My Attorney Blog

If you’re an attorney, particularly if you’re a contract attorney, you must have heard or read about the recent Wall Street Journal Article regarding the lagging state of the legal employment market. There has been much debate and rumbling among contract attorneys on the matter. If you’re a new law school graduate or if you’ve been struggling to find legal employment, I’m sure the article confirms what we’ve all known for some time. Unless you attended a top tier school and you’re in the very top percent of your class, your legal employment life is going to be extremely harsh or even non-existent. Furthermore, even if you’re a top student from a top tier school, there is no real guarantee that your path will be paved in gold.

I’m currently a contract attorney. On my projects I encounter attorneys from all legal backgrounds and graduates from all law school tiers. However, whenever I bump into someone who was a great student from a top tier school like Georgetown Law, I always stop to think about how far the legal profession has fallen. Even these top tier law school graduates lament to me about how tough the market is and how difficult it is to find proper full time employment. They too are finding it extremely difficult to rise above the sea of attorneys. Many end up changing professions altogether or choose to perform temporary contract attorney work. Some toll away in jobs that pay the same as that of clerical workers as they struggle to find a way out. The drowning pain is further compounded by the often crushing student loan debt numbering in the six figures that frequently accompanies law graduates.

Too Many Law School Creating Too Many Law Graduates

There are simply too many lawyers out there and law schools are facilitating this never ending deluge of new attorneys by continuing to graduate more and more lawyers. Unlike other major professions, there are over 4 tiers of law schools and new law schools are added every year to keep up with the demand of students who blindly want to become lawyers. Many of these law school hopefuls hope to chase the commonly hyped fantasy of landing a big time job at a law firm working 40 hours a week and making millions. These law school hopefuls need to know that the legal market already has more than it can handle. There are better academic and professional options out there. Did you know there are only 1/3 as many medical schools as there are law schools? Do we really need so many lawyers? If law school bound college students only knew.

I’m glad the Wall Street Journal article was published. It helps to shed public light on a serious epidemic in the legal profession. An attorney is still a prestigious profession but when you have over saturation, it loses its prestige and you become a dime a dozen. You have all of these easy political science, English, and history majors enrolling in law schools because they don’t know what else to do with their majors. It will take time, but hopefully such discussion will cause a shift in the legal profession for the better. Despite my usual optimism, I don’t have much hope for this. There are too many stakeholders such as a large firms and law schools that will never want the lawyer making machine to slow down.