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The job outlook for newly minted lawyers is getting worse.
Back in January College Guide wrote that there simply aren’t enough legal jobs for all the lawyers the country produces. Today, according to a Wall Street Journal article by Jonnelle Marte, only 71 percent of the law class of 2009 have real legal jobs. This is down from 75 percent, which is also pretty low, for the class of 2008.
Or, as Indiana University’s law professor Bill Henderson put it a year ago in a piece he wrote for NALP Bulletin last year: “It is painfully obvious to everyone that it does not matter where you went to school, or who you clerked for—a lawyer in his or her first… year of practice is just not worth $275 per hour.”
It’s gotten so bad that Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan weighs in, writing that:
Most recent law school grads are now doing stand up comedy or “consulting” or dumpster diving or strongarm robbery, because the economy tanked and suddenly everyone figured out, hey, we don’t really need to be paying insane salaries to thousands upon thousands of unmotivated twentysomethings languishing here at our law firm just because they couldn’t figure out anything better to tell their dad they were doing after they graduated from Sarah Lawrence.
Now how are they going to pay off that law school debt? [Image via]
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Nate Levin on July 20, 2010 5:54 PM:
I think the headline for this post is very poorly chosen. A more accurate headline would have been, "Many recent law grads without jobs". After all, (and it was a surprise to me that it was this high) 71% of the 2009 grads *do* have jobs in the legal field.
steve on July 20, 2010 5:58 PM:
Or maybe the Gravy Train track is reducing passenger percentage.
matt on July 20, 2010 8:04 PM:
I would hardly call law school graduates "unmotivated." Having worked for 9 years in a law school, aside from medical students, there is hardly a more motivated bunch than law students. They know good grades get jobs.
George on July 21, 2010 12:35 PM:
Rather cruel person to state this: "thousands upon thousands of unmotivated twentysomethings languishing here at our law firm just because they couldn’t figure out anything better to tell their dad they were doing after they graduated from Sarah Lawrence"
Litigious on July 27, 2010 10:59 PM:
There are way too many lawyers, law schools and law graduates for this or any economy. In a depression like today, there is must less economic activity so all these transaction lawyers have little new business. Law schools need to publish the truth---borrow $100,000 + but you will have trouble finding a job to pay back that loan.
Iceman on August 06, 2010 10:47 AM:
There are almost 200 law schools, but the good jobs go mostly to graduates of the top 15 schools, and below the top 30 you need to be a superstar to even get interviews.
Lots of people hear about the $150,000 starting salaries for Ivy Leaguers, and thinks they're going to get the same jobs. Instead, graduates of non-elite law schools mostly wind up in strip-mall personal injury firms earning $40,000, in dead-end mind-numbing temporary jobs, or in some cases not able to find work in the legal field at all.
The real problem is that there are too many law schools graduating too many lawyers. They limit the number of medical schools and medical students, so you don't have lots of unemployed and underemployed doctors running around. Law schools that don't place, say, 75% of their graduates in real jobs, should be shut down. They should probably close at least 1/3 of the country's law schools.
Joel on July 12, 2012 6:53 AM:
Law schools are cash cows for universities. High tuition, low overhead. There's no incentive to slow the pipeline from the university POV.