Postgraduate Fellowship Outcomes

For over seven years, Michigan Law has offered Postgraduate Fellowships to help provide a bridge to full-time, permanent legal employment for our graduates.

The Fellowships enable students to acquire experience and develop a professional network leading to desirable post-Fellowship positions, with Law School financial support (with awards of up to $4,000 for up to 12 weeks of work in 2010 and 2011). Any of our 3Ls who has not obtained an offer for a post-graduate job at the time of graduation, and who wishes to work with an eligible nonprofit organization or a government office that has at least one attorney on staff who can supervise the Fellow, is eligible. The Fellowships allow our graduates to develop their skills as practicing lawyers, making them even more marketable to legal employers.

As one graduate wrote, when reporting that he had secured a post-fellowship position at a state Attorney General's Office over stiff competition:

I really, really wanted to pursue a career in the public sector, and the Postgraduate Fellowship program was definitely central to making that possible. There were over 270 applicants, and they interviewed 18, the vast majority of whom had more experience than I do. Had I not already been working here [as a postgraduate fellow] and proving that I could litigate against more experienced attorneys, there is no way I would have been seriously considered.

For the class of 2011—the class widely believed to be most hard-hit by the constriction in legal employment, because of a dramatic decrease in the size of summer-associate classes in 2010—75 students were awarded MLS Postgraduate Fellowships. These Fellowships accomplished exactly what we set out to do, to provide the experience necessary to make the Fellows more marketable for post-fellowship opportunities, which they obtained. Please see the table below for information on the post-fellowship jobs of our graduates. We had 50 Postgraduate Fellows from the Class of 2012, far fewer than the 75 from the Class of 2011. A few of them are still in the midst of their fellowships, and once they have completed them, we will provide the data on the outcomes of the 2012 Postgraduate Fellows.