That’s absolutely true but too many people do not do that, which I guess was the point I was trying to make. My H and one of my Ds are lawyers. I know hundreds of lawyers, at all stages of their careers, in both the U.S. and Canada. The cost of law school in the U.S. is incredible, even compared to the crazy cost of undergrad programs. Now if you don’t have undergrad debt and you have the stats to get into a T14 without going into a huge amount of debt, then I’d say it was probably worth it. If you don’t fit those parameters and you’re taking a big chance of never getting a job in law and living with a large amount of debt, then, clearly, it’s not. When half of the current grads are not getting jobs that they have trained for and are expecting, there’s something wrong.
the thing that has shocked me since the recession is just who the people are who aren’t getting jobs. They are the people who went to places like Wesleyan for undergrad and had always been at the top of the heap, but for some reason the planets didn’t align for them when they graduated from law school. It’s incredibly difficult to get a job after your year and, to be unkind, once a person has taken a job as a reviewer or a temp attorney, it becomes next to impossible to get a job as a practicing lawyer unless he or she hangs a shingle. In some ways, things are starting to pick up, but the thing I don’t think will change is how many clients who are happy to pay $1000 per hour for senior partners will not pay a dime for first and/or second year associates absent some very special criteria (PhD in biochemistry or something), and those junior associates were always the money machines for law firms, so hiring is, I think, going to stay tight.
The accessibility of those Biglaw positions (the $160,000 starting salary type) is far easier for graduates of HYSCCN, even further down in the class. Also, many Yale/Harvard students are hoping to land in academia after a couple of federal clerkships, and there is a significant population at all these schools looking to take advantage of LRAP (loan repayment programs) by working in public interest positions. While big firms hire students at median (or even sometimes below) from HYSCCN, students in the lower T14 may have to have higher grades to be considered. It’s not a science. As zoosermom says, alumni ties and other factors can play a real role in hiring. However, to take on substantial debt that will dictate your future without any consideration of the risk/benefit calculation is foolish, imo. Full disclosure --my S1, H and I are all attorneys and my D is a 2L. We’ve done the math.
And it depends on the region as to which schools are in the top 20, or are being heavily drawn upon by the BigLaw firms. While HYS and a few others are equally desirable across the country, If you want to work in Madison, Wisconsin, you are better off if you went to UW Madison than Boalt (UC Berkeley). In LA, you are better off in the job market from UCLA or USC than from Penn or Cornell. In Texas, UT Austin is the preferred school.
The thing that concerns me is how miserable many lawyers are in their Big Law jobs- and even at some of the regional firms. I get asked every single day about the availability of in-house positions by law firm lawyers who are very unhappy with their law firm jobs.
There IS another good path that doesn’t involve as much debt or T14 schools. If you know where you want to live and practice- i.e. Oklahoma, Nebraska, Texas etc.- go to the top state law school and DO REALLY WELL. You will get a good job at a top firm in the big cities in that state. Just don’t count on that Nebraska degree getting you into Big Law in NYC.
I have spent my entire career in-house, and I am fortunate to be ending my career at the best job yet with a great company. I’ve had a few bad positions, but for the most part I have enjoyed my career. I haven’t made the kind of money that you make at a firm, but I enjoy being a contributor to the business and being part of the successes and failures of major corporations. When I came out of law school it was possible to go in-house right away. That is extremely unusual now, unfortunately. You have to put in about 5 years at a firm first. I went to a top 3 (at the time) law school (I think maybe top 4 now). Back then the lower tier law school grads could still get jobs.
Let’s say you’re smart, your forte is reading and writing, you aren’t particularly entrepreneurial, you aren’t a personality star, you aren’t a leader of men. you have indifferent math and computer skills and don’t really like math. You get out of college with a lberal arts degree, and can’t find a job. Or find only a low paying dead-end job that you hate that leads to nowhere.
What the heck are you supposed to do? Die? Pack up your truck, drive cross country to Califiornia to pick crops ? (oh I left out, manual labor isn’t your thing either)
Build yourself a secluded cabin in Montana and mail bombs to random people? (actually you don’t have the ingenuity or mechanical skills to do that)
You can elect to enroll in some Master’s degree program, that still costs lots of money (2 years instead of 3), and offers little merit aid, to try to get you qualified for a careeer with even less guarantee of subsequent employment than a law degree does, and/or has much lower future earnings potential (eg journalism? public policy?)
Or you can go to law school and hope for the best, relying on that Federal program to bring down your loans, if necessary, if things don’t work out.
Of course there may be one or two other options as well.
But opportunities kind of stink out there for some liberal arts types these days, across the board and not just in law, and what’s been discussed in this thread should be considered in that context.
IIRC at least 50% of the class at each of the T14 goes to 100+ lawyer firms, except perhaps Georgetown where an unusually large proportion are employed by the government or related. There is variation, at some of the schools the percentage is quite high.
" A fresh JD graduate, no matter if he or she had a prestigious clerkship under their belt, would never be offered such a job. "
As with any career most have to work their way up to such a job. My nephew is an attorney for ICE Has been there his whole career (he’s about 30) He was just promoted to head ICE legal div in Florida. He didn’t go to a T10 - he went to Purdue.
There are also a few other young attorney’s in my family. One started as an ADA in Queens and has now gone to a law firm in NYC. He went to Temple. Another is a defense attorney at a firm in Canton, Ohio. He went to U of Dayton Law. Seems to be doing pretty well as far as I can see. Has a house, two young kids and wife is a SAHM.
Emily, those situations were always common before the bottom fell out of the legal market. It is so vastly different in the last five years it’s like an alternate universe. I’m not saying no one should go to law school, but it used to be the case that the vast majority of law graduates could make a great living in any number of excellent ways. Not the case anymore. The whole document reviewers lobbying for toilet paper situation is an actual thing. People should just weigh the decision very carefully because government jobs are so coveted now that each job gets countless applications from people who would never, ever have applied to them before the crash. As MOWC pointed out, it’s not possible to get an in-house job as a junior lawyer anymore. In fact, what a lot of companies are doing is seconding associates from their outside firms for periods of time to train them on the law firm’s dime. However, in regional markets, the top students in the regional law firms do very, very well. that may be a very smarter decision for some people than even the tippy-top law schools.
We had an in-house position open at my company 2 years ago. I got swamped with calls from my outside counsel and law firm lawyers all over the country. It was frightening, really.
I kind of find it ironic that as the parent of a music student where the rate of ‘making it’ as a musician has always been very fraught, the same thing is being said of law school, that once upon a time when a kid said they were interested in going into music, that ‘they should go to law school’ (as one of the options of a ‘real’ job).
In some ways music is very much like law school, every day there seems to be another school adding a school of music, and last I checked music schools were turning out something like 15,000 graduates a year, and many of them have little to no chance of making a career in music, more than a few of those, for example, are non auditioned programs, many are at a level where they will never play well enough to ‘catch up’, very much like the plethora of law schools that are out there churning out graduates. In music, even if you go to the equivalent of an elite law school, the Juilliard’s and Curtis and so forth, the rate of people still in music 10 years after graduation is pretty small…
There is a bit of difference with music, there isn’t quite the old school tie kind of thing that there is with elite law schools, while networking does play a factor in music careers, with gig work and such, and going to some schools might help with that, or if you want to teach at a college program it may help to be from let’s say Juilliard, but in terms of getting into an orchestra or a rock band or jazz band or chamber group, it is all going to be about how well you play, a boring musician from Juilliard isn’t going to get a place in a chamber group over someone who is exciting from a lesser school, whereas in law a brilliant law school graduate from a non top x elite law school might not be able to get his/her resume looked at by some law firms, so there are differences.
I would say that with Law it kind of is like music,that you should only go into it if you really have a passion for it (in music, they say if you see yourself doing anything else, you may want to do that instead of music), and have the ability to be in the top tier of graduates if you goal is to work in law at a top law firm, or even have a chance at many others. It probably is also wise to think of other places you can use a law degree, which after all is a grad level degree that has a certain way of being trained and such. It may mean you end up as a financial trader, a financial analyst, in tech, whatever, rather than working directly as a lawyer, but a law degree, like a music degree, has advantages to it in more ‘normal’ jobs…on the other hand, if you dream of making partner at Sullivan and Cromwell or the like, then you better pursue getting into a tippy top program, and while there distinguish yourself, the same way someone who dreams of being a violin soloist, you better be incredibly well prepared to get into a top program (or have the chops to get into one), and then have the dedication and fortitude to fight towards the goal.
Is the cost of hiring a lawyer dropping? Are per hour costs dropping?
We seem to have a glut of educated or talented people and fewer opportunities. Too many lawyers. Too many would be musicians. Too many phds.
To some extent, yes. Clients are demanding and getting more value billing and flat rate billing.
The actual billing rates for people who are billing aren’t dropping. However, the number of attorneys who aren’t actually billing particular clients is rising and value added options are increasing markedly.
But the big guns are still charging $1000 per hour and getting more hours at that rate than they can possibly work.
So, for the average person who wants a lawyer to go over a contract, or wants to hire a divorce lawyer, or wants a lawyer to write up a living trust, are costs dropping for the client?
No, costs are not dropping- at least not that I’m seeing.
So why aren’t lawyers who are not doing well dropping their fees?
And is the internet hurting the legal profession?
The type work you are describing is a tiny part of the legal profession. You are describing work done by smaller firms or sole practitioners. Most of the focus on this thread is on legal work done by firms who represent major corporations. Also, there are restrictions on advertising by lawyers, so you don’t see much of “come to me at my bargain basement rate.”
The fact is that there are way more licensed lawyers than there are jobs or work for them. There also isn’t just huge interest in hiring JDs for work that doesn’t require a JD. There are exceptions, of course, but many employers feel that you are “settling” and will bail as soon as something else comes along.
There is a finite number of clients in each market/area. People don’t buy houses or make wills every year at the smaller level, and at the BigLaw level, there are constant “beauty contests” for companies by various law firms. The winner gets the work and the losers generally get nothing. In BigLaw, it’s always been up or out, which means that a “class” will start in the fall after graduation from law school and at year 8 they will be up for partnership. Every year along the way, people will be told that they are not eligible for partnership and have X months to leave. By the partnership year, perhaps there will be one or two left or possibly none. Nowadays, the initial classes are much smaller and filled with people whose credentials would have almost guaranteed success in prior years. Also, the dirty little secret is that above a certain level, clients want value for their money, but they also want bragging rights. So they will not pay for color copies, but they will pay $1000 per hour for a trial lawyer to be available every morning when they call and ruminate from their cars on the way to work.
To add to what MOWC said, clients don’t want to pay for a JD to do non JD work, but they also don’t want to pay for new JDs to learn on their work. When I started in a law firm 29 years ago, the bills to clients were a single piece of expensive bond paper with the words “For services rendered” and a dollar figure that the partner pulled out of his hat. They were always paid. Nowadays, bills are submitted electronically and kicked back for anything and the payment cycle is between 60 and 90 days.
I think biglaw firms aren’t dropping their fees because they don’t need to. Local smaller firms or one-person shops’ fees can probably be negotiated. If you want a divorce lawyer or someone to read over a contract, you don’t need biglaw firms.
In addition, the work-life balance is horrible working at those $160K/year firms. You are working long hours and weekends just like the investment banking analysts (a 2 year gig) but for 8+ years if you don’t quit or be laid off.
I think working at regional smaller firms are much better and if you have good numbers, you can get law school tuitions significantly reduced. That also means you don’t need to attend the tippy top law schools.
Listen to zoosermom. DH is a partner in a major metro area firm, and has previously worked at one of the most well-known, highest priced firms in the country. He has been telling me for years that the practice of law has completely changed and he is glad that he is on the down-side of his career and thinking about retiring. He wouldn’t want to be in his 40’s and practicing now. Clients have ZERO interest in paying 1st and 2nd year associates. They want experienced lawyers only to be on their cases and doing the billing. And when DH bills, invariably the client comes back wanting to “bargain” the price down. And yes, he represents some big time, national businesses. Everyone wants a deal. He has said on numerous occasions that he would never advise anyone he knew personally to go to law school now.
On the other hand, our new DIL is about to graduate at the top of her class from YHS and has a great federal court appellate clerkship lined up, followed by a federal district court clerkship as well as an open offer from a BigLaw firm. But, she wants to work in one of the federal programs mentioned above. They are incredibly competitive and she is worried about whether she will be accepted into one. I keep thinking, “if they don’t take her, who will they take?” But, it’s just that competitive.
X-posted with zoosermom