Over the last couple of weeks I've been crunching the numbers on the recently released ABA law school employment statistics. The methods I use to analyze the employment statistics are driven by a principal components analysis of the data. They do not assume that particular categories of employment are better or worse; instead, the schools sort themselves out based on the data they report. These methods are the only existing objective ones I have seen in analyzing the employment outcomes reported to the ABA.
One thing that comes along with using objective data-driven methods is that sometimes the results don't match prevailing intuition. For example, in my post that identified the best and worst outcomes in the ABA employment data, a lot of people were surprised to see full-time long-term (FTLT) solo practice and FTLT practice in firms of 2-10 lawyers among the very worst outcomes--almost equivalent to unemployment. That result is surprising because the "employment status" of FTLT bar passage required was the "best" status in my analysis, and solo practice and practice in 2-10 lawyer firms are FTLT bar passage required jobs.
On reflection, however, the reason why solo practice in particular is such a negative outcome becomes apparent. Just as JD advantage jobs are highly malleable versus other categories and yet count as "full credit" jobs in US News, so solo practice is a highly malleable category versus unemployment. The ABA's standards for reporting that a graduate is in solo practice (and therefore in a bar passage required job) is based on the graduate's intent, not based on the graduate's actual practice. So it wouldn't be surprising if some effectively unemployed graduates without clear employment prospects were classified as having the "intent" to practice as a solo practitioner, rather than classified as unemployed. That would help the law school's employment reporting dramatically. The only real limitation is that the person be licensed to practice, which constrains schools with low bar passage numbers. The 2-10 lawyer FTLT number probably captures many graduates who continue in "clerk-type" roles after graduation, but that is probably an area where an audit could be revealing.
The results don't indicate there is anything necessarily wrong with solo practice jobs or with employment in 2-10 lawyers in themselves. Instead, the data suggest that those outcomes are strongly associated with schools with higher unemployment (as are JD advantage jobs, which usually are among the worst outcomes overall), and therefore they probably aren't what they appear in many cases.