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Going to law school used to seem like a fairly stable career move. Sure one has to assume a lot of debt to get the degree, but the jobs looked secure and lucrative. What has happened?
America has too many lawyers. It also has too many law schools producing too many new lawyers every year. Too many reason bright young college graduates assume too much debt to obtain pretty crappy jobs.
The latest issue of the magazine contains a review of a new book about precisely this problem. Retired lawyer Steven Harper explains in The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis that the law school pipeline (assume high debt to get a high salary) doesn’t work anymore.
Check out Elizabeth Lesly Stevens’s piece about the book. As she explains, Harper warns,
bright young sons and daughters of midwestern truck drivers that they best not try to climb that ladder that served [Harper] so well.
Some of the rungs are broken, others greased and impossible slippery, and that ladder doesn’t stretch to any place you would want to be, really. The era of law being the safe and well-compensated “traditional default option for students with no idea what to do with their lives,” Harper notes, is over, even if the tens of thousands who still flood into law school each year stubbornly believe that these macro forces will somehow not apply to them.
Though the Bureau of Labor Statistics expects 73,600 new lawyer jobs to be created in the U.S. in the current decade, American law schools graduate about 44,000 new JDs each year. So averaged over the decade, there are six new lawyers for each new job.
It’s not so bad if you go to a good law school, of course, but it costs just as much to go to a bad law school. And that’s the problem.
The supply of lawyers has made the quality of a legal jobs dramatically worse. Graduates of lower-tier law schools often now toil in contract positions as document reviewers, “who sit in horrible little basement rooms. They are performing mindless work in Dickensian conditions, stuck in there” explains one law professor with whom Stevens spoke. These jobs are dead-end ones, with no potential for career advancement; they merely pay the bills. And the bills are really high. The average student loan burden of new law school graduates is $125,000.
I’ve written about this problem before but I admit that when I’ve addressed this I’ve probably focused too much on the education debt part of this, and the way law schools keep churning out more lawyers despite knowing that the career prospects for most of them aren’t very good.
One thing I’ve missed is how actual law firms operate in this system. I assumed that the problem was simply that many of these lawyers couldn’t get jobs. What Harper emphasizes is that the supply of lawyers means even graduates of good law schools who have jobs at the top firms aren’t doing as well.
The median salary of new associates hired by major firms fell by more than a third between 2009 and 2011. They now earn about $85,000 a year. What’s more, as Stevens explains:
The bulk of Harper’s book dissects the structural and cultural transformation of Big Law, and goes on (for many, many pages) about factors that caused such firms as Finley, Kumble and Dewey & LeBoeuf to fold. He laments that the concentration of power in the hands of a few executive partners atop global behemoths means that relatively few of the thousands of junior lawyers will ever be granted a full equity-partner role. With no job security or likely financial payoff for years of oftentimes mind-numbing junior work, Harper notes, a good number of young and mid-career lawyers devolve into alcoholism, depression, and even suicide.
Granted, to a journalist like me $85,000 sounds pretty good. But then, I don’t have $125,000 worth of debt. Many of these lawyers will simply never be able to pay their debt off.
Law schools and legal jobs will always be here in some sense. But Harper’s book seems like a good warning to potential students: be wary. Attempting to built a legal career may just not be worth it. Law school, and the legal profession, are risky. Very risky. [Image via]
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jjm on March 14, 2013 4:52 PM:
Why is our country so very unable to utilize the skills, talents and intelligence of young people who are the brightest and most eager to contribute?
What kind of death drive are we succumbing to?
And the malarkey about how college and professional schools aren't 'preparing' young people for the job market is wearing very thin. The jobs aren't there, no one is interested in having smart young people around, as if they are terrified of them.
Catherine on March 14, 2013 4:55 PM:
Many years ago Art Buchwald had a column addressing the at-that-time-formidable competition that the US was experiencing from Japan. His solution: Start exporting American lawyers to Japan until they were as boluxed up as we were.
edenZ on March 14, 2013 5:11 PM:
I think the other issue with $85K sounding like more than it is, is that Law is one of those "high-cost" fields - you can't show up in work in jeans and a t-shirt so your salary has to cover more expensive clothes. You have to work long hours so have to spend more on eating out, services (like a house cleaner, car wash, etc.), and have less time to use to be frugal. I'm guessing that most offices have a culture that requires frequent restaurant lunches and after-work drinks, etc.
It's something that doesn't often come up when people are giving career advice, but aside from having different salary levels, job openings, etc. different careers also have differing levels of socially imposed costs that are required if you want to advance.
Bokonon on March 14, 2013 5:26 PM:
The career bust for lawyers really started all the way back in the mid 1990's ... which, unfortunately, was the very same time that I graduated from law school myself. Conditions have simply deteriorated further since then, sometimes slowly, and sometimes in big leaps. The last few years have been just awful.
But let's not forget the larger issue that led so many people to seek out law school in the first place - which is that the economy hasn't been really been expanding or creating open positions for new job seekers for at least a decade. Getting a degree was a way of leveraging your way into a tough job market. But the problem is, once you have your degree in hand, there STILL aren't enough positions to go around.
In the legal field, what we have right now is a perfect storm. It involves a shrinking pool of opportunities, too many hungry, qualified job applicants chasing the jobs that are available, disruptive technologies, and huge cost reduction pressures (all of which meet the twin forces of gigantic, consolidated clients and the gigantic lawfirms that work for them). Like many other sectors of the US economy, this system does produce some winners ... and it also produces a large number of people that do not do very well at all.
Mimikatz on March 14, 2013 5:28 PM:
The fundamental problem is that the legal system, as currently constituted, is a terrible way to solve problems with as many if not more perverse incentives for practitioners as health care. First, there is fee-for-service, which encourages lawyers to perform lots of unnecessary work, like endless discovery. Second, the issues in almost all cases are so trivial that winning becomes the sole goal. Lawyers from big firms try to blitzkrieg plaintiffs into giving up or settling on the cheap. Over the time I was practicing (1977-2000) lawyers became increasingly unpleasant and would never agree to do things in a simple, straightforward way and would never agree to things like continuances, courtesies that just went by the boards. Everything was a battle. Everything had to be negotiated and they always wanted something in return. So costs were driven up, and the profession just became intolerable.
Finally clients began to figure out that the people they hired to screw the opposition were screwing them too, inflating hours and billing partners for work done by junior associates. Clients cut back, more people started using better means of dispute resolution like mediation, and that exacerbated the lawyer glut.
I would advise any young person to forget law, study science or resource management and go into something useful like mitigation and adaption to global warming, or something connected to making more efficient use of water and energy.
Art Hackett on March 14, 2013 5:30 PM:
It's not just the legal profession that has this problem. I like to say that capitalism is simple. Someone pays someone else to make something or do something. They take the money and pay someone else to make something and do something.....and so on.
What happened, IMHO,is that because of the over supply of capital flooding the stock market as an out of proportion population cohort tried to save for retirement, companies got the idea that they could make money by doing nothing...manipulating their books to drive up the stock price...flipping the shares from investor to investor while doing as little as possible using overseas workers and capital supplied by a socialist government in China trying desperately to not be on the wrong end of the next revolution. In the process, more recent generations found themselves burdened with college debt and unable to find any job no matter how low the price.
What appears to be happening now is this: Older workers are dying and retiring, capital is being taken out of the markets as 401k's are cashed out. Businesses who once had an unlimited supply of highly educated grads that they could make jump through hoops for months and then reject, is instead seeing a shrinking pool of disillusioned grads who are cutting corners on their education because they don't want to mortgage their futures while trying to guess what wild hair will be growing up the ass of the HR manager four years later when they graduate.
It's too early to be overly confident but the most recent job statistics appear to indicate that we're returning to normal, or whatever will pass for normal. Corporations are moving through the stages of HR grief. I'd say they're somewhere between anger and bargaining. Acceptance (I guess we may have to train our own workers if we want to survive) is still around the corner.
Robert on March 14, 2013 8:01 PM:
What Mimikatz said. This is a good thing. Really.
Any honest evaluation of Superfund - the legislative initiative created to compel the clean up of the nations most toxic polluted sites illustrates that the perps (known as Responsible Parties, RPs) made a cost-benefit decision that tying up clean-up agreements in court was less expensive than actually cleaning anything up. Superfund proved that litigation was not the progressive way to get stuff done.
That is a lesson that has apparently expanded across all aspects of America's business. If you want the job done, don't send your attorney. Pick up the phone, and start dealing. A good thing.
gregor on March 14, 2013 8:02 PM:
It's worse for engineers, who for whatever socioeconomic and psychological reasons, do not even know that they are no more than disposable commodities.
jkl; on March 14, 2013 8:11 PM:
Edenz is right. And the condos at the beach. And buying beers and dinners. The stress at the rotunda courthouse. The gossip and degradation. The nothingness that it is eventually is all about...
Jim-Bob, Esq. on March 14, 2013 8:36 PM:
There are two real changes, which I think are being overlooked in this piece. First, there are real changes in technology that have automated much of the work that used to be done by junior lawyers in big firms. Electronic records and the ability to search them by rapidly improving search technologies changes the cost/benefit analysis for hours of page-by-page review of documents. Second, business clients are driving law firms to greater efficiency and trying to hold down legal costs. This has resulted in a massive amount of outsourcing in the legal industry, both domestically and abroad. Some functions have to be kept in-house at law firms, but others can be outsourced for far less. Businesses just aren't as willing to pay for on-the-job training for new lawyers. And in this economy, they don't have to.
There will never be too many good lawyers. New lawyers who want to join a big firm succeed need to have some other skill in addition to merely being lawyers. A background in science, economics, business, language skills, etc., are the kinds of things that help new lawyers stand out from the crowd and get a chance. And if they fail, they can at least earn a better rate if end up getting stuck doing contract work.
Of course, they don't need to go to big firms, either. You can still approach law like a trade or craft, join or start a small firm and learn how to practice law the old way--by actually working on whole cases for individuals, rather bits of huge cases that go on for years. The pay for those jobs was never the same as at top-drawer firms, but the work can be just as rewarding or more. What's important is that people understand what they are getting into when they sign up for law school, and have realistic expectations. The law school bubble should get burst, true. But law can still be a fine occupation if you go into it with realistic expectations and some skills to offer that others cannot.
wihntr on March 14, 2013 8:54 PM:
In a couple months I will mark my 20th year in the legal profession. I have seen some changes over the years, but I must admit that I am not in a position to take quite the macro view that some here have expressed.
I have worked as a prosecutor, representing county and state, in mostly criminal but some civil matters as well. As such, I really only know the criminal courts. One big difference I have noticed is that the new attorneys, the interns we get each year and the new folks in the defense bar, just don't seem that well-educated. They don't write very well as a rule, they tend not to be particularly interested in politics (I know one otherwise bright young attorney who, at the age of 30, has never even registered to vote) and I can't tell what education they may have had prior to law school.
A big problem with the criminal justice system here in Cheeselandia is that the government just doesn't want to pay for it. And I don't just mean paying to keep bad guys locked up. I mean that the indigency level to qualify for representation by the public defender's office is so low that if you work half-time at McD's and have no dependents, you make too much money to qualify for thier services. And the state just adjusted the guidelines for the first time since 1987. I also mean that if you are a member of the private bar and agree to take on a public defender appointment, you may only bill your time at $40 per hour, the same rate as when I started 20 years ago. (For those who don't know how law offices run, even in a small community such as the one where I work, a lawyer's overhead typically exceeds $40 per hour, with rent, secretary, insurance, etc.) Most of the private bar people I know who take those cases do so because they work out of their homes, have no staff, etc.
And I mean that if you want to break into my line of work, trying to put rapists, gang-bangers and serial drunk-drivers behind bars, you will start at about $46,000 a year, out of which your health care premiums and pension contribution are deducted, and if the last ten years are any indicator of the future, you will not see pay increases that keep up with increases in the cost of living. This is why statewide, over the last ten years, our prosecutors corps has seen a turnover state-wide of nearly 100%. In our largest county, Milwaukee (well over 100 homocides last year alone) most of the assistant district attorneys have been out of law school less than five years.
Generally speaking, what lawyers do is deal with other people's problems. All that fancy nonsense you see on TV about expensive suits and cars, wealthy clients, there certainly is some of that. But most of us deal with the nastiest aspects of human behavior. And it really doesn't pay well.
James E. Powell on March 14, 2013 10:40 PM:
What Mimikatz said, plus what Jim-Bob Esq said.
During my years of civil trial practice, 1985-2005, the job descended into drudgery and constant tension between lawyers & opposing lawyers and between lawyers and clients trying to cut down on expenses.
Now I teach high school for quite a bit less money but quite a bit more happiness. People ask me, How could you leave law for teaching? Ask just about any lawyer, I tell them.
Quaker in a Basement on March 14, 2013 11:20 PM:
What's that you say? A law degree is no longer a ticket to a guarantee of a cushy lifestyle?
Oh! The humanity! Boohoohoohoohoohoohoohoo. Maybe a few more of 'em should go get real jobs.
Ben on March 14, 2013 11:43 PM:
Tucker Max wrote on this very topic. See here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/tucker-max/law-school_b_2713943.html
S.W. Anderson on March 15, 2013 1:09 AM:
Daniel Luzer's good, informative post on a worthy topic serves as proof four eyes are better than two where copy editing is concerned. It's unfortunate this post benefited from too few eyes before being published. It's all the more unsettling because Luzer is web editor of the Washington Monthly.
For example, Luzer writes, "The latest issue of the magazine contains a review . . ." A copy editor would ask, "What magazine?"
Quoting the book, Luzer relates, "Some of the rungs are broken, others greased and impossible slippery . . ."
A good copy editor would've made "impossible" "impossibly."
Then there's, "Attempting to built a legal career . . ."
If the Washington Monthly is short on copy editors right now, it would be worthwhile to get another writer or office helper to read copy before it's published. Four eyes, in other words.
Sgt. Gym Bunny on March 15, 2013 8:18 AM:
I will say that in my line of work (grad school records office), we have been sending fewer transcripts to LSAC and the law schools. So either our MA grads are actually getting jobs (rather than waiting out the piss-poor job market as "professional students") or they're starting to realize that going deeper into debt for a second graduate degree in sketchy field isn't very prudent. (Granted, our grads are pretty well versed in the areas that Jim-Bob, Esq. mentioned above. But what's the good in being overly well-qualified for a lower position if you got damn near 100 grand in debt?)
That said, I have noticed that we are sending a lot of transcripts to MBA programs... Outta the frying pan and into the fire.
Rich on March 15, 2013 9:05 AM:
We don't foster skills in science and technology and rely on immigrants to fill that gap. The glut in law school grads began to be evident about 25 years ago. The continued growth of law schools and the debt balloon may bbe what finally made this glut manifest. Frankly,, turning out people with PhDs in philosophy would be more practical than turning out more lawyers. Philosphers often turn into programmers because they understand something about systems of thought. Law schools turn out people who can't draft a will but are empowered to make life changing decisions for other people. Like MBAs and Divinity grads (also glut degree fields that often provide little practical experience), the ones lucky enough to find jobs are empowered with privilege that they have no business doing.
boatboy_srq on March 15, 2013 9:21 AM:
@wihntr:
A big problem... is that the government just doesn't want to pay for it.
You can drop "the criminal justice system" and "Cheeselandia" - the problem is far more widespread, and those two conditions are only part of the larger problem.
Welcome to the War on Tea.
cdwilsher on March 15, 2013 10:07 AM:
I've been practicing for more than thirty years. The crisis in the legal profession is caused by the fact that few people can afford lawyers. When I started practicing a good living (125,000-150,000 a year in 2013 dollars) could be made writing wills and contracts, doing divorces, some criminal, car wreck cases, and worker's comp. Now, the settlements on car wreck cases are less in nominal terms than they were 30 years ago, lawyers are not involved at all in worker's comp and people can't afford even routine legal work. A woman at church asked me if she should use an on-line service to prepare a will and I said she's be better off hiring a lawyer for $750 and she looked at me as if I'd grown a second head; there was no way she could afford $750 for a lawyer (and she works as a teacher at a private school). I would have offered to do it for free, but I know nothing about wills.
The problems of the legal profession can be attributed to the continuing immiseration of the middle class.
James M on March 15, 2013 10:46 AM:
When I was deciding on grad school in the early 80's, law school still made sense. The tuition, by any comparison, was a fraction of what it is now and you were more or less guaranteed decent employment after you graduated. However, even then the condition had pretty much become graduation from a top 20 law school.
I ended up in business school. Not so much because I probably wasn't really cut out to become a lawyer, but rather for the simple fact that I got into a top 10 B school as opposed to a top 20 law school. I would say that with the exception of top tier investment banking, consulting or medical specialties, the days of any profession being a guaranteed ticket to the upper middle class are gone.
DouglasKeith on March 15, 2013 10:52 AM:
"Too many reason bright young college graduates assume too much debt to obtain pretty crappy jobs."
Huh?