Reason 29. New attorneys vastly outnumber dwindling law jobs;
desperation is on the rise.
After graduating, racking up
$50-100k in debt, and passing the bar, you’ll have a 55% chance of landing a
permanent, full-time legal job within a year of graduation.
[i]
Yes, I wrote that right, and yes,
you read it right. Unless your mom is an
attorney and wants to hire you, your odds of becoming a full-time, permanently
situated lawyer will be about the same as that of a coin toss.
Many students give up on becoming
an attorney after several months and settle for any decent job that pays. And for those who choose to hang tight, stay
strong, and strive tirelessly to become a working attorney after graduation,
it’s not uncommon to pound pavement for over a year (and quite possibly more)
before landing any permanent job in
the legal profession. Even temporary
contract gigs have become quite desirable for paying the rent – and thus are
increasingly hard to get – and it’s also not unusual for newly licensed
attorneys to log hundreds or thousands of volunteer hours in the fight to find
a job. New attorneys’ applications for
non-profit volunteer opportunities stack into the hundreds.
And, in case you like horror flicks
and rollercoasters, here are a few more terrifying figures to make your stomach
drop:
·
Nine
months after graduation, only
86%
of 2011 law school graduates had found work.
Not
legal work, mind you –
just plain
work.
[ii]
This will hopefully improve in step with
the general economy.
o
It gets worse, though:
If you exclude graduates who have taken “bridge
fellowships” funded by their own schools (thus conveniently inflating graduate employment
stats), that number is
actually 81%.
[iii]
(Note
that the vast majority of those “bridge” jobs are part-time and temporary.)
o
On top of that, another 3% of the reported jobs were actually solo practitioner positions, in
which the grad started a business and hired herself.
o
Another
2%
were working for legal temp agencies.
[iv]
·
Among those who had jobs, only 65.4% held jobs that required passage
of the bar.
o
Of those, 12% were part-time, and 7% were both temporary
and part-time.
The scary thing about a really
difficult job market is that it’s not
personal. You can’t sweet-talk it or
have it look the other way for you. No
amount of beauty, determination, hard work, or intelligence can guarantee you
immunity or speed up the job hunt.
Plain and simple, the number of new
students graduating each year far outstrips the number of available attorney jobs.
In 2009, twice as many people in the U.S. passed
the bar exam (54,000) as there were openings for lawyers (26,000).
[v]
For this, you’ll pay a hundred
thousand dollars, live on bad delivery pizza, and give up every waking hour of
three years of your life?
(Hungry for more cheap thrills and stomach-plunging statistics? Feel free to check out the "Don't Go to Law School: 50 Reasons" ebook.)
[iv] “Median
Private Practice Starting Salaries for the Class of 2011 Plunge as Private
Practice Jobs Continue to Erode.”
July
12, 2012.
National Association of Law
Placement.
http://www.nalp.org/classof2011_salpressrel Accessed 26 Nov 2012.
