News Flash: Legal Job Market Sucks

Nathan Koppel took a turn writing for the WSJ proper, explaining the plight of recent law-school graduates to the general public.

Understanding that he’s not writing for those of us who obsess over this subject, we’ll forgive him for what may be the understatement of the year:

The situation is so bleak that some students and industry experts are rethinking the value of a law degree, long considered a ticket to financial security.

Only some?  OK, maybe there are some deluded students who haven’t caught on yet, but how can there be an industry expert who isn’t “rethinking the value of a law degree.”  If you’re not, you’re not an industry expert now, are you?

More after the jump (including our frustration with the whole OCI system).

Whom should we blame?

Part of the problem is supply and demand. Law-school enrollment has held steady in recent years while law firms, judges, the government and other employers have drastically cut hiring in the economic downturn.

Should we really expect law schools to turn away suckers willing to pay?  Or are the applicants just being duped by schools’ continuing efforts to game the system to advance their own interests?

We tend to think of the firms as the clients of law schools, so how can we blame them?  It’s not the customer’s fault if the supplier doesn’t scale back to meet demand.  So how have firms been affected?

Morrison & Foerster LLP, a 1,000-lawyer San Francisco-based firm, hired about 30% fewer graduates this year than in the prior year. “It would not surprise me if all firms cut back on hiring law graduates for a couple of years,” said Keith Wetmore, its chairman. Saul Ewing LLP, a 250-lawyer Philadelphia firm, cut hiring of law graduates this year by about two-thirds.

But surely this will all sort itself out, right?

Many 2009 law graduates who were offered jobs just started work this year. And many graduates hired in 2010 won’t start until 2011. So even when the economy picks up, firms would first have to absorb their backlog of recent hires.

Nope.  And that’s what we’ve been saying for a year and a half now.  The pipeline will remain overstuffed until firms either skip a class entirely or trickle off enough smaller classes to finally get back to reasonable input levels.

And as long as they have to keep hiring people more than two years before their start dates, projecting needs will remain a disaster.  It doesn’t look like that will change any time soon, either – percentage of summer offers was one of three statistics WSJ broke out in the fancy infographic.

One of our biggest pet peeves is the absurdity of Fall OCI for second years, which results in de facto employment offers based on just one year’s grades for someone to start more than two years later.

Would anyone other than lawyers run a business that way?

Tagged as: morrison & foerster, saul ewing