The Red Velvet Lawyer

Focus on our 2014 Grads! Once again, thanks to the generosity of ASL Trustee Joe Wolfe, ASL is on the airwaves via our NBC and FOX television stations. This time, the star of the show is the entire Class of 2014.  Please share the link as widely as you can.  Graduates:  your mom wants to watch it. P.S.  Yes.  I know.  Photo features some grads from an earlier class. 

The Mission of the Appalachian School of Law Sets up Grads for Happier Lives A new study reported today in the ABA Journal Law News Now reports that money and prestigious jobs obtained after graduating from a higher ranked school do not lead to happier lives as lawyers.  The survey measured lawyers’ “subjective well-being,” a combination of life satisfaction and mood. More than 7,800 bar members in four states responded to the survey; the study focused on about 6,200 who provided complete data and said they worked as lawyers, judges or in related positions.  The survey found that lawyers in “prestige” jobs, who had the highest grades and incomes, aren’t as happy as lawyers working in public-service jobs for substantially lower pay. Judges, however, were happiest of all.  “Prestige” jobs included lawyers working in firms of more than 100 lawyers and those working in areas such as corporate, tax, patent, securities, estate-planning and plaintiff’s...

The Bell Curve  and  The Spike First, forgive the look of this blog posting.  I have reproduced the chart from the NALP website , and this blogging platform makes me keep the original formatting (in this instance). Now, I saw this chart for the first time at the conference of the Midwest Association of Pre-Law Advisors (MAPLA).  LSAC General Counsel, Joan Van Tol, included it in her slides along with data on applications to law school.  She explained that the chart showed two salary patterns.  The bell curve on the left hand side of the chart shows the starting salary for most (reportng) law school graduates 9-months after graduation.  Most of the jobs held by new grads pay $40,000 to $65,000.   The second pattern appears on the right side of the chart and reflects starting salaries of graduates who land jobs with BigLaw.  Van Toll called this part of the chart "the spike."  The spike moved away...

Law School Success Stories Elie Mystal, of Above the Law , which I would characterize as one of the leading "scambloggers,"  made a posting  yesterday entitled:   The Lack of Law School Transparency Claims Another Victim . Here is the lead in paragraph: Some guy on Twitter was complaining that Above the Law focuses too much on the negative side of going to law school. Apparently this person mistakes us for a law school admissions office — people who ignore facts when they don’t fit their happy-clappy narrative. We do bring you some law school success stories when we hear of good ones. Do you know why those stories are “news”? Because law schools are so effective at leading people down a path of career frustration and financial ruin that when somebody beats the odds, it’s mildly noteworthy. This blog tends to focus on graduates from top-ranked schools who had expected to join BigLaw. They routinely paid $40,000-$50,000 per year in tuition at the top sc...

I've enjoyed the blog-based debate about the new report -- The Economic Value of a Law Degree -- which I summarized here .  Michael Simkovic and Frank McIntyre, its authors, have explained their methodology, which to my untrained eye, appears robust.  They have successfully responded over the last several weeks to the points made by Brian Tamanaha, author of Failing Law Schools . Simkovic's last blog post appears  here .  It goes into further detail about the methodology used to compare the two populations -- first, law school grads and second, bachelor degree earners most like law school grads. I am curious why this report has generated this type of debate.  Are we so accustomed to hearing bad news about law school that some good news seems automatically suspect?  Have the scambloggers so occupied the field for so long that we cannot easily make a shift in how we view the value of a law degree in today's market? Yes, getting a legal education...

Michael Simkovic, one of the authors of the new report -- The Economic Value of a Law Degree , is debating the author, Brian Tamanaha, of the 2012 book --  Failing Law Schools .  The debate began earlier this week and appears at Brian Leiter's Law School Reports .  It should be an interesting exchange that will go on for a while. Both authors are law school academics. Simkovic serves as an Associate Professor of Law at Seton Hall University School of Law.  Brian Tamanaha, serves as the Dean of Washington University School of Law (my alma mater ). I summarized Simikovic's paper  here .  Tamanaha's book is available  here  (yes, I am encouraging you to use Barnes & Noble, and not Amazon). One of the factors affecting both authors' projections is the cost of law school tuition. Given the drop off in applicants to law school -- from about 100,000 in 2004 to about 50,000 this past recruiting season -- lower-tiered law schools have substant...

I graduated from law school in 1982.  At that time, 7.6 percent of new law graduates became solo practitioners;  40.3 percent entered small law practices (2-10 lawyers);  about 11 percent entered firms 51 to 100 lawyers in size;   only 15. 6 percent of new law grads entered large firms of 101 plus lawyers, and more women did that than men; and  NALP, the Association of Legal Career Professionals, did not keep a separate category for firms with more than 500 lawyers. See trend report here .  According to an earlier trend report , in 1982, about 10 percent of new law grads entered business and industry. About 23,000 students graduated from law school in 1982. Fast forward to 2007, the year of record employment among lawyers, NALP reports that: 3 percent of new law grads became solo practitioners (a 4 percent drop); about 33 percent entered small law practices (2-10 lawyers) (a 13 percent drop);  about 6 percent entered f...

That’s right. A very large number of law graduates choose not to practice law.  Instead, they pursue careers in banking, other financial institutions, insurance, technology and e-commerce, management consulting,  corporate contracts administration, alternative dispute resolution, government regulation or compliance work, law enforcement, human resources, accounting, the military, government executive positions, legislative positions, administrative agencies, teaching, journalism, risk management, judicial clerkships, law school administration, law firm professional development or CLE training,  or other professions.  In the report I summarized in yesterday's blog , authors Simikovic and McIntyre analyzed data for 2009 from the U.S. Census Bureau and  the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to conclude that about three out of five law graduates work as lawyers.  Fifty-eight percent of all law degree holders report “lawyer” as their occup...

Some qualified good news.  Overall employment for 2012 law grads suggests an improving trend. The 2012 grads obtained more jobs than 2011 grads, but the class also had more graduates in it. Accordingly, the percent of employed fell to 84.7% from 85.7% the previous year.  The 2012 grads entered law school in the fall of 2009, and so the larger class size apparently indicates the choice of many college graduates to attend graduate school rather than face a job market deep in recession. The NALP Executive Director, James Leipold, stated: "I continue to believe that the Class of 2011 represented the absolute bottom of the curve on the jobs front . . . ." Many of the stories about job prospects for law school grads compare current employment rates to the pre-recession rate of 2007.  This comparison misrepresents the situation because employment that year represented a 24-year high of 91.9% according to NALP.   I compute the 20-year average (from 1988 to 2007), as ...