Tag Archives: American Bar Association

Poor Odds of Employment for Many Recent Law School Grads

Posted on June 28, 2012 by | Leave a comment

New data from the American Bar Association indicates that the legal employment market for new law school graduates is still struggling, and may have shifted altogether.  The data was released at least in part due to growing concerns about the employment fates of newly minted lawyers.  The Wall Street Journal reports (subscription required) that this is the first time the ABA has released employment data on the percentage of the previous year’s graduates who have secured permanent, full-time jobs requiring a law degree.

Nationwide, the overall numbers are dismal, with only 55% of 2011 law school graduates obtaining full-time, long-term employment requiring a law degree.  There is better news for graduates of more elite schools.  University of Virginia, Columbia, Stanford, NYU and Harvard all posted employment rates greater than ninety percent, and most schools ranked highly by U.S. News & World Report also reported high employment rates.  Several lower-ranked schools, such as Louisiana State and the University of Alabama, also reported that more than 75% of their graduates had employment meeting the ABA’s definition.

But many schools reported alarmingly low employment rates.  Even when employment is expanded to include jobs for which a law degree is preferred but not required, and jobs for which a law degree confers no special advantage, a remarkable number of schools reported less than 50% employment.  Among them: Whittier College, University of the District of Columbia, Golden Gate University, Thomas Jefferson School of Law, and Western New England University.  It should be noted that all 198 schools on the list are ABA-approved – the ABA did not include statistics for unapproved schools in this release.

Law school deans provided a number of explanations for these results, including the fact that students at lower-ranked schools may need to obtain bar membership before being considered for certain jobs.  Other school representatives noted that some students attend law school specifically to advance their careers in other fields, not to become lawyers.  But the schools are not unconcerned.  Says Whittier Law School dean Penelope Bryan:

“We consider this a problem… We have redesigned completely our career development and we expect to see some improvement, but in the meantime we’ve had to live with this transition.”

Unfortunately for the law students graduating during this transition, that improvement may come too late.

Posted by Emily Fisher

See Also:

NALP’s Class of 2011 Findings: Law Firm Employment Still Declining while Business Employment Rises (June 8, 2012)

The Low-Cost Lawyer is Not a Lawyer (April 6, 2012)

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Market Trends in Focus: More calls for deregulation

Posted on September 20, 2011 by | 2 Comments

In a recent opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, Clifford Winston and Robert W. Crandall, senior fellows at The Brookings Institution, question the notion that there is a surplus of lawyers in the United States and the need by some to put new limits on entry into the legal profession.

The authors contend:

“Many more people could offer various forms of legal services today at far lower prices if the American Bar Association (ABA) did not artificially restrict the number of lawyers through its accreditation of law schools—most states require individuals to graduate from such a school to take their bar exam—and by inducing states to bar legal services by non-lawyer owned entities.”

According to Winston and Crandall, these steps would “lower prices for clients and lead to more jobs” for lawyers. As an example of how increased competition reduces prices, they cite LegalZoom.com, which provides legal form documents such as patent applications and wills to people who might otherwise need to hire lawyers to prepare these relatively straightforward documents.  LegalZoom, however, does not diminish demand for law firms and lawyers with the expertise to advise on complex, high-value matters.

Winston and Crandall, whose book (written with Vikram Maheshri), First Thing We Do, Let’s Deregulate All the Lawyers, was recently published by the Brookings Institution Press, advocate allowing accounting firms, investment banks, and other non-legal businesses to provide legal services. They believe this would “undoubtedly generate innovation” and lower costs in the legal industry, much as deregulation of wireless telephone services led to lower rates and new products for wireless users as new carriers entered the market. While the authors accede that they cannot predict all the effects of deregulation in the legal industry, they believe that not only will the deregulated services be more responsive to consumers, but that it will also create more jobs in the legal profession.

Other movements to deregulate the practice of law are also afoot in both the U.K. and the U.S.  In the U.K., as a result of the passage of the Legal Services Act 2007, law firms will soon be permitted to raise external capital through alternative business structures.  These alternative structures will allow the firms to sell all or part of their business to investors (e.g. through a private equity investment or an IPO). In the U.S., the American Bar Association Commission on Ethics 20/20 has recently circulated a proposal to allow non-lawyers to hold a minority interest in law firms.  The proposed change would allow some alternative business structures, which are currently forbidden in every U.S. jurisdiction outside the District of Columbia, and permit partial non-lawyer ownership of law firms. The commission has not yet taken a position on the draft rule.

Posted by Marianne Purzycki

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Posted in Market Trends

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