According to an excellent report by the Wall Street Journal, law school graduates who are not in the top 10% of their class at all but the elite schools are having an increasingly difficult time finding work. Work that is found (outside of the big firms, of course) offers starting salaries more modest than in the past.
Evidence of a squeezed market among the majority of private lawyers in the U.S., who work as sole practitioners or at small firms, is growing. A survey of about 650 Chicago lawyers published in the 2005 book "Urban Lawyers" found that between 1975 and 1995 the inflation-adjusted average income of the top 25% of earners, generally big-firm lawyers, grew by 22% -- while income for the other 75% actually dropped.
To which I say cry me a river. The vast majority of law school graduates are still going to find quality work and earn a more-than-comfortable salary. What really caught my eye were these paragraphs:
[D]ebate is intensifying among law-school academics over the integrity of law schools' marketing campaigns. Defenders argue that the legal profession always has been openly and proudly a meritocracy: Top entrance-exam scores help win admittance to top schools where top students win jobs at top firms. Even the system that is used to issue law-school grades -- a curve that pits student against student -- reflects the law profession's competitiveness. . . . [The Dean of second-tier Loyola Law School] says it is problematic that big firms only interview the top of the class, "but that's the nature of the employment market; it's never been different."
. . .
"Prospective students need solid comparative data on employment outcomes, [but] very few law schools provide such data," adds Andrew Morriss, a law professor at the University of Illinois who has studied the market for new lawyers.
Students entering law school have little way of knowing how tight a job market they might face. The only employment data that many prospective students see comes from school-promoted surveys that provide a far-from-complete portrait of graduate experiences. Tulane University, for example, reports to U.S. News & World Report magazine, which publishes widely watched annual law-school rankings, that its law-school graduates entering the job market in 2005 had a median salary of $135,000. But that is based on a survey that only 24% of that year's graduates completed, and those who did so likely represent the cream of the class, a Tulane official concedes.
It often feels that my school has forgetten that Law School is a professional school. It's an investment, and our goal, as students, is to be prepared for and to land a job after we graduate. As an example, On Campus Interviews (OCI) are taking place right now, and the application process began in early August. Unbeknown to the majority of students, however, was the fact that our Office of Career Planning (OCP) is not as we left it in the Spring. Our entire staff (of 3, for 750 students) resigned, was released, or is on sabbatical. Upon returning this Fall, we found one new OCP attorney, with her Director not arriving until mid-September, long after OCI applications were due.
I'm sure there's an interesting back story here, and while we do seem to have upgraded our OCP staff, leaving students high and dry for OCI was a horrible means to that end. Some students at my school have lost out on interviews, quality internships, and possibly even jobs because Career Planning has not been enough of a priority for our administration. I can only hope that the positive reports I've heard and the positive acts I've seen from the newly hired staff marks a change in attitude at my law school.
For a larger discussion on the WSJ piece, see the WSJ Law Blog »
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