Why Does Everyone Want to Go to Law School?
by Brian John Spencer
For some reason people in America and the UK people have come to regard Law School as some sort of panacea. The pinnacle of academic learning and the route to meteoric career earning: the ultimate career backstop that offers glamour, big respect and guarantees a bulging bank balance.
Let’s call this ‘Law School Think’: the reason why everybody wants to go to law school.
However it’s all a myth.
The idea of Law School being a panacea is a perception ingrained so deeply that young men and women enrol in the face of hard facts that scream out: “Don’t go to Law School!” Slate writer Eric Posner provides a great prefatory note here.
And shame on all those law schools that peddle the Law School myth; only for all those ambitious, hardworking, albeit deluded young people to see their (ill-gotten) dreams melt between their fingers.
But what worries me is that the Law School myth has yet to be busted – it is still alive and well in the US and UK. Because of this I explored the problem on the Huffington Post with a post entitled, ‘Law: The Default Career Choice’. And on the League we’ve had Burt Likko look at some of the problems facing law school and law practice more generally – see here.
On this occasion I want to go a little deeper and unpack some of the detail. Get in deep and see what’s driving young people in the US and UK to enrol in law school in the face of hard facts that say: “don’t!” Here’s a breakdown of the reality as it is in the US and UK. I’ll look at each in turn, starting with the US. Then I’ll look at why we still do it and how we can stop it
In the United States things are especially bad.
According to the American Bar Association, of the Class of 2011 only 55% secured employment as an attorney. In 2012 there was a meagre1% jump on this as 56% took work as an attorney.
Stating the obvious a little here, but the problem is that the legal economy is really flunking.
Since 2008, some 15,000 attorney and legal-staff jobs at large firms have vanished. The double digit growth of the pre-boom years was an aberration and job figures will be flat in the near and medium term. It hasn’t helped that more and more firms are adopting new practices and liberalising their business models, including outsourcing a lot of the entry level work.
The reality is that the market for law graduates is saturated, while the legal profession itself has excess capacity and haemorrhaging jobs.
In this context, the legal higher education needs to undergo a radical re-adjustment. Like perhaps… not produce as many wannabe lawyers – but like the profession itself, law school seems to be in denial. As the Atlantic put it, ‘the legal economy is in shambles and law schools have done virtually nothing to react.’
The bottom line is this: law schools need to supply law graduates to the legal economy at a level that is commensurate to the level of demand in that economy.
Though it would be false to say that nothing has changed; applications and enrolment numbers are both down. You can see some great graphs, good reading and interesting links on a post by Aaron Kirschenfeld, entitled ‘The Law School Crisis, visualized.’
On a side note: it’s also important to note that Law School needs to up-skill and broaden the learning curriculum to match the ‘New Normal’ of law practice. If BigLaw and small law have changed, then shouldn’t Law School? Of course it should! But that’s a discussion for another day – back to the Law School enrolment figures.
According to Above the Law, Law school apps have dropped to 54,000 annually, from 100,000 in 2004.
But as Steven J Harper, author of the ‘The Lawyer Bubble’ said:
‘You’re still going to have way more applicants than you have seats in law schools. And as the recent employment data shows, in 2012 we had a record number of law school grads, over 46,000. The bubble is continuing to grow. We are an extraordinarily long way from anything that looks like an equilibrium between supply and demand.’
Will Meyerhofer, a former Sullivan & Cromwell attorney turned psychotherapist lamented the lemming-nature of ‘Law School Think’ which funnels impressionable young men and women into law school:
‘There’s something about observing these lemmings scrabble their way into the maws of ruthless law schools, despite dire warnings and appeals to common sense, that just…gets under my skin.’
In the UK Law Schools things are bad.
The extent to which the misfortune of law graduates has been documented in the UK hasn’t enjoyed anywhere near the same exposure as in the US.
According to Legal Week the total number starting a law course in September 2007 stood at 17,702, just over 18,000 in September 2008 and 18,394 in September 2009. In 2009 law was actually the top subject choice in the UK according to UCAS.
In 2009-10 there were 11,370 full-time and 3,140 part-time solicitor students compared to just 4,874 newly registered training contracts. That’s a surplus of 9,636 students – pretty much the majority of students.
This was in the context of a legal profession that according to RBS, was ‘carrying thousands of excess solicitor jobs.’ Michael Todd QC, Chairman of the Bar Council has said that many have students “no hope” of a job in law.
So unfair are the terms of engagement that many graduates have to settle as paralegals or have been forced to go elsewhere. So it’s pretty clear that the British, like the Americans have been captured by ‘Law School Think’.
What’s up with ‘Law School Think’ – Why does it exist?
The head of the American Bar Association, William Robinson has no sympathy for jobless law grads and said that law students should have known what they were getting into.
Personally I wouldn’t agree with the William Robinson analysis. It’s pretty easy for young people to get caught up in the compelling narrative of ‘Law School Think’ spun by the media and self-interested Law Schools, and as upheld by out-of-date social hearsay.
To my mind there are two reasons why young men and women choose Law School in the fact of a legal economy that’s tanking:
- The overhang of an old truth/socially reinforced illusion
- Sinister doings of Law Schools who want to maintain the status quo
On the first point: there’s not much to this, it’s just that old fashioned regard that holds the lawyer as an exceptionally gifted, successful and very well off person.
Look, it may have been true at one time. But now it isn’t. And because of a lag period, parents buy into the old thinking and in doing so, fool themselves and their children into going to law school thinking their kid’s going to grow up and be Atticus Finch, Alicia Florrick or Reese Witherspoon.
In this video Matt Yglesias explained how his career guidance from friends and family extended as far as a very vague and very broad suggestion that he should go to law school.
Alex Aldrige (@AlexAldridgeUK) of Legal Cheek (Britain’s Above the Law) made a strong contribution, suggesting that ‘Law School Think’ essentially comes down to the middle class condition:
‘A turning point in my life was when I ran out of excuses to do more higher education. On reflection, my English literature degree (four years), GDL (one year) and BPTC (one year) amount to a massive waste of time and money. Indeed, if I could do it all again, I wouldn’t even go to university. But perhaps, as a middle class person whose university lecturer parents placed a high value on education, these were just the hoops I was destined to jump through.’
It may have been true at one stage but the idea that law school = a well paid job is dead. As Above the Law said, ‘Remember when studying law was a path towards the good life of home ownership?’
On the second point: this is a little more complicated. There’s a lot two it. Steven J. Harper has spoken of ‘The Law School Sham’ and there’s even a blog that goes by the title, ‘Inside the Law School scam’.
Undoubtedly there’s reluctance for insiders to adjust: after all, there’s an incentive to uphold the old order and the status quo. Frankly: Law Schools are cash cows. As the New York Times said:
‘Tuition at even mediocre law schools can cost up to $43,000 a year. Those huge lecture-hall classes — remember “The Paper Chase”? — keep teaching costs down. There are no labs or expensive equipment to maintain. So much money flows into law schools that law professors are among the highest paid in academia, and law schools that are part of universities often subsidize the money-losing fields of higher education.
“If you’re a law school and you add 25 kids to your class, that’s a million dollars, and you don’t even have to hire another teacher,” says Allen Tanenbaum, a lawyer in Atlanta who led the American Bar Association’s commission on the impact of the economic crisis on the profession and legal needs. “That additional income goes straight to the bottom line”.’
Paul Campos, a law professor at Colorado tried to lift the lid on the law school sham through his blog, ‘Inside the Law School Scam’. He had expressed grave concerns about how law schools were raising fees to absurd levels while simultaneously being less than open about the employment prospects of new graduates.
And the reaction of law Schools? A collective shrug. They don’t give a toss. Just keep the students rolling in and keep the balance book buoyant; but just let them worry about getting a job and paying off their debt.
So what do we in the US and UK need to do?
We need to bust the myth and ‘Law School Think’ which elevates Law School to some sort of zenith. The old order thinking is both ill-informed and massively damaging.
What Law School Think does is to promote the inefficient allocation of resources. We need high schools and colleges to inform their students on the market realities of the legal economy.
On the side of this we need to promote other professions and push for parity of esteem.
Above the Law put it best on approaching the question of Law School. They said:
‘If you don’t have a strong and well-informed desire to be a lawyer, then you probably shouldn’t go to law school (unless you’re so rich that you or your parents can afford to treat law school as “finishing school for liberal arts graduates”).’
Or, as Forbes Magazine said to the graduating class of 2012: just ‘Don’t Go To Law School’.
I graduated law school in 2011 at the age of 30. This put me in prime years for the law school sham probably. Though I was also a bit odd because I was a slightly older student. Most of my classmates started law school between 22-24. Though there were plenty of older students. I really enjoyed my law school education. My law school had a long history of providing a good deal of the lawyers to the Bay Area/Northern California for most of her history. We suffered a lot in the crisis though. Interestingly a lot of my friends from law school are working as lawyers. Mainly for small or medium sized firms, some for the government as prosecutors and district attorneys. At least three are working for their parents though, probably more.
My career path was an inbetween. I worked for thirteen months for a firm on a project to project basis and that wrapped up in the end of April. Now I am looking for my next move. I am getting a lot of places tell me that they just hired a bunch of new associates. So I think the market got better but I missed the ship :/. Though last week I had two interviews and a recruiter submit me for a position.
I wrote about this for the League’s Higher Education symposium under the headline careers for the slightly impractical student. My joke was that Law School was for people who wanted to make good money but were too nerdy for business and not scientifically inclined enough for medicine, engineering, math, etc.
I graduated from what America calls a “small liberal arts college” in 2002 with a BA in Drama. Small liberal arts colleges tend to be academically elite and tend to attract a very smart and precocious but not necessarily practical kind of student. Most if not all of these schools do not have “practical” majors like Business, Marketing, Nursing, Engineering, etc. You could major in a pure science like Chemistry and Biology. Most pre-med types ended up doing that. If you wanted to do engineering, you needed to a joint 3-2 program with another university like Columbia or RPI. I don’t know anyone who did this. Many of my friends also majored in subjects like Drama and English and we wanted to be artists of various sorts.
From 2002-2003, I taught English in Japan because I wanted to live abroad for a year.
From 2003-2008, I tried with varying degrees of non-success to start a career in theatre as a director including going to grad school. Theatre is extremely hard to make a living in but this is a subject for another post. The people I know who do it are either independently wealthy or misfit enough that any kind of office life beyond the occasional temp job is impossible for them. I am neither of these things.
However my attempts to get a normal job from 2003-2008 were met with a lot of silence. I worked as a freelance legal proofreader during this time. Those jobs paid decently but the work was not very frequent. I worked for a small publishing company as a publicity assistant for ten dollars an hour and as an independent supervisor for an board of directors election at a non-profit. Any other attempt at getting a “normal” job completely and utterly failed. The Corporate world seemed to want nothing to do with me. I didn’t even get any interviews.
So law school it was because my grandfather was a lawyer (though retired by the time I was born), my dad was a lawyer, and my brother (LeeEsq at the League) is a lawyer. My timing probably could have been better but I needed to get the theatre thing out of my system. I would have flunked out of law school otherwise.
Despite the crisis, my thirteen month gig was the best year of my life as an independent working adult. I paid my rent, my insurance, and still had money for fun and some savings. Though I am still concerned about the future and landing that associate position is still a bit of a challenge it seems. Some of my friends from law school “hung up their own shingle” but all these people have partners or spouses with jobs and therefore a secondary source of income plus access to health insurance. I do not have a spouse or partner.
Basically, I don’t know whether I was part of a scam or not. I never wanted to do Big Law and I knew that my starting salary would almost certainly not be in the six-figure range (this seems to be a big part of the scam, the misleading about starting salaries and hiring rates. It took my dad and brother 1 year to get their first law jobs and both started with modest salaries) However, I am still one of many somewhat impractical people who went to law school because we could not get employment anywhere else. Since America is a nation of 300 million people, there are probably a lot of us very smart but very impractical people. Liberal Arts majors of the World Unite! You have nothing to lose but your Foucault!
But no one really had an answer to my question from my League essay. What are careers for liberal arts majors in the era of STEM, STEM, STEM? A lot of the paralegals at the firm I worked at were liberal arts majors. Some were doing it as a day job and writing or working on their art at nights and weekends. Others were seeing how they felt about legal careers.
Journalism is dying, academics is increasingly impossible because now everyone seems stuck in adjunct hell. What are we to do?Report
Ahh… Japan. Where this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQgGUEnMZrg
counts as community service.
… and people wonder why my stories always sound so out there!
Because this actually happened. (as in, they put together the readers,
and even hired voice actors… and then distributed them to schools.)Report
There is a crying need in STEM for folks that can actually write in English. I recall when I was working on a standards committee we had an English major in the group. and he was able to make the documents we were working on much clearer. This does however mean that one needs to minor in at least Math and Physics, and perhaps some field of engineering. How many times has one read computer documentation that is not well written. Also this applies to folks that major in some foreign languages, if they can translate technical and user manuals into actual good English they are valued.
I don’t know how large the market is but it is an area. However it does require one to have an aptitude in the STEM area at least thru calculus and calculus physics, which of course leaves a lot of folks out of the picture.
One question occurs how many english programs have good technical writing training, rather than focusing on further explication of shakespeare for example. Or interestingly anthropolgy if willing to apply has some application in figuring out how folks will use new technology, and providing input in the design phase to make the technology better.
So it suggests that one do a minor in STEM (i.e. the first 2 years type course) along with a humanities major.
In the law school case if one has the STEM background what is the market for patent attorneys like?Report
“In the law school case if one has the STEM background what is the market for patent attorneys like?”
As far as I know, good to excellent. Same with attorneys with serious foreign language skills. You will always be able to get at least well-paid document review work if you are fluent in Japanese, Korean, and other hard languages. But fluent is really fluent and not “I can read Manga aimed at teenagers fluent.”
“One question occurs how many english programs have good technical writing training, rather than focusing on further explication of shakespeare for example.”
Larger universities probably have at least courses in technical writing. The issue here is that what is the point and purpose of a university education. This seems like a never ending debate. Is it to create good employees or well-educated and intellectually curious citizens who cane think and write critically and well? If the purpose is to create good employees, we should focus on technical writing. If to create well-educated citizens, we should focus on Shakespeare and Milton.
“I don’t know how large the market is but it is an area. However it does require one to have an aptitude in the STEM area at least thru calculus and calculus physics, which of course leaves a lot of folks out of the picture.”
Including me. The issue seems to be that law school was the destination of choice for smart people who were not cut for medicine, business, or engineering/science careers. This worked well for decades and in the past few years the system has been destroyed. A lot of the panic seems to be in finding careers for these people.Report
Historically the point of a college education was in many cases to get a job. Look at the names of many institutions when the were founded, before they became comprehensive universities, they were Normal or Teachers colleges, thats vocational training. Or look at the Land grant schools, which were set up to train in the Agriculture and Mechanic arts (engineering). Before WWII there might have been one basically comprehensive state supported university in a state. Perhaps this is a return to that state of affairs.Report
I do think that a lot of liberal arts majors will do best by doing something like the the “day job and writing or working on their art at nights and weekends.” And sometimes, the day job might be something with a lot of drudgery (perhaps paralegal work fits in here): they might have to accept punching a time clock and dealing with customers over the phone or otherwise serving people, or pushing papers and being an office drone, or doing some other job that provides income but is not fulfilling.
This might have sounded harsh–and I admit there was at least a little of the chip-on-shoulder “well, that’s what I did” ism at the back of my mind when I wrote that–but sometimes living the life of the mind is or ought to be its own reward. Not all liberal arts graduates (and here I include the graduates from state schools and not only the private liberal arts schools) will go on to executive positions or the old standby of “work at a non-profit.”
If the demand is for STEM, that’s probably what’s going to be the moneymakers. (I suspect that the supposed demand for STEM might be more of a pre-bubble marketing hype than anything, but I really don’t know, and as Lyle pointed out, there might be a demand for English-speaking and good-writing STEM workers.) Sometimes the liberal arts are their own reward. And I think graduates in liberal arts and those considering in majoring in liberal arts are well served to think of it that way instead of throwing good money after bad at law school or grad school.Report
“sometimes living the life of the mind is or ought to be its own reward”
Maybe instead of saying “ought to be,” which sounds to me very judgmental, I ought to say “can be” or “might be.”Report
Another aspect of being someone with a law-student/lawyer mind is that law-student/lawyers tend to get fairly cranky when listening to people speak meaningless nonsense.
A lot of career advice these days seems to be in the form of useless and vague buzzwords and terminology like “think outside the box”. I have never met a lawyer or law student who could stand such advice and often world get very cranky if someone told them to “think outside the box” or any other buzzword non-sense. Yet there are people who can lap those empty phrases up like they are very sage advice. There seems to be a lot of business and management abuse of the English language with phrases like the above. All phrases like that are void for vagueness.Report
People who suggest “think outside the box” rarely have any fucking idea what they’re suggesting. Google American McGee’s bio, and you’ll see what I mean. “Out Of The Box” … sure… you really want to suggest that????
“Out of the Box” means most people gonna fail, and fail hard.Report
Law and law school revolves around thinking in the box.Report
You just think it does, because you think inside the box.Report
I, too, wrote about law school and the career that can reasonably be expected to result from it for the symposium. First, I asked why anyone would want to go to law school in the first place. Second, I explored the hoops you have to jump through to get in. Third, I looked at how one gains admission to the bar (at least in the United States; the OP offers a welcome counterpoint with a look in the UK). Fourth, I looked at what the actual practice of law is like and the remuneration actually available. Finally, because it was getting pretty bleak, I looked at some ideas to reform things.
At the end of the day, I largely agree with the OP: my impression is that law school today would not be worth it given the realities of the legal profession. NewDealer is more optimistic than I, as appropriately befits his status as a younger attorney. I will say that I think it can get better. It just hasn’t yet.Report
I don’t what else I can do besides be optimistic. At this point I have too much skin in the game. Going along with Paul Campos style railing would only put me in a pit of depression and despair. Especially because he is kind of lacking on advice for people who were part of the “law school scam”. He doesn’t seem to have any advice on what underemployed lawyers could do as alternative careers.
Though I wonder how much of this is because many industries only seem to select from certain schools. A kind of “old Boys network” that now includes more women and minorities (presuming they attended the right schools):
http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/brown-and-cornell-are-second-tier/27565
The article basically states that the best Law Firms, Investment Banks, and Consultaning firms only want people from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and maybe Stanford. I’ve seen some small boutique law firms say this quite strongly on their website as a selling point. Choice quote from the article:
‘Here’s a manager from a top investment bank describing what happens to the resume of someone who went to, say, Rutgers: “I’m just being really honest, it pretty much goes into a black hole.”
What’s surprising isn’t that students from elite universities have a leg up; it’s that students from other colleges don’t have a chance, even if those colleges are what the rest of us might consider elite. Here’s what a top consultant had to say about M.I.T.:
You will find it when you go to like career fairs or something and you know someone will show up and say, you know, “Hey, I didn’t go to HBS [Harvard Business School] but, you know, I am an engineer at M.I.T. and I heard about this fair and I wanted to come meet you in New York.” God bless him for the effort but, you know, it’s just not going to work.
There are exceptions, but only if the candidate has some personal connection with the firm. And the list of super-elite schools varies somewhat depending on the field. For instance, Columbia might be considered elite by some investment banks, but others describe it as ”second-tier” or “just okay.”’
I went to an undergrad institution that would be considered very elite. According to Wikipedia, nearly 8000 hopeful students applied for a spot in the class of 2016 and slightly over 1800 were accepted. This is an acceptance rate of just under 23 percent.
Yet according to the linked article, we are second tier and probably not going to be considered by many companies in many industries. We had a computer science major but perhaps other top tech firms are similarly snooty and only want MIT, CalTech, Stanford, etc.
In short, this could be another reason for the law school trap, many bright students from many schools cannot get into a lot of places because of the name of their degree granting institution. This can include many top schools like Wesleyan, Williams, Amherst, Vassar, Swathmore, MIT, Cal Tech, Michigan, Cal, Reed, Colby, Bowdoin, Oberlin, Kenyon, Grinnell, the University of Chicago, etc.
The issue does not seem to be that students are not considering alternatives but hiring managers and HR are narrow-minded in who they accept depending on the industry. If an Oberlin grad can’t even get herself an interview because her degree says Oberlin than why should she consider things beyond law school?Report
“I don’t what else I can do besides be optimistic. At this point I have too much skin in the game. Going along with Paul Campos style railing would only put me in a pit of depression and despair. Especially because he is kind of lacking on advice for people who were part of the “law school scam”. He doesn’t seem to have any advice on what underemployed lawyers could do as alternative careers.”
He has also failed to bring peace to the Middle East.
What he *can* do is to keep some people from going into the meatgri der in the first case.Report
And sound oh so righteous, oh so noble, and oh so holy while still retaining a lucrative salary from the scamming Institutions that he professes to hate.
Wikipedia tells me that the University of Colorado Law School is ranked 44th according to US News and World Report. Respectable but not stellar. The same wikipedia article says that Inside the Law School Scam calls Colorado “overranked” and it should really be “117”
Do you think that Mr. Campos tells his Property students to runaway while they are still ahead? Or does he just go on teaching The Rule Against Perpetutities and about Easements and the Fee Simple?Report
In short, this could be another reason for the law school trap, many bright students from many schools cannot get into a lot of places because of the name of their degree granting institution. This can include many top schools like Wesleyan, Williams, Amherst, Vassar, Swathmore, MIT, Cal Tech, Michigan, Cal, Reed, Colby, Bowdoin, Oberlin, Kenyon, Grinnell, the University of Chicago, etc.
I’m skeptical of this, for any proportional definition of “a lot.” There just aren’t enough Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford graduates for more than a tiny percentage of employers to draw exclusively from that pool. On the order of 5,000-7,000 graduating seniors each year, for all four schools combined. Some employers may hire exclusively from these schools, but that can’t be the norm, or anywhere close to it.Report
I think that law kind of works as a default profession for people who are ambitious and driven intelligent but do not want to pursue a career in architecture, business, science, engineering, academics, medicine, and variety of other fields. Maybe they feel they do not have the talents for a particular field like architecture or engineering. They might think that other fields like teaching will not give them the money they want but that they do not have the right mindset for business or finance for some reason. They go to law as a an alternative.
When I entered college, all I knew was that I wanted to major in history. I had no idea what I’d do after graduation. Towards my junior year, I decided that I’d either go to law school or continue on and get a PhD and go into academia. I knew that getting a PhD would take a long time and did not wanted to get to work sooner than latter, so I decided to go to law school.Report
I cannot believe so many people pile on such massive debt to obtain a law degree. Worse, except for a few top schools, a degree from most schools offer little chance to obtain a job that readily allows the person to pay back the debt and still live a life that can afford a middle class experience. That all said, if one attends say MIT for a STEM degree, the cost (unless you have a lot of money) is down right cheap. What they say what they charge and what you are really asked to pay is a world of difference – in the case of MIT, I make very high end five figures and I will pay about 15% of their stated tuition for my child; these schools are a great deal if you have the academics to get in … . This would have occurred for Stanford, Caltech, Princeton, Yale and so on. People should not rule these schools out on a cost bases.Report
People simply don’t know. They see average salaries and don’t realize that those are ‘trimmed’, meaning that the law schools count the successes and ignore the failures.Report
I think we would have to know more about the particulars of your child’s case as an applicant to these schools to know how this experience generalizes as an example for families looking at choosing and financing a path through higher education for their children. It doesn’t sound like your situation is necessarily an entirely common one.Report
John, thanks for mentioning yhe blog ‘Inside the Law School Scam’. I found it to be eye-opening.Report