NEW YORK, June 1 (Reuters) - Law school graduates of 2010 faced the sorriest job market since the mid-1990s, according to a survey released today by the National Association for Law Placement.

The employment rate for 2010 law school graduates nine months after graduation was 87.6 percent. That is down more than four points from the 20-year high of 91.9 percent in 2007 and is also the lowest employment rate for law grads since 1996, when it was 87.4 percent. Only 68.4 percent of the 2010 law graduates had jobs that required bar passage, NALP reported.

"There is likely to be more bad news to come," said NALP Executive Director James Leipold, in a release. He said that the job market likely won't improve until the class of 2012.

Among 2010 graduates, 50.9 percent were in private practice, down 5 percentage points from 2009. Employment in businesses was 15.1 percent, the highest that NALP has recorded since it began tracking comparable law job results in 1985. About 32.5 percent of the jobs in business required bar passage and about 29 percent preferred juris doctor degrees. Jobs in business included temporary legal jobs, paralegal jobs and law clerk positions.

The percentage of 2010 law school graduates working part time was 11 percent, compared with 6.5 percent for 2009 graduates and about 5% percent in prior years. Leipold compared today's results to placement trends in the 1990s. He said that after the recession in 1991, the legal employment market didn't begin to rebound until 1994. Some 44,004 students graduated in the 2009-2010 academic year from the 200 U.S. law schools approved by the American Bar Association.

NALP calculates employment rates based on the number of graduates whose work status is known, counting all types of jobs as employment.

(Reporting by Leigh Jones)