More discouraging employment news from the legal sector. According to The National Law Journal, NLJ 250 firms have lost about 10,000 attorneys since 2008: “In the 34 years The National Law Journal has been surveying large firms to gather headcount numbers, there have never been multiyear declines of this magnitude.” It’s still important to note that “firms reached record sizes in the two years prior to the recession,” and that the number of lawyers working at these firms now is still greater than the number in 2006.
Nevertheless, those considering law school should take these numbers into account, especially with the misinformation regarding post-grad employment gathered by the law schools themselves. Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado, breaks down the numbers in an article for The New Republic. He discusses the U.S. News figures and the numbers gathered by the NALP, which claim that 88.2% of all law school grads are “employed” nine months post-graduation.
Campos explored the numbers for one top-50 law school and discovered that once he excludes those doing non-legal work, in part-time jobs, or in temporary work, the number of employed grads drops to 45%. Plus, he noticed that grads may overstate their employment: “Perhaps some graduates exaggerate their employment status out of embarrassment, or for strategic reasons, but, whatever their reasons might be, this apparently not uncommon practice suggests that the true employment rate should be lowered even further”.
Consequently, Campos adds his plea for the dissemination of better information. He recognizes the potential negative impact on law schools, but argues, “if we assume that the point of academic work is to reveal the truth, rather than to engage in the defense of a professional cartel from which law professors benefit more than almost anyone else, then this work needs to be done.”
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Read the full article: Legal Employment News: Not Very Encouraging
