At 69%, Montana Blewett Law’s headline employment figure is exactly the kind of number that requires decomposition before judgment. Full-time long-term bar-required is the category that means “working as a lawyer”; everything else, part-time, JD-advantage, school-funded, is context. The 509 separates them, and so will this page.
MetricFigureContextEmployment rate (10 months)~69%Every category, blendedPrimary placementMissoula and MontanaWhere the pipeline pointsNetwork strengthMT in-state, natural resources, tribal lawStrongest for matching plans
The honest translation of 69%: that share of the class reported employment of some kind at ten months, a category that spans first-year associates and part-time school-funded fellows alike. To know what the degree actually buys, isolate full-time, long-term, bar-required placement over the whole class. Lawyers live in that line; the headline lives everywhere.
Every school reports this way, Montana Blewett Law included, which is why the ABA’s standardized disclosure exists, and why the ten minutes you spend in it outweigh every brochure page.
Read the 509 employment summary the way you will someday read a deal disclosure, categories first, headline last. The category that means “lawyer” is full-time, long-term, bar-passage-required, taken as a fraction of all graduates. School-funded roles get separated out (real work, not market demand). JD-advantage gets read with one eyebrow raised. And every figure gets a map: where are these jobs, and is that where your life is going? The blend exists for marketing; the breakdown exists for you.
Withheld Tip: compare the same school’s 509 across two or three years before trusting any single one. One strong year is a cohort; three is a pipeline. Trendlines are harder to stage than snapshots.
Employment data only becomes a decision once you add the one variable the school cannot publish: your destination. Placement strength is geographic, here, Missoula and Montana., and a powerful network in the wrong city is a weak network for you. So invert the usual order, choose the market, then choose the school as the best vehicle into it. Never the reverse.
Around 69% report some form of employment at ten months. The lawyer-specific figure, full-time, long-term, bar-required over the whole class, is the one worth your attention, and it lives in the 509.
Primarily Missoula and Montana, with particular strength in MT in-state, natural resources, tribal law. Read the geography as infrastructure: alumni, employers, and on-campus recruiting all live where the school’s history lives, and your outcomes will too.
They do, and the 509 isolates them on a dedicated line so you can decide what they mean. Read them as institutional support for graduates, valuable to those in them, and distinct from market hiring when you evaluate the school.
The discipline this page teaches, decompose the headline, locate the geography, verify across years, is the same discipline the career itself will demand. Treat the school’s employment summary as your first case file. The applicants who read it that way tend to end up on the right side of the statistics they once scrutinized.