Hidden on a back page of the NYTimes instead of prominently displayed on a front page is a piece by Lincoln Caplan, "An Existential Crisis For Law Schools" that bears serious attention by law students, lawyers and, most critically, law schools.
A few decades age you went to law school, took the bar exam, passed the test and got a job. A good job. One that would help pay down that $50 grand of tuition debt. Like many other things in the legal profession - one of my litigator gurus predicts no more trials in 5 or 10 years - the promise of a job after law school has shifted. Excerpt.
"Only 55 percent of 43,735 graduates in 2011 had a law-related job nine months after graduation, said William Henderson of the Indiana University Maurer School of Law, who analyzed recent data from the American Bar Association. Twenty-eight percent were unemployed or underemployed. And at the 20 law schools with the highest employment, 83 percent of graduates were working as lawyers. At the bottom 20, it was a dismal 31 percent.
These numbers are far worse than jobs data going back a generation and should be a deep embarrassment to law schools, which have been churning out more graduates than the economy can employ, indulging themselves in copious revenues that higher tuitions and bigger classes bring in. A growing list of deans acknowledge that legal education is facing an existential crisis, but the transformation to a more sustainable model will be difficult and messy.
The number of law office jobs began to decline in 2004, well before the recession. And demand for new lawyers isn’t expected to grow much even when the economy recovers. Outsourcing of legal work to places like India and greater efficiencies made possible by smarter software to search documents for evidence, for example, are allowing firms to cut the positions of multitudes of low-end lawyers. In 2009, twice as many people passed bar exams as there were legal openings — a level of oversupply that may hold up for years. There is, of course, tremendous need for lawyers to serve the poor and middle class, but scant dollars to pay them.
Law schools have hustled to compensate for these shifts by trying to make it look as if their graduates are more marketable, even hiring them as research assistants to offer temporary employment. But those strategies won’t fix legal education, particularly when students are starting to see that a high-priced degree, financed by mountains of loans, may never pay off. The number of people taking law school admissions tests fell 24 percent in the last two years, to the lowest level in a decade. Law schools will be crushed if they don’t remake themselves, said Frank Wu, dean of Hastings College of the Law at the University of California in San Francisco. “This is Detroit in the 1970s: change or die.”"
TIP: Law firms are slow to change; law schools are even slower. It's up to you to decide what you want and need for your life.
TIP: Do you cut your losses and quit or press on? This post might give you something to think about: "Cut Your Losses Or Finish."
TIP: A few years old, but the wisdom and observations are relevant: "A Lot Can Change In A Year."
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