count 251–500-lawyer firms as well, and about one in four starts in BigLaw.
At the other end, firms of 1–10 lawyers accounted for 26.4% of law firm jobs, against 33.2% for firms of more than 500.
On pay, the Class of 2025 national median starting salary was a record $100,000, up from $95,000 for the Class of 2024.
Sector medians ran from $63,000 in education to $155,000 in private practice — government at $81,000 and business flat at $100,000, with public interest at $75,000 and judicial clerkships at $72,533.
The distribution matters as much as the level.
NALP describes new-lawyer salaries as bimodal — in the Class of 2024 data, 53.0% of salaries fell between $55,000 and $100,000, with a second peak at the prevailing BigLaw salary — and notes that very few salaries fall near the average, which is why this page quotes medians (the 50th percentile) rather than the mean.
The split has a direction, too.
NALP credits growth in public defender and prosecutor roles as a key driver of the rise in bar-required jobs since the 64.4% low for the Classes of 2012–2013 — even as federal hiring tightened, with new graduates hired by the federal government (excluding clerkships) falling 37.0%, from nearly 1,100 for the Class of 2024 to about 690 for the Class of 2025.
Where to find attorney jobs
Search each lane in its own vocabulary, and read each posting's requirements line to see where the license sits.
If your target is the licensed path, start where the firm postings live: attorney jobs on LawFirmHires — the board lists law firm jobs, so each posting is a role inside a firm.
Career information, not legal advice. Bar admission is administered by the admitting authority in each state — confirm current requirements there before acting on anything above, and check NALP's current releases before quoting the figures on this page.