The making of a satisfied midlevel starts sooner than you might think.

The latest results from our Midlevel Associates Survey show that respondents’ overall job satisfaction strongly correlates with how well they believe their law schools prepared them for practice. The tie between the answer to that question and overall satisfaction, as measured by the survey, is on par with the one between associate seniority and compensation—no small matter in a world where lockstep associate pay is the norm.