Law graduates’ prospects change little from 2012

Job prospects for 2013 law school graduates changed little from the year before, according to data recently released by the American Bar Association.

About 57 percent of students who graduated from law school in 2013 secured long-term, full-time jobs that required them to pass the bar exam as of nine months after graduation. That percentage is only slightly more than the Class of 2012, of whom 56.2 percent were employed in the same type of job nine months after graduation.

The proportion of graduates finding jobs has risen slowly in the three years since the American Bar Association started collecting detailed employment statistics for law school graduates. The employment rate for the Class of 2011, the first year that data were collected, was 54.9 percent for long-term, full-time jobs that required passage of the bar exam.

Chief executive officers aren’t always highest paid

Chief executive officers aren’t always the highest-paid employees.

Nolan Archibald, who retired as executive chairman of Stanley Black & Decker in March 2013, was paid $52.5 million last year, almost five times more than Chief Executive Officer John Lundgren, according to company filings.

That was also the highest pay among executives at 338 Standard & Poor’s 500 Index companies that have filed proxy statements for last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Archibald’s compensation included a cash bonus of about $51 million tied to Stanley Works’s $4.4 billion purchase of Black & Decker in March 2010.

Prices companies receive show increase in March

The prices companies receive for their goods and services jumped in March, led by gains for food, clothing, jewelry and chemicals.

The rise in food prices was partly offset by a 2.4 percent decline in gasoline prices and a 0.7 percent drop for electric power.

The producer price index, which measures price changes before they reach the consumer, rose 0.5 percent in March, the Labor Department said.

Overall, producer prices increased 1.4 percent during the past 12 months.

– From news service reports