The material is collected by the section, which requires law schools each year to disclose data and information covering matters of interest to potential law students and others with an interest in legal education, including admissions and enrollments, tuition and living costs, financial aid, curricular information, faculty demographics, employment outcomes, bar passage and other areas. The data can be easily searched and sorted, allowing for school-by-school comparisons and analysis and should be useful to prospective law students, pre-law advisors, media outlets and others who study and write about legal education.

The spreadsheets, explanatory information and the ABA’s database of Standard 509 reports are available at www.abarequireddisclosures.org. Some of this information has been collected and summarized in the News and Announcement listings on the section's website and in its Legal Education Statistics section. The section’s 509 available reports go back only to 2011 although other historical statistics are available through the statistics link. There are several changes to the reports this year, and those changes are summarized here.

Employment outcomes and, for the first time this year, bar passage outcomes, are reported in separate questionnaires. The section expects bar passage data to be available in March 2018. Employment outcomes, reporting employment for the class of 2017 as of 10 months following graduation, should be available in April.

The Council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar and its Accreditation Committee are recognized by the U.S. Department of Education as the national accrediting agency for programs leading to the J.D. The section’s 14,000 members strive to improve legal education and lawyer licensing by fostering cooperation among legal educators, practitioners and judges through workshops, conferences and publications. The section also studies and makes recommendations for the improvement of the bar admission process, and the section and its governing council operate for accreditation purposes as independent arms of the ABA.

Go to www.abalegalfactcheck.com for the ABA’s new feature that cites case and statutory law and other legal precedents to distinguish legal fact from fiction.

With more than 400,000 members, the American Bar Association is one of the largest voluntary professional membership organizations in the world. As the national voice of the legal profession, the ABA works to improve the administration of justice, promotes programs that assist lawyers and judges in their work, accredits law schools, provides continuing legal education, and works to build public understanding around the world of the importance of the rule of law. View our privacy statement on line. Follow the latest ABA news at www.americanbar.org/news and on Twitter @ABANews.