The Red Velvet Lawyer

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...

Professor Brian Leiter  Takes on the Scambloggers Professor Brian Leiter, a well-known blogger , is now writing for the Huffington Post . In American Law Schools: The New Reality , he describes the many factors that have contributed to the down turn in applicants to law school including: Competition among law school for US News rankings, which forced them to compete based on expensive services instead of affordable tuition; Rising student debt; Poorer employment outcomes for graduates in a recessionary economy; Congressional overhaul of bankruptcy laws as they relate to student loans; and Lax oversight by the ABA regulators. I've blogged about all these topics this past year.  And, it is nice to have this summary for easy reference. In his second article, American Law Schools and the Psychology of Cyber-Hysteria , Professor Leiter looks at the "toxic" environment law schools face while trying to respond to the market downturn in responsible...

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...

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...

Now I Really Get  the Law Job Market In a blog posting entitled, Did the Market for Law Firm Associates Peak 25 Years Ago , Bill Henderson, of The Legal Whiteboard, graphically shows the change in the BigLaw staffing model I discussed, in part, here . You must take a look at this material! From the posting (with permission): Based on the chart below, which reflects 35 years of large law firm data, the answer appears to be yes. The chart enables us to compare two very simple trendlines: the percentage of lawyers in NLJ 250 law firms who have the title of Associates versus the percentage with the title of Partner. * * *  Indeed, the 35-year graphic above provides a true wide-angle view, which in turn reveals an absolutely remarkable story. Associates were most integral to the large law firm model over 25 years ago. Although large law firms went on a hirng spree at various points during the 1990s and 2000s, the firms themselves were simultaneously ad...

The Red Velvet Lawyer  Gets Some Notice In an article  predicting when law-related jobs will exceed the number of law school graduates, the National Jurist discussed my blog posting on the same topic, found here . I want to clarify that my posting attempted to support the prediction made by Prof. Organ at the MAPLA conference in October 2013.  And, as noted in updates to my posting, I am happy that other folks are further examining the data and making a more precise prediction. I fully support the informed decision-making of any person applying to law school right now.  I also strongly recommend that prospective students work closely with pre-law advisors.  As I have posted elsewhere , they are a highly professional and committed group of people who strive to serve the best interests of the students they advise. I also noted that 70 percent of prospective law students fail to take advantage of this important resource.

Appreciate the Recognition for ASL's Mission! I got back from some restorative massage to find a nice email from ADR colleague, Art Hinshaw, a blogger on ADR Prof Blog . He congratulated me for getting recognition from Brian Leiter's ABA Top 100 Blawg for my recent posting on job prospects for future graduates. Here's Prof. Leiter's posting: Thursday, November 21, 2013  We are on track for there to be more new jobs for lawyers than there are new law school graduates... By Brian Leiter ... by 2016 or 2017 . Hopefully this will help some of those currently unemployed, but it is also probably quite good news for those starting law school now or next year. (I commend Professor Young for taking the time to run the numbers, which in the current toxic cyber-environment where facts are never welcome [recall the irrational reception in cyberspace of the Simkovic & McIntyre study , even though it completely altered the terms of debate in the real world]...

The Tide Turns Again? New Jobs Exceed the Number of Law Graduates in 2016? At the conference of the Midwest Association of Prelaw Advisors held at the end of October 2013, Professor Jerry Organ predicted that jobs would exceed the number of law school graduates in 2016 (as I recall). He suggested that the market would turn because applicants to law school would continue to decline while the trend in new law jobs would hold at least steady. So, here is my attempt at supporting this prediction.  I am using data provided by LSAC at the MAPLA conference, which I have discussed in earlier postings.  I am also relying on data provided by NALP . I make the following assumptions: Enrollment of first-year law students will decline by 8.0% from the previous year through the 2015 entering class. Each entering class experiences an attrition rate of 12 percent. So, only 88 percent of each first-year class graduates three years later. New full-time jobs in three categori...

Here's the headline: Adapting to the Current Realities of the Employment Landscape for Lawyers, Half of Pre-Law Students Say They Plan to Use their Law School Degree in a Non-Traditional Legal Job So started an April 11, 2013 news release published by Kaplan Test Prep.  It goes on to report: The employment stats don’t paint a pretty picture for pre-law students looking ahead, but flexibility about their future career and their passion for it is driving them forward. According to a recent Kaplan Test Prep survey of more than 200 pre-law students, 50% say they plan to use their law degree in a non-traditional legal field. Of that 50%, nearly three out of five (58%) said the current job market for lawyers factored into this decision.   Forty-three (43%) percent of survey respondents overall said they plan to use their law degree to pursue a job in the business world rather than in the legal world—which helps explain why 42% said they’d likely pursue an MBA if t...

Recently, Above the Law decided to develop its own law school ranking system based on employment rates nine months after graduation.  For the list of top ten schools look  here .  I especially like the first comment to that story.  This list clearly fails to recognize that most students will not have the GPA and LSAT scores to get admitted to the law schools Above the Law ranks at the top of its list.  Moreover, the list covers only the top 50 schools, leaving about 150 ABA-accredited schools out of the analysis.  See  here . My last post here  discussed how the reported employment numbers could mislead a prospective student.  This new ranking system reflects only the last category of numbers I discussed:  full-time, long-term, bar-required employment within nine months after graduation. I am not the only law school professor frustrated with the coverage these numbers get.  Brian Leiter of the University of Chicago has...