<p>The following are some exerpts from an article in today's Wall Street Journal:</p>
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Best Defense? Seeking a Haven in Law School Article</p>
<p>By NATHAN KOPPEL
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The job market for lawyers, hit hard by the recession, seems to reach new lows every day. But that has not done much to discourage the thousands who are lining up to become the next generation of attorneys.</p>
<p>In seeming defiance of logic, many law schools are surging in popularity. At Washington and Lee University in Virginia, for example, law-school applications are up 29% this year over 2008, while Yale Law School and the University of Texas School of Law both enjoyed an 8% increase in applications. Nationwide, the total number of applicants is up by 2% over last year, with the deadline to submit applications having passed at most schools.</p>
<p>College graduates, educators say, are seeking refuge from the economy in the relative tranquility of higher education, hoping that the job market will improve by the time they graduate. Law schools also have been aided by the long-held belief that the legal business is relatively immune from recessions.
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In the past, the legal profession has been relatively immune to economic downturns. When times are bad, after all, companies still need lawyers for such tasks as bankruptcy filings.</p>
<p>But the legal industry now is feeling the pain every bit as much as the rest of the economy. Some legal specialties, to be sure, remain relatively robust, including bankruptcy and litigation, but those practices have not made up for substantial declines in mergers, corporate finance and other staples of the business. Firms across the country are firing lawyers by the hundreds, slashing salaries and even rescinding job offers to law-school graduates. Last month, Latham & Watkins, a marquee firm with large New York and Los Angeles offices, laid off 190 lawyers.</p>
<p>In short, it is the worst job market in modern memory at large corporate law firms, which have long been the employers of choice for top graduates.</p>
<p>Public-sector law jobs also are harder to come by these days, according to James Leipold, executive director of the National Association for Law Placement, a Washington-based nonprofit that researches the legal job market. The Philadelphia District Attorney's office, for example, recently rescinded about a dozen job offers to law-school graduates due to start in the fall.
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Some large corporate firms may never rebound to their prior size, due partly to contraction in the investment-banking industry and the fact that corporate clients increasingly are fed up by the lofty legal rates charged by elite law firms, says Mr. Henderson, who specializes in the economics of the legal profession.</p>
<p>"There are very few schools that can guarantee students that they'll find a high-paying corporate job," he says. Those considering law school who don't consider law a calling, he adds, need to ask: "Is it really worth going $120,000 or $140,000 more into debt?"
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Still, law school may be a place to hide out. In light of the economy, "there are a lot of people who have decided they will not test the job market as a graduating senior from college," says Richard Geiger, the associate dean of enrollment at Cornell University Law School, where applications are up 8%. Graduate-school applications typically shoot up during a recession.
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School administrators seize on the versatility of a law degree in asserting that it is still a sound investment. Lawyers, they say, will play a central role in navigating a variety of issues, such as the use of natural resources, cross-border trade and government stimulus spending, which likely will play a central role in the economy for years to come.</p>
<p>"As compared to other graduate programs, [law school] is more analytically rigorous and touches more areas of society," says Paul Berman, dean of Arizona State University's Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, where applications this year are down.</p>
<p>But even those bullish on law school stress that students should take steps to ensure that their investment pays off. For starters, students should aim to get into an elite law school. (There are many lists ranking law schools; the best-known is U.S. News & World Report's, which can be found at grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/grad/law.) In a buyer's market for jobs, lawyers note, employers can afford to be choosy and hire only the most pedigreed applicants.
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