<p><a href="Reuters">i</a> - Facing a stagnant job market, law graduates from New York and Michigan schools on Wednesday accused their alma maters of duping graduates out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition by publishing misleading post-graduation employment and salary statistics.*</p>
<p>Interesting article about how law schools are pretty much oblivious towards the
already-saturated legal field, and are luring innocent undergrads with falsified employment statistics. </p>
<p>So to all the lawyers, how bad is it actually getting out there? </p>
<p>The legal job market is very bad–perhaps the worse I’ve seen and I’ve been practicing since 1976. That said, you should know that the legal job market has always been somewhat cyclical and it is largely tied to the business climate. Right now, due to the depressed housing market and weak retail market, there is little legal work for lawyers specializing in real estate development, for example. On the other hand, lawyers doing bankruptcy, foreclosures and evictions are quite busy. If you believe that the overall economy is going to rebound, then the legal market will rebound as well. The difficult part is timing your education so that you graduate when the market is rebounding–and not before.</p>
<p>One recent development that may be permanent is that the very large business law firms (often called “Biglaw”) are hiring far fewer partner track associates at the very high salaries they did before 2008. Clients have learned that it was nonsensical to pay first year associates who know very little about the law $375 per hour to review documents. Larger businesses are simply hiring young lawyers to work in house at half the salary to do the same thing. To counter this, Biglaw has moved toward a two-tied system of associates–with a few stars still being hired on a partnership track with absurdly high salaries and bonuses but with many new hires being placed on a non-partnership track with much lower salaries. Even if you have no interest in Biglaw (or conversely, Biglaw has no interest in you since they usually only hire from the top 5-10% of Tier 1 law schools, except for the top 14 schools where the percentage is higher), this development has a trickle down effect on all hiring since newly minted graduates who in the past would have gone to Biglaw have now set their sights, at least in terms of salary, rather lower.</p>
<p>The bottom line is that I am confident that the legal job market will rebound as soon as the economy does–but I suspect that the mean salaries for new lawyers may be significantly lower than it once was. This will have an impact on those who borrowed heavily to pay for law school. Of course, this prediction could be entirely wrong; if the economy rebounds strongly, there once again may be a strong demand for merger and acquisition lawyers, real estate lawyers, business litigators, etc. This demand could again spark competition among Biglaw firms to attract the best and the brightest–which is what led to the aburdly high starting salaries in the first place.</p>