The Red Velvet Lawyer

Tell Your Story! This invitation comes from one of my very ambitious ADR colleagues. Please take her up on the invitation to share your stories. Hi all, I wanted to share with you a new video blog project I started focusing on ADR as a first career. This video blog is a place to share and read about individuals who chose to begin their professional career in the ADR field. Check it out at here . The purpose of the blog is to explore how successful the next generation of ADR professionals has been in pursuing careers in ADR straight out of law school or graduate school. To do so, I am trying to gather ADR as first career stories by encouraging folks to upload videos about their own experiences or schedule an interview with me in which I will create a video to upload on their behalf. It is very simple to do (you can see others have already started participating), and you can even create your own video straight from the blog itself. I’d love it if you would share ...

BigLaw  Headcount Strategies Adam Smith Esquire's Bruce McEwen, well-known blawger, in a post entitled, Where Do You Want Your Firm to be in 2020?, reports some data on the strategic planning horizon of large law firms, which he argues does not extend beyond one, two, or three years. Interestingly, he reports the following figures for the changes in headcount at large law firms. [C]onsider the little-remarked but sobering figures on how the proportionate composition of lawyers at the largest 250 law firms in the US based on headcount has changed over the last decade: Associates: from 55% to 47% (down 15%). Equity partners: from 31% to 26% (down 16%). Non-equity partners: from 7% to 16% (up 129%). Other’ lawyers (staff, of counsel, contract, etc): from 7% to 10% (up 43%). He comments on these changes later in the post: And what, exactly, is the point about the aforementioned morphing composition of lawyers at large law firms? Simple, I b...

Refining the Data Analysis Further  and  Adding Assumptions The National Jurist , as promised, has followed up its December 2013 article (apparently no longer available if you don't have a subscription) with the data on which it relied to predict that an equilibrium between new legal jobs and new law grads would come in 2015.   Here is the link. This article also predicts jobs will exceed law graduates for the graduating class of 2016, but reaches that conclusion by applying an historic average for full-time employment in "bar-passage required" jobs of 69 percent. It says: The analysis by both [Profs. Young and Merritt] assumes that the number of [new] jobs remains flat and that the balance point between supply and demand is 100 percent full-time legal employment by graduates within nine months of graduation.  But since NALP began tracking data in 1985, the percentage of recent graduates who were employed in full-time legal jobs has never exceeded 8...

The Red Velvet Lawyer Mentioned in AmLaw Daily In the ongoing discussion about when law graduates and available law jobs will reach equilibrium, Matt Leichter, of the  Law School Tuition Bubble  blog, has continued to work with the  numbers  and published in the AmLaw Daily  here  a story called:  No, It's Still Not a Good Time to Apply to Law School . (You may need a subscription to read the story but his blog posting covers all or most of the same data.) He mentions my launch of this conversation and concludes that Prof. Merritt may have the better analysis. He looks at several more data-bases to reach that conclusion.  As I've said before, I want prospective students to make decisions about law school using informed decision-making.  The more we talk about the numbers, the more information they have to make better choices about the careers they want to pursue. I'd invite Leichter to expand his analysis...

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...

Appalachian School of Law is one of the most affordable private law schools in the U.S.  Based on the data I have, it is one of the most affordable private law schools east of the Mississippi River.  Even so, our tuition this coming year is about $31,000 per year. Living expenses in excess of tuition -- of about $20,000 per year -- make law school a significant investment in a student's future. If a college graduate asked me whether to go to law school today, I'd say "yes."  But, here's how to do it. Do not apply to a school that is likely to admit you to fill the bottom of the class. You will pay full tuition to claim that spot. Instead, apply to law schools that will happily admit you to fill the top ten percent of their classes -- they will be one or two tiers lower than your stretch school.  Look at the LSAT quartiles for each school for a hint at how you fit in each school's entering class profile.  Disclose the admission package offered by the be...

I recently joined the ABA's Law Practice Management Section in an effort to support our graduates who will start solo practices because of the lack of opportunity in law firms and other traditional employers of lawyers in this recessionary economy.  I blogged about the day-long solo practice workshop the Appalachian School of Law offered this past spring  here .  I blogged about the employment prospects for new grads  here ,  here , and  here . This past week, I received the section's welcome packet and its May/June 2013 issue of the Law Practice Magazine.  The section focuses on the following four core areas: marketing, management, technology, and finance.  It provides section members with six issues of its "award-winning" hard-copy magazine, a monthly webzine, a bimonthly e-newsletter, and a legal technology blog.  It also focuses on the challenges women face as rainmakers and sells an impressive collection of books. The May/June issu...

Most of the news these days focuses on the alleged over-supply of lawyers.  I say "alleged" because the market considered by these journalists does not cover the needs of our rural populations or anyone who can not afford legal services at current prices. But, I'll leave that topic for another post. Today, I want to focus on the potentially odd likelihood that we will have a lawyer shortage in another five to ten years.  Here's why. The Washington state bar surveyed its lawyers asking about retirement plans.  The survey found that nearly one-quarter of the state's lawyers planned to retire in the next five years or about 1,440 per year.  Another 32 percent of its surveyed lawyers planned to leave the profession or cut back their practices.   See story here. The Washington bar report noted that a whopping 71 percent of the state's lawyers were aged 50 or older, with 21 percent being 61 or older. On the other hand, admission...