I abstained from attending this event.
I started to really think long and hard about my law school decision. The main point being that there seems to be more graduates of law schools then there are jobs.
When I break it down by my area (Chicago) and think about the law schools in Illinois alone...
-Northwestern
-University of Chicago
-Chicago-Kent
-University of Illinois
-Loyola
-DePaul
-John Marshall
-Northern Illinois University
-Southern Illinois University
(which by the way, the Chicago market is the 2nd largest market behind New York for law schools)
AND if you want to get really technical, throw these schools into the mix because of their proximity...
-Notre Dame
-Marquette
-Valpo
-Purdue*
-Wisconsin*
-Michigan*
-Indiana*
(*=a stretch but where do you think they are going to look first for jobs? Maybe a major metropolitan city like a Chicago)
...this reaffirms my concern for employment.
There is a total of 16 law schools that graduates, in theory, could be competing for the same small number of jobs.
Can any of these law schools guarantee a job after graduation? No.
With the U.S. Economy in a recession, how can one justify going to law school, not working for three years, adding a minimum of $100,000 of debt, and then not have a guarantee about a job afterwards? Not to mention that lawyers are not immune to a recession. I spoke with my Powerscore LSAT teacher about this and he said "Now is one of the worst times to be graduating law school." Sure, he's referring to the market in today's time and under today's economic terms. Could the market turn around? Definitely. Will it in three years? That's debatable. If I was in Vegas, I would bet no (especially in the legal field).
I think in three years not only will law school graduates deal with competing against each other for jobs, but also graduates of today that couldn't find steady work and just did random jobs to make ends meet. I also think it would be obtuse to think that partners and individuals with several years of legal experience are immune to this recession. So graduates would have to compete with them as well.
I recently stumbled upon this article in a discussion forum that I think strengthens my reasoning to reconsider law school:
From US News, Poor careers for 2006 Attorney.
If starting over, 75 percent of lawyers would choose to do something else. A similar percentage would advise their children not to become lawyers. The work is often contentious, and there's pressure to be unethical. And despite the drama portrayed on TV, real lawyers spend much of their time on painstakingly detailed research. In addition, those fat-salaried law jobs go to only the top few percent of an already high-powered lot.
Many people go to law school hoping to do so-called public-interest law. (In fact, much work not officially labeled as such does serve the public interest.) What they don't teach in law school is that the competition for those jobs is intense. I know one graduate of a Top Three law school, for instance, who also edited a law journal. She applied for a low-paying job at the National Abortion Rights Action League and, despite interviewing very well, didn't get the job.
From the Associated Press, MADISON, Wis. (AP) - A lawmaker who persuaded the Assembly to eliminate all state funding for the University of Wisconsin law school says his reasoning is simple: There's too many lawyers in Wisconsin.(Too many lawyers in Wisconsin)
From an ABA study about malpractice claims, More Sole Practitioners:
There appears to be an increasing trend toward sole practitioners, due partly to a lack of jobs for new lawyers, but also due to increasing dissatisfaction among experienced lawyers with traditional firms; leading to some claims which could have been avoided with better mentoring.
New Lawyers:
Most insurers have noticed that many young lawyers cannot find jobs with established firms, and so are starting their own practices without supervision or mentoring. This is likely to cause an increase in malpractice claims, although the claims may be relatively small in size due to the limited nature of a new lawyers
“In a survey conducted back in 1972 by the American Bar Association, seventy percent of Americans not only didn’t have a lawyer, they didn’t know how to find one. That’s right, thirty years ago the vast majority of people didn’t have a clue on how to find a lawyer. Now it’s almost impossible not to see lawyers everywhere you turn."
Growth of Legal Sector Lags Broader Economy; Law Schools Proliferate,
For graduates of elite law schools, prospects have never been better.
Big law firms this year boosted their starting salaries to as high as $160,000. But the majority of law-school graduates are suffering from a supply-and-demand imbalance that's suppressing pay and job growth. The result: Graduates who don't score at the top of their class are struggling to find well-paying jobs to make payments on law-school debts that can exceed $100,000. Some are taking temporary contract work, reviewing documents for as little as $20 an hour, without benefits. And many are blaming their law schools for failing to warn them about the dark side of the job market.
The law degree that Scott Bullock gained in 2005 from Seton Hall University -- where he says he ranked in the top third of his class -- is a "waste," he says. Some former high-school friends are earning considerably more as plumbers and electricians than the $50,000-a-year Mr. Bullock is making as a personal-injury attorney in Manhattan. To boot, he is paying off $118,000 in law-school debt.
A slack in demand appears to be part of the problem. The legal sector, after more than tripling in inflation-adjusted growth between 1970 and 1987, has grown at an average annual inflation-adjusted rate of 1.2% since 1988, or less than half as fast as the broader economy, according to Commerce Department data.
On the supply end, more lawyers are entering the work force, thanks in part to the accreditation of new law schools and an influx of applicants after the dot-com implosion earlier this decade. In the 2005-06 academic year, 43,883 Juris Doctor degrees were awarded, up from 37,909 for 2001-02, according to the American Bar Association. Universities are starting up more law schools in part for prestige but also because they are money makers. Costs are low compared with other graduate schools and classrooms can be large. Since 1995, the number of ABA-accredited schools increased by 11%, to 196.
According to the Internal Revenue Service, the inflation-adjusted average income of sole practitioners has been flat since the mid-1980s. A recent survey showed that out of nearly 600 lawyers at firms of 10 lawyers or fewer in Indiana, wages for the majority only kept pace with inflation or dropped in real terms over the past five years.
Many students "simply cannot earn enough income after graduation to support the debt they incur," wrote Richard Matasar, Dean of New York Law School, in 2005, concluding that, "We may be reaching the end of a golden era for law schools."
Now, debate is intensifying among law-school academics over the integrity of law schools' marketing campaigns.
David Burcham, Dean of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, considered second-tier, says the school makes no guarantees to students that they will obtain jobs.
OK, I have to interject right here. Did a dean of a law school basically say you could go through all the nonsense of getting into law school, law school, ethics exam, bar exam and you should not expect some sort of gainful employment after you are through? You might as well go to Las Vegas and put your tuition money on the roulette table and let it ride, you may have better odds of making money than going to his school and getting a decent paying law job. This guy is a jerk.
Yet economic data suggest that prospects have grown bleaker for all but the top students, and now a number of law-school professors are calling for the distribution of more-accurate employment information. Incoming students are "mesmerized by what's happening in big firms, but clueless about what's going on in the bottom half of the profession," says Richard Sander, a law professor at the University of California-Los Angeles who has studied the legal job market.
But in law schools' self-published employment data, "private practice" doesn't necessarily mean jobs that improve long-term career prospects, for that category can include lawyers working under contract without benefits, such as Israel Meth. A 2005 graduate of Brooklyn Law School, he earns about $30 an hour as a contract attorney reviewing legal documents for big firms. He says he uses 60% of his paycheck to pay off student loans -- $100,000 for law school on top of $100,000 for the bachelor's degree he received from Columbia University. "Most people graduating from law school," he says, "are not going to be earning big salaries."
Adding to the burden for young lawyers: Tuition growth at law schools has almost tripled the rate of inflation over the past 20 years, leading to higher debt for students and making starting salaries for most graduates less manageable, especially in expensive cities. Graduates in 2006 of public and private law schools had borrowed an average of $54,509 and $83,181, up 17% and 18.6%, respectively, from the amount borrowed by 2002 graduates, according to the American Bar Association.
But just as common -- and much less publicized -- are experiences such as that of Sue Clark, who this year received her degree from second-tier Chicago-Kent College of Law, one of six law schools in the Chicago area. Despite graduating near the top half of her class, she has been unable to find a job and is doing temp work "essentially as a paralegal," she says. "A lot of people, including myself, feel frustrated about the lack of jobs," she says.
The market is particularly tough in big cities that boast numerous law schools. Mike Altmann, 29, a graduate of New York University who went to Brooklyn Law School, says he accumulated $130,000 in student-loan debt and graduated in 2002 with no meaningful employment opportunities -- one offer was a $33,000 job with no benefits. So Mr. Altmann became a contract attorney, reviewing electronic documents for big firms for around $20 to $30 an hour, and hasn't been able to find higher-paying work since.
Some new lawyers try to hang their own shingle. Matthew Fox Curl graduated in 2004 from second-tier University of Houston in the bottom quarter of his class. After months of job hunting, he took his first job working for a sole practitioner focused on personal injury in the Houston area and made $32,000 in his first year. He quickly found that tort-reform legislation has been "brutal" to Texas plaintiffs' lawyers and last year left the firm to open up his own criminal-defense private practice.
He's making less money than at his last job and has thought about moving back to his parents' house. "I didn't think three years out I'd be uninsured, thinking it's a great day when a crackhead brings me $500."
What the above article did for me is provide me with a new perspective that law schools are producing more graduates than there are jobs available. It's almost, a recession within a recession. And new graduates are finding themselves in unfortunate situations (burdened with debt, unemployment, under-qualified, etc, etc) and are scrounging for any type of work and experience.
And to that I say thanks, but no thanks. I am already dealing with one recession, I don't need another.
You might find our new podcast on the economy interesting (and encouraging).
ReplyDeletewww.lawschoolpodcaster.com