Exposing The Law School Scam

NPR exposes the Law School Scam

2012-01-16T19:43:00.003-06:00

Here is the url from the NPR site, and there is also a link to listen to the story that went out on the radio.

Do Law Schools Cook Their Employment Numbers?

NPR does a good job on this article, especially with this quote:
"A school might advertise a median salary of $160,000," ... "and not disclose that only 10 percent of a class actually responded to the salary survey."

Exactly! The fact is that the law school industry pushes those median salaries figures everywhere they can, but the fact is that for many if not most law schools, a small, sometimes a very small, fraction of grads actually report their salaries. That is the fact that will get the jury on our side. That is the smoking gun. Until we can get discovery and really get some inside info. Of course, many grads have reported on the internet that the practices of these law schools in collecting this data are crooked as hell.

A major reason why the law school scam has been picked up by the mainstream media

2011-12-21T08:45:00.001-06:00

The mainstream media has picked up the law school scam story. I suspect that $ has a lot to do with this. The law school scam stories are widely read. In fact, some here have pointed out from time to time that law school scam stories that have been published in the NY Times and/or other major newspapers have been quite widely read. Some of these newspapers have info detailed whether certain stories are among the most emailed stories. Comments I have seen indicate that scam stories on nytimes.com etc have indeed been widely emailed stories.

I suspect that what is happening is that readers who happen to reside in the middle upper class and the upper class zip codes are very interested in these stories. It is from these zip codes that most of the law school applicants come. And so they and their families are very interested in scam stories.

The large newspapers like nytimes.com and etc do track what zip codes where their readers reside via cookies. And stories on these sites like nytimes.com etc are tagged with descriptive tags. Tags that are widely read and emailed etc by readers in high income zip codes are of interest to the newspapers because their advertisers are very interested in getting their ads in front of readers who have money, and that means advertisers who advertise on these large newspaper sites like stories that attract attention of readers who have money.

So I suspect that what is happening here is the result of an algorithmic process: the software that is linked into these big newspaper sites is telling newspaper editors that law school scam stories are attracting the sort of readers that advertisers want. Editors want more advertising income. They can take these results to the advertisers and say "Look at how many readers we have from high income zip codes. Pay us more $$ for your advertising."

So the editors are pushing reporters to report on the scam.

We won. And we got these bastards on the run.

2011-10-06T05:57:00.004-05:00

Oh, how times have changed.

Nice article. But there is an issue that has yet to go mainstream, and I think the exposure of this issue would go a long way towards explaining and exposing the scam.

A large percentage of grads from lower ranked law schools have parents who are either successful lawyers with their own firms or who are well-off and have other businesses. And so when these particular law school students graduate, they go to work for the family business, whether that is a successful law firm or other business. What percentage of these grads are in this position? Don't know. But at my school, I would say it was not too far from 20 percent.

Excellent Law School Scam Site: http://jdscam.blogspot.com/

2011-07-29T01:26:00.002-05:00

I tried to add this site to my blogroll, but it would not take. But it is a good one.

NYTimes Giveth and the NYTimes Taketh Away. But is there $ involved?

2011-07-25T05:03:00.008-05:00

The NY Times has an "ad-story" out that promotes the master's degree as the "new bachelor's degree." This "ad-story" is effectively an advertisement for higher education disguised as a news story. I have to wonder if the higher education lobbyists on K Street paid for this "ad-story."

And if so, the question that arises is whether the money paid for this "ad-story" was paid specifically or whether it is disguised as an advertising buy for more conventional ads for colleges, and the quid pro quo payoff for those ad buys was this ad-story.

The NY Times has however been in the forefront on exposing the law school scam. See this recent article on the law school scam. But I would imagine that exposing part of the education scam would send a message to the higher education industry: "pay us more money or we will expose your scam."

So, pay up, higher education industry--pay the mass media man with advertising dollars or else you will be exposed.

Note that in the "Get a Masters Degree Now" ad-story linked above, that there is no way for readers to leave comments. One wonders whether the higher education cartel had to pay extra for the "no comments" option.....

Tell the ABA's Zack what you think of the ABA's refusal to stop the law school scam

2011-07-22T07:42:00.008-05:00

The ABA has a story mentioning ABA's Zack and his simpering response to Senator Grassley re: the law school scam. There is a section for comments below.

Senator Grassley Slams The ABA for its Complicity in the Law School Scam. And a Telling Comment in the Wall St Journal

2011-07-21T21:22:00.006-05:00

Senator Grassley has come down hard on the ABA for allowing law schools to lie about how well their graduates do. And now in response the ABA has output yet another mealy mouthed, platitude-ridden turd as reported in the Wall St Journal.

Beneath the story are some interesting comments. Such as this one:

The commentator "Do not go to law school" wrote:" ....My Senator told me that for every attorney posting on USAJobs, they receive 4,000 applicants. Locally, 1200 attorneys apply for every position."

That is about what I have heard from the management of the government agency where my friend works. There is a massive oversupply of attorneys.

And yet the ABA continues to generate these "let them eat cake" responses.

I say, off with their heads! Either the federal government or the state government need to step in and disempower the ABA. And where are the state bar associations in all this? The California Bar has at least done some lip service on this issue. But no other bar has uttered a peep.

Lawsuits against schools for deceptive advertising. Where is the real smoking gun?

2011-07-16T05:07:00.006-05:00

So, the battle against the law schools has begun.
A law firm was trying to find plaintiffs to go against a law school, and is being sued for defamation.

Many schools like Thomas Cooley run ads that get all over the nation.

And many states have some very strict laws against deceptive ads.

There are many deceptive ads run by all sorts of businesses that could well be actionable. But what are the damages if you sue for a hamburger that looked a lot better in the advertisement than what you actually get? Zilch. There are no damages and therefore no lawsuits on these deceptive ads.

But if law schools deceive people into working hard for 3 years and going into 100K of debt, well, then there are damages, real damages that make a lawsuit worthwhile.

Time to take down this educational cartel.

But it is going to be hard. You see, the REAL deceptive ads that the educational cartel runs are the "news stories" that the media runs. Why on earth is the media so hot to run all these stories that tout the salaries of college and law school grads? Because a large part of the revenue for the media is advertising purchased by these schools. The bogus employment stats that are disseminated via these advertisements masquerading as news stories is where the real damage is done. The obvious ads by the schools are not all that deceptive. And they are not all that effective, either.

Most of the ads run by schools are feel good sort of ads and stay away from making claims about employment.

The truly deceptive and truly effective ads that the schools run in the media are these fake "news stories" that discuss bogus, inflated employment and salary figures.

The media runs these ad-stories in exchange for the advertising buys by the schools. The ads that the schools actually buy are not all that effective or even deceptive. But the ad-stories are a different matter entirely.

I would imagine there has got to be some sort of quid pro quo going on. The schools buy ads and in exchange the media runs stories that are actually ads.

If somehow a law firm could get some discovery that could uncover a smoking gun link between the schools and the media regarding the running of ad-stories in exchange for buying conventional ads, THEN you could really put these bastards out of business.

Furthermore, the educational cartel even funds third party nonprofits to do the dirty work of collating and disseminating fake stats to the media.

Look at the emails between the schools and the media. That is where you might find the real smoking gun.

Look for ad-stories run in the media that mention a particular law school. Then get discovery of the emails for that school and see if there is a quid pro quo advertising buy.

40% of all resumes received for paralegal positions are from law school grads or lawyers

2011-07-03T19:25:00.003-05:00

....according to the Wisconsin Law Journal.

And when those law school websites and their lying deans tell you that 90 percent or more of all grads have jobs, now you know what sort of jobs those grads are getting--if they are lucky, that is.....

Law.com site touts the effect of "unruly scambloggers," and ABA Journal publishes some very telling graphs from Prof. Henderson.

2011-06-29T21:30:00.008-05:00

The law.com website is one of the biggest legal websites around. They have published yet another article dealing with the scamblog movement and our battle against the fraudulent employment statistics used by law schools.

And over at the ABA Journal site, Professor Henderson has weighed in with an excellent scambusting article with lots of graphical goodies showing the decline of the legal job market and how it really started before the Great Recession.

Good work on both articles.

How US News and the law school cartel did an end-run around the scambloggers' use of the phrase "Third Tier Toilet."

2011-06-09T23:59:00.004-05:00

US News & World Report used to be a news magazine. Nowadays it is primarily a propaganda organ for the higher education industry, in particular, the law school education industry cartel.

US News has recently put out some self-serving, mealy-mouthed propaganda about how the law schools need to be more forthcoming and transparent with their use of employment stats. Ya don't say?
Here is my response to that propaganda:

don't believe a word us news says.

Same for the aba and the nalp and the law schools.

these entities all work hand in hand together to fleece these naive, young kids.

the law school industry is a 3 billion a year income machine. And those at the top of this law school industry make very handsome salaries, and they will do almost anything to keep the $$ rolling in.

For example, the us news law school propaganda outlet has long ranked law schools in multiple tiers: 1st tier, 2nd tier, 3rd tier, and finally 4th.

Been that way for many years.

Well, as the number of law school grads has increased over the past few years, and as the number of lawyer jobs going overseas has increased, and as the number of law jobs here in america has decreased, it has become increasingly apparent that the job and income numbers used by the cartel were fake, and that these false employment stats were simply used to entice us to sign those student loans.

As a result an online coalition of new lawyers has formed (we call ourselves the lawyers against the law school scam), and we have spoken out against the law school education cartel.

One of the ways that we lawyers online have fought back against the cartel is to create our own buzz words and phrases to show the truth behind the 'law school scam.'

One such phrase we created was "third tier toilet." That phrase captures the truth behind the fact that most of the grads from lower ranked law schools (i.e., the law schools in the third and fourth us new tiers) are doomed, that they have wasted several years of their lives, put themselves into huge debt, and come away with nothing to show for it. Just like me.

The phrase 'third tier toilet' and its shorthand version 'TTT' caught on big online.

And how did the law school cartel (the law schools, the NALP and US News) react to our use of 'third tier toilet'?

They eliminated the tiers. Gone are the tiers. They did an end-run around our use of TTT (third tier toilet) by eliminating the third tier and all the rest of the tiers. Now US News simply has ranked and unranked schools.

Big change from many, many years of having tiers. Now the phrase 'third tier toilet' has little meaning. And that was the intent of US News.

US News works hand in hand with the rest of the law school industry to keep those 3 billion dollars of student loans rolling in.

To find out more about the law school scam, google the phrase "law school scam."

Lawyer from low-ranked law school charged with prostitution

2011-06-06T07:07:00.009-05:00

According to this story, a district attorney has charged a young lawyer with prostitution. The DA claims she was a prostitute for $50 this past May of 2011-- after she had received her law license (November of 2010).

So how is it, if the DA is correct, that a lawyer has to prostitute herself, and for as little as 50 dollars?

Well, from the article, I can see that her law school was not a high ranked law school, and from her website, I can see that she is 25 years old, a new lawyer, and has had to go solo on her own.

The law schools promise a handsome income for almost all graduates. But they lie.

I hope this young lady beats the charges. I suspect that she was a victim of the law school scam. And maybe that DA can go find some crimes that have actual victims.

Let this be a lesson to all you law school wannabees--if you go to a lower ranked law school, you may find yourself in dire financial straits.

Oh, Sara "Let them eat cake and get over it" Stadler, the revolution is nigh

2011-05-29T13:15:00.007-05:00

Law Professor Sara Stadler of Emory Law had her Marie Antoinette moment, when, during her address of the 2011 graduating Emory Law School class, she told the grads to "get over it" (when referring to the fact that there are few jobs for law school grads).

Queen Sara, why don't you "get over" this:

The fact is, Queen Sara, that we law school grads have had enough of getting ripped off by the law school scam. Haven't you heard? The lawsuits have begun. We are storming the Bastille of the law school cartel. It's a revolution, dearie!

Oh YEAH! A Law School is Being Sued for Bogus Employment Stats!

2011-05-27T18:09:00.000-05:00

Go, Anna, Go!

Senator Barbara Boxer continues to attack the law school industry scam. The ABA responds. And I respond to the ABA.

2011-05-21T01:35:00.007-05:00

See here.

The ABA/Law school industry spokesperson Zack said:
"Even in these difficult times law students have not made a mistake in choosing the law as their profession."

Nonsense. Even the ABA's own stats show that there are 1.4 million working age grads of law school. However, the Bureau of Labor Statistics federal govt website shows that only about 550,000 people report themselves as being employed as lawyers, and only about 210,000 report themselves as self employed lawyers. That means only about 760,000 people make a living as a lawyer. And some of those 760K people are only in it short term because they are going to either 1) go out of business or 2) their temporary jobs in the legal field will end and some of those will not be able to find other employment in the legal field.

So what is the growth rate of the legal profession and what is the replacement rate for retiring lawyers? That is how many open slots come available in the legal industry for graduating law school grads each year. There are about 45,000 new law school grads each year. That means that new law school grads constitute 5.8 percent of the legal industry --ANNUALLY. Does of the sum of replacement plus growth come anywhere near 45,000 annually?

No, it does not. In fact the BLS website shows that the growth trend for the industry over the last few years is negative. Negative growth. Even if the growth rate were 1 percent, that would only employ about 7600 new lawyers annually. But it is not 1 percent. It is less. In fact, the legal industry is shrinking.

So what about replacement of retiring lawyers? Is there enough there to employ the 45K new grads each year? No. As the EXPOSING THE LAW SCHOOL SCAM blog shows, about 2 to 3 percent of all workers retire each year. If you assume a 40 year career for most people, and 100 percent retirement (everyone retires eventually), then 40 goes into 100 2.5 times. Thus, about 2.5 percent of all lawyers will retire each year.

So what is 2.5 percent of 760,000 people? Well, that would be about 19,000 people. That is how many jobs/slots there are available for the new graduates of law school. Even if you are wildly optimistic and factor in a 0.5 percent growth rate, that is only about 19,000 plus 3,800, which is 22,800 slots available for new law school grads.

And as we know, there are 45000 new law school grads each year. That means that roughly half of all law school grads are out in cold each year. After going into huge debt. And that was using an OPTIMISTIC view of the data. Realistically, less than half of all law school graduates will find work in the "profession."

Mr Zack of the ABA thinks that's just dandy. Mr Zack, does the ABA (and you) take money from parties that profit from the law school scam?

Do you want young people to gamble 100K dollars of debt and 3 years of their lives on a 50 percent chance of failure? Better they should borrow 100,000 dollars and plunk it down on a roulette table in Las Vegas. At least that way they do not waste 3 years of their lives.

So, Mr Law School Industry Spokesman, I think you are wrong. And I think the Justice Dept should investigate the law school industry racket and its propaganda organs, the ABA and the NALP.

law school applications dropping?

2011-05-15T16:02:00.002-05:00

Applications to law schools drop steeply
Minneapolis / St. Paul Business Journal - by Ed Stych, Staff Writer according to a news story out of Minnesota.

The article quotes some law school staffers, who say that there is a lot of national attention on jobless law school grads. Yeah, thanks to the efforts of lawyers like me who have gone online and exposed the rip-off scam that is law school and their fake employment statistics for law school grads as put out by the law school cartel.

When are the law school staffers going admit that their employment figures are fake?

Is there blood in the water?

2011-04-30T19:16:00.005-05:00

Will there be a media feeding frenzy on the law school scam?

The NY Times exposes the law school scholarship scam.

Law school prof Steven Harper savages the scam.

In Discover Magazine, the Gene Expression blog insightfully points out that "Outrage and disillusionment has percolated out far enough socially that this is a story that many people are interested in" and that law school grads are of the same social class as those who have the power to expose the scam.

Attack! Feed!
Attack! Feed!
Attack! Feed!

Has anyone noticed how quiet the NALP and other law schools shills have been lately?

2011-04-06T07:50:00.003-05:00

Usually, about this time of year, you can count on the NALP and other entities associated with the law school industry to be putting out media propaganda about how fantastic the employment and salary figures are for last year's law school graduates. Of course, as we scambloggers have been saying and as everyone else is now discovering, the law school grad stats put out by the NALP and the industry are as phony as Monopoly money.

But where are the law schools shills this year? Where be their boasting and shillery now? Ah, but now is the winter of their discontent, made litigation-wary by this harsh spring sunlight of mainstream media scambusting. They aint saying a peep. Keeping they mouths shut, they is...

And we aint done with you yet, ya liars. You goin' down, beeyotches. The Perp Walk. The "Bubba in yer prison cell" future.

US Senator calls out the lying law schools and their fake employment stats

2011-03-31T17:27:00.004-05:00

http://abovethelaw.com/2011/03/watch-out-law-schools-united-states-senators-want-you-to-stop-lying/

You hear me, you lying law school admins? Your muthafucking day is a-coming. Like in the movie SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, that old pseudo-bible sayin' applies to YOU, law school admins:
"His judgment cometh and that right soon..."

The Atlantic asks about an "Anti-College Backlash"

2011-03-31T17:24:00.003-05:00

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/03/an-anti-college-backlash/73214/

You hear me, law school bitches? Your day is coming, lying fuckers.....

Law School Liars Busted By Forbes

2011-03-23T18:06:00.003-05:00

http://blogs.forbes.com/kurtbadenhausen/2011/03/23/law-school-graduates-do-not-make-160000/

Suck it, ya lying law school beeyotches

we scambloggers did this

2011-03-05T06:21:00.000-06:00

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2011/03/04/the-incredible-shrinking-law-school-its-the-vision-of-two-ny-deans/

SCAMbloggers, not bloggers....

are we scambloggers primarily responsible for stopping 2 new law schools in texas?

2011-02-11T04:36:00.004-06:00

Looks like the long planned new law schools in texas are never gonna make it off the drawing board.
From this article, it is clear that we have 'turned' elements of the mass media. We have in part co-opted the consensus wisdom. I am betting these 2 new schools of law are dead.

And who stopped 'em? You and me, babe. We few, we proud, the scambloggers. This never would have happened had we not filled google with our truth. Our mindvirus seed of alternative, on-the-ground truth has found purchase on the rocky shores of the public mind....

NY Times asks whether law school is a losing game

2011-01-09T12:06:00.002-06:00

Excellent NYT article here. Refers to the bogus law school employment stats as a 'wonderland' that is 'finessed' by the law schools.

TTT law prof writes detailed expose of law school scam

2010-10-30T08:33:00.001-05:00

Good going, Prof.

Above The Law exposes new lawyers desperately rapping on youtube, hoping to make a living. And the law school shills are there, trying to downplay it

2010-10-22T07:41:00.002-05:00

Here it is. Check out all the apologists in the comments, trying to downplay this and make it out to not be as bad as it is. Don't tell me that the law school profs and staff are not out on the internets, trying to stem the tide of law school scambusting.

They're here...

"There are 5,057 janitors in the U.S. with Ph.D.’s, other doctorates, or professional degrees."

2010-10-22T03:41:00.003-05:00

This article asks why so many go to college and cannot use the degree. The answer is that the higher education lobbying/propaganda organizations are funded by the colleges to put out bogus income and employment statistics. These stats have become part of the culture.

Schools offer kids the chance to borrow money to live, and their media ads acknowledge this unwritten fact

2010-09-17T17:54:00.003-05:00

We have no decent social welfare state in this crap nation, and so few kids have jobs. So in order to get money for a place to live and food and transportation, they have to go to school and borrow money, and a lot of that $$ borrowed is for basic living expenses. In western europe, the unemployed kids have the dole. Here, we force them in to debt. This is truly a neoslave colony, one borne of a early national history that was based on indentured and chattel slavery and a cruel and autocratic national culture that grew up around slavery.

Going up tha country, go to get away...

2010-09-09T17:31:00.003-05:00

As the scambloggers report, the law school cartel is trying to sell the idea that all these jobless new lawyers need to go to the rural areas to get work.

Oh, yeah!

Oh, it is SO DARN EASY to get experience as a pro bono lawyer!

2010-09-09T17:31:00.001-05:00

Learn the truth on JDU, lawyer wannabes:

Fark picks up on the New Jersey Law School ScamBusting Story

2010-08-17T04:59:00.000-05:00

Lots of comments on the fark thread.

Oh, and some snarky fuck at the New York Observer wrote a column on it.

The Newark Star Ledger and Reporter Leslie Kwoh do some scam busting.

2010-08-15T12:32:00.004-05:00

As reported here by the law school scambusting blog But I Did Everything Right, reporter Leslie Kwoh of The Star-Ledger has written a pretty darn good story on the law school scam. Maybe the best major media story on the law school scam.

It even mentions by name 3 lawyers who admit they got scammed.

Thanks to Scott, Justine, and Ben, those 3 brave lawyers. We owe you.

Stripper Says Video Game Design Degree Worthless

2010-08-07T13:59:00.004-05:00

Story sez schools charge 6 figures for worthless degrees. I am sure law school grads can relate.....

Plumbers vs Lawyers: The Law of Supply and Demand is a Harsh Mistress

2010-08-02T22:20:00.005-05:00

Compare this craiglist ad:

JM Plumber ($50 cash to interview) (Greater Houston area)
Date: 2010-03-24, 8:02AM CDT
.....

WE WILL PAY YOU $50 CASH ON THE SPOT TO INTERVIEW WITH US
$50 CASH for applicants meeting the following requirements:
Current Texas Journeyman/Tradesman License
Valid Driving License with good record
Good Background
Must be able to pass drug screen

With this craiglist ad:

Elite Law School Grads, Brave New NeoSlave World and Turtles All The Way Down

2010-07-31T10:23:00.010-05:00

On a JDU thread, the owner of that site, named Admin, who is a grad of an elite law school, offered this advice to another poster who was wondering whether to go to law school:

Admin (Jul 28 - 11:46 am)

Agreed. People here are overly negative. You have to work hard but it can be a very fulfilling career.

So here Admin is saying that all you have to do to have a good career in law is work hard.

Here is my rebuttal:

you wrote:
"You have to work hard but it can be a very fulfilling career."
Since "Admin" is a computer science undergrad major, I will use a computer science approach in my rebuttal.

"Hard" is relative. If you say "work hard and you can have a good law job" to person X, you are telling person X to do Y amount of work, which meets the threshold for hard work and thus will secure employment in law.

Then you say "just work hard" to another person, who we will call person X+1, and you can also assign a value to that amount of work, also equal to Y. If person X+1 does Y amount of work, then he will he have a good career in the law, right?

But in the real world the amount of hard work done does not increase the amount of legal work needed. In fact, the amount of legal work required by clients is independent of the amount of work (Y) done in order to have a good career.

The demand for lawyers is therefore unrelated to the amount of work Y done to prepare for a career in law.

Your advice tells people that there is an unlimited demand for lawyers. This is what is implied by telling people that all you need to do is work hard.

If young people believe your advice (that there is an unlimited amount of high paying jobs available if one only does the required amount of work), then they should go to law school. In fact, under the logic of your rubric, all young people should go to law school.

Hence, because the demand for lawyers is actually limited, and your advice says the exact opposite (that demand is limitless) then at some time T in the future, if you continue to say "work hard and you will have a good paying law job" to people, there will come a person N+Z at time T, where the value of work required to make a living is not Y any longer, but Y+K, where K is the additional amount of work needed to out-compete all those who previously received and took your advice.

As iterations of advice continue as time goes past T, so will the value of K increase.

K increases without bound, save for time constraints, population growth constraints and the physical limitations of the human body. What a great world the graduates of the elite schools would create for us...

This situation is called a race to the bottom.

A brave new world, indeed. But really nothing new. Slavery has always been around. But in this brave world, the chains are not made of iron, but of silver, as Lasswell put it. Chains of silver, chains of ideology and propaganda. If you say all the right words and take all the right positions, you will be rewarded by the elite. They no longer use chains of iron, but chains of silver that fit not the ankle, but the mind.

And the grads of the elite schools get picked to be our unelected federal judges/lords. Admin is a grad of one of those schools, and he adheres to their philosophies here. They are the enemy of the working class. If he advocates for the race to the bottom, no doubt someday the elite will put him in a position of power. If you just keep saying the right things.

Once again, we see that the grads of the elite schools continue to ignore the "turtles all the way down" logical fallacy, and it benefits them to do so.

I'm a Loser (Soy un Perdedor): Charter Members of the ShitLaw Hall of Fame

2010-07-28T02:41:00.008-05:00

I have decided to open the ShitLaw Hall of Fame, by way of celebrating the lawyers who are the losers in the great race for prestige that is law school and the legal profession. I include myself in this ShitLaw Hall Of Fame--a magna cum laude grad of a third tier toilet who now has a menial job just to pay the bills.

But who are some other charter members?

Please consider if you will one Charles J. Guiteau.

Don't remember him? He was a lawyer who assassinated U.S. President James A. Garfield on July 2, 1881.

Allow me to quote from his Wikipedia entry:

Guiteau then obtained a law license in Chicago, based on an extremely casual bar exam. He used his money to start a law firm in Chicago based on ludicrously fraudulent recommendations from virtually every prominent American family of the day. He was not successful. He argued only one case in court, the bulk of his business being in bill collecting. Most of his cases resulted in enraged clients and judicial criticism.

Gee, that sounds familiar...

He was executed by hanging.

Well, at least he was spared the humiliation of going to law school for 3 years, failing as a solo and then working in a menial job.
From a JDU thread, here is another description of a couple of anonymous current-day members of the ShitLaw Hall of Fame:

Immigration lawyers are the worst. We have dudes going into court in sneakers. One guy I see everyday, who is the nicest guy and I love him, but he has literally worn the same suit everyday for over a year, same shi[r]t and tie too.

Hey, suits are expensive.

Another guy looks like he slept on a subway grate. I have no doubt if he was just sitting on a park bench people would think he was homeless. His suit is all crumpled like it came out of the hamper. Loose and crooked tie, hair all messed up.

Housing is expensive, too.

The absolute worst though was about 2 months ago. I'm in the bullpen waiting for my case to get called. I'm sitting next to this ... lawyer. He looks bad enough. Dandruff all over him. Suit coat missing a button, doesn[']t match (you have like a 2 hour wait so you notice this stuff). However, his case gets called. He stands up and begins waddling up to the bench when I notice a huge hole in his pants. Right below the back pocket. You could literally see the guys butt cheek. the hole was like 6 inches in diameter.

Ah, immigration law. I advertised for it, but never got a client. Kinda glad of that...

And the theme song for the Shit Law Hall of Fame? Well, let's just say that in the time of chimpanzees, I was a monkey....

GIGO means Garbage In, Garbage Out.

2010-07-26T09:03:00.005-05:00

Some law professor has written some blog post on some blog about how law school grads make a lot of money.
The writing is pretty crappy and so it makes it hard to read, but here is the gist of the blog post: law school is great cuz law school grad make so much money. Basically his post is saying that the bimodal salary graph for law school grads shows that law school is a good deal for a lot of grads. He basically says that any problems are due to the recession.

Here is my response to his blog post:

GIGO means Garbage In, Garbage Out.
The bimodal graph is based on faulty, manipulated, deceptive data.

Specifically, a very large percent of the reported data are from students who get temporary jobs at relatively high pay rates and then cannot find a way into a permanent job. But the survey is taken while they still have these temp jobs.
Looking at the BLS stats and the ABA stats shows that there are less than 20,000 lawyer jobs opening up per year due to growth and retirement. Yet there are 44,000 grads. Also, the stats show that there are 1.4 million law school grads of working age. Yet income tax returns only show about half of that number are earning a living as a lawyer.

Also, the entire data set is SELF REPORTED. It is common knowledge that self reported data that is involved with the subject's self esteem or sense of self worth is INACCURATE. Scientists would laugh at this data set because it is clearly going to be inflated by the reporters.

Also some of the lower ranked schools DO NOT PARTICIPATE IN THE SURVEY.

Also, many of the surveyed grads do not RETURN their surveys.

Also, the people who collect the data depend on that data for a living. If the data is not good, they lose their cushy jobs. Wow, talk about a conflict of interest. And never has any school been audited when it comes to these survey results.

What we have is a data set that is collected by those who depend on the results of the survey for their livelihoods, and then we have the fact that this data set/survey has NEVER EVER BEEN AUDITED.

The data set is invalid!
Therefore your entire blog post is garbage.

The Cruel Fist of Supply and Demand Spaketh Thusly

2010-07-25T09:30:00.003-05:00

Great post on JDU here.

Some quotes from that post that detail the life of a shit-lawyer:

numbclerk (Jul 25 - 10:04 am)

any advice on how anyone on here deals with the stress of shitlaw. I know we call it shitlaw, because it is. The pay is atrocious, the benefits non-existent. I look at friends who have only a BA and went into fields like finance and acounting and they own homes by now, have retirement plans, while I'm drowning in TTT debt and live paycheck to paycheck and am so fungible that if my boss shitcanned me tomorrow there would be an army of TTT grads storming our crap office over a Thai Restuarant like it was the Bastille.

Brilliant metaphor. Such talent and education, wasted on shitlaw.

I've had only one day off in a year, and think I'm am medically exhausted.

This is what happens when you have hordes of talented, intelligent, ambitious people who have spent years chasing a dream, but where that dream involves a supply and demand situation where the supply substantially exceeds the demand.

Laid off lawyer applies to 1000 jobs and gets zero interviews

2010-07-14T05:58:00.008-05:00

1000 applications later, no interviews. Go to law school, kids!

...A lawyer was laid off from her job as a lawyer..and in the past 1.5 years has applied to over 1000 jobs -- from secretary to file clerk to daycare worker -- and she has never been called for an interview.

Can't even get an interview for a menial job.....
Aint America great?

Only 54 percent of all working-age law school grads are able to make it as a lawyer....

2010-07-10T21:36:00.005-05:00

The FlusterCucked blog has a nice post showing that about 1.4 Million JDs graduated from law school in the past 40 years (based on ABA figures).

Also recall that in a earlier post on this blog, I cited a Kiplinger finance article from Yahoo which said that the average american retires at age 67.
And since the ABA stats show that the average law school grad is 28 years old, that makes the average lawyer career almost 40 years.

So, if 1.4 million people graduated from law school in the last 40 years and since the average career is 40 years, then almost 1.4 million people should be marking "lawyer" as their occupation on their tax returns, right?

Well, the Bureau of Labor Statistics site shows that about 760,000 people earn a living as a lawyer. About 550,000 have jobs as lawyers, and about 215,000 are
self employed lawyers.

What percent of 1.4 mill is 760K?

That means only about 54 percent of all law grads that are of average working age made it as a lawyer.

So, if lawyering actually pays 125K a year (as the law school industry claims), then why aren't more law school grads working as lawyers?

Something does not add up here.

"Everybody's not as big a crook as you are, Harry."....."Well, everybody tries!"

2010-07-10T01:08:00.007-05:00

Over on JDU, there is an interesting thread on possible practice areas for new solos.

Here is part of a post by me on that thread:

I can tell you that most of my TTT classmates who had to go solo right out of law school are now struggling solos--i.e., they are 'solo lawyers' operating out of their homes (or strip mall offices). Most of them are being supported by their parents or a high-earning spouse.

When you get a good job out of law school, you get a chance to build skills and build a client referral network. This is a special advantage that those who have to go solo right out of law school do not have.

There are some who have roots in rural/small/midsized towns and they are making it, but not all that well. One of them claimed to be making 6 figures but owes me hundreds for many months now.

Law is sales. Law is reputation. Reputations are built in part on inflated tales of income. High income means a good lawyer, right? So new solos try to lie their way to a good rep by lying about their incomes.

And if you have ever worked in sales, you know it is all about image. Lies are the foundation of sales. Don't ever believe what a solo or small business person tells you. They are all crooks and liars, at least at some level. If not, they will not make it unless they have a supply of $$ from elsewhere.

You think I am kidding? I will be honest with you--at the small business level, you will not survive unless you are at some level a crook. Not unless you have some special advantage.

There is an old Elvis movies called ROUSTABOUT. Probably on youtube right now. I recommend it. Elvis gets hooked up with a traveling circus in the 60s. The circus is constantly on the edge of failure -- like MOST small businesses. There is a larger circus that buys out smaller circuses and of course the bank is ready to foreclose on this small circus.

Elvis and the love interest have a tiff, and he quits the small time circus and goes to work for the bigger circus, singing for the circus goers.

The love interest from the small time circus goes to see elvis as he sings for the big circus. She plans to have sex with him in order to persuade him to return to the small circus. She cannot bring herself to do it. She loves him and cannot sell herself like this to him, etc etc.
Elvis realizes this. But the owner of the bigger circus tells Elvis she is just there to get him back to the small circus. He tells Elvis this. Elvis replies "Everybody's not as big a crook as you are, Harry." The successful circus owner replies: "Well, everybody tries!"

See that scene in this clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlLyOGp4YI4&feature=related

Lying and puffery etc is contrary to my personal makeup. I am a knowledge person, not a sales person. The law school scam is centered around a deceptive depiction of the legal profession as something that is almost failsafe, a sure thing, a bet that almost never loses. This false picture is created via a set of bogus income and employment stats for recent law school grads. That was the scam that sucked me in, the sting, the bogus stats sting of the law school industry.

The Loss of Lawyer Jobs Accelerates (but the ABA Journal tries to avoid the gist of the report)

2010-07-06T08:29:00.005-05:00

The ABA Journal reports that the federal govt stats show that "In June, the legal sector lost 3,900 jobs."

And since the ratio of support staff to lawyers is roughly 1 to 1, we can say that almost 2000 lawyer jobs were lost in June.

But here is the ABA headline for the story:

June Was a Bad Month for Law Firm Employees, Labor Stats Show

Well, I would think that in a publication for lawyers, that they would focus on lawyer jobs. But maybe they don't want to scare away any prospective law school applicants.

The story goes on to report that:

....And the stats for May weren’t as rosy an initially portrayed--there was an actual loss of 600 jobs.

the legal profession has lost 22,200 jobs since the same time a year ago,

So job loss for lawyers is accelerating.

And if 11000 lawyer jobs were lost in the past 12 months (with a 1 to 1 lawyer to support staff ratio, about half of all law firm jobs are lawyer jobs), who is hiring all those 2009 law school grads, as touted by the ABA and the NALP and the law schools?

"Fake it till ya make it," is the advice of experienced lawyers to newbie solos right out of law school. Translated, that means "Lie your ass off!"

2010-07-01T19:21:00.010-05:00

Lawyer friend of mine from law school (2 years out) owes me $600 for research I did for him. I told him 2 months ago I really needed the $ he owed me. Yet he is always telling me about the $200K he is making this year. Yet still no check.

Curious.

I see the same pattern of deceit in the telephone sales arena that now pays my bills. Lies and deceit everywhere.

Another law school friend who had to go solo says he charges 50K for a felony.
50K for a felony for a lawyer licensed 2 years. Won 1 misdemeanor trial. And that gets you 50K per felony. Yeah right.

Called up another former classmate whose office location shows as a residential area on google maps. yet she claims she is making 6 figs. Yeah right.

Curious and curiouser.

Another friend who does traffic tickets asks me if I know anyone who can help him execute a $1M judgment. Yeah, right.

Are these people lying to help bolster their rep? Naw, that could never happen. Lawyers would never exaggerate their income to boost their rep. Could never happen.

I went broke trying to make it as a solo. Everywhere I turn in sales I see people lying and exaggerating. Law is a form of sales. If you are making 200K you can afford to pay 600 dollars. Right?

This is the essence of america. Fake it till you make it means LYING!

It is all about lying to bolster your reputation as a hot shot lawyer. Even when you are not one.

God, I wish I had never applied to law school. I am a knowledge person, and a good one. I could have been a world class linux expert by now. I have a CS degree and experience in the field, and yet I gave it up for a pack of lies.

If I had wanted to be in sales, I could have dropped out of high school and fucking sold cars!

And what does this endemic and systemic pattern of lying amongst solo/smalltime lawyers have to do with law school and the law school scam?

It is all the same old house of cards built on deceit and propaganda.

Value in promoting the "scamblog" brand name?

2010-06-22T08:06:00.003-05:00

The Subprime JD scamblog has this post about how a wikipedia entry on the law school "scamblogs" was quickly deleted. Seems to me that we scambloggers deserve our own wikipedia entry, as many of us have been cited in established media sources and have been referred as "scamblogs" in said media sources. At least I think so.

In any event, I wonder whether it would be fruitful to establish the "scamblog brand name" as a way to get a wikipedia entry (and a link to same on the main "law school" entry in wikipedia). If we want a wikipedia entry, we will have to fight for it and marshall all the available evidence and possibly get more media mentions for the name itself.

Also, having this easily recognizable handle/brand name might make it easier for our movement to gain more visibility because the entire concept could be wrapped up in a single word and make it more portable in the mainstream media.

Anyway, I am thinking about ways to promote the scamblog name via this blog (e.,g., using the word a couple of times on the top and side of this blog).

Any thoughts from other scambloggers on this?

Survey Sez.....only 30 percent of all 2009 grads of large state university have jobs..

2010-06-21T11:00:00.006-05:00

This survey shows that:

Forty percent of May ASU graduates are still looking for a job, according to an ASU Career Services survey.

Actually, it means that only 30 percent have jobs, not that 40 percent do not have jobs. And of course all those media articles that talk about the median income for college grads of various majors never deals with this aspect of reality--those articles completly ignore these people and only focus on employed grads.

And what percent of those 30 percent with jobs has jobs at Starbucks, etc?

College is a scam for the most part.

Fear of failure and humiliation and a need to be perceived as being successful. This is the core of the legal profession....

2010-06-19T19:13:00.012-05:00

The law school shills, zero-L wannabees, and braggarts are out in force over on the latest Third Tier Reality Blog thread.

Basically, there is the eternal debate going on over there and here are a couple of my comments from there that go right to the heart of what I consider the essence of the law school scam:

HomelessLawyerPostingFromLibrary said...

once again, I will say that the law school cartel widely disseminates stats that give the impression that almost every single grad of law school makes a good living right away.
Specifically, the law school cartel stats show that well over 90 percent of all law school grads are employed at an average salary of about 60K. this is a fraudulent lie designed to lure in more victims.

I fell for that lie, hoping that I could at least pay my bills. I graduated magna. Never been fired from a job in my life. Experienced patent agent. CS Degree. Sent out over 150 resumes, emails, job apps, etc. Not one interview. Almost went broke and lost my life savings trying to go solo.

Perp walk the law school deans!

June 19, 2010 5:05 PM
HomelessLawyerPostingFromLibrary said...

One more thing--i never ever planned on 'struggling for years developing a practice.'
why? because the bogus stats show that is NOT necessary.

Does the bogus NALP stat showing that well over 90 pct of all law school grads earn a median income of about $60K at 9 months out of law school lead one to believe that one might need to struggle for years and work side jobs while building a practice? NO!

Fraud!!

But when I got out into practice after failing to land a job, I found that the majority of shitlawyers who did not land a decent job out of law school had to struggle along for years developing their practice and supporting themselves by working side jobs like selling insurance, night club bouncer, or else they were supported by their families.

And then I found out that perhaps a third of those jobs counted for the employment surveys were temp jobs cooked up by the law school cartel to hide the real situation. And I am not talking about the Great Recession situation. This is what the cartel was doing during the "good years."

And of course many of them had to drop out of law altogether. Either they did not feel like working a side job for years (or could not afford to do so) or their families could not support them, or whatever. This is what one lawyer called "the filtering out process." Well, this ole boy done been filtered out..
Many of them continue to struggle for years and years trying to build a practice. The fear of humiliation and failure keeps them going. That or a deep seated need to be perceived as successful.

The law schools know all this. But they continue to pump out the stats so they can make lots of money and their staff members can buy nice cars etc.

I NEVER would have even considered law school if I had known the true situation! This fraud ruined my life.

Experienced Criminal Lawyer in Large Metro Area Dreams of Day When He is Eligible for Partial Social Security

2010-06-09T17:57:00.005-05:00

I was at docket call in criminal court a month ago to plead out my final legal client. No one knew me. I was just some anonymous newbie TTT grad sitting amongst all the experienced crim def lawyers in the misdemeanor courts in this very large county. Some of the regulars looked askance at me: "Who is this guy?" The DA's don't respect you because they know you have never gone to trial.

Most of the other crim def lawyers seemed to know each other. One of them was speaking to a group of others and I overheard what he said. Here is a paraphrase of it: " Two years from now I turn 62. And I will be eligible for Social Security. When that day comes I won't come down here anymore. I will send an emissary."

So here was this experienced crim def lawyer in this big city. And he was dreaming of the day when he can get his partial social security payment and retire. You know how much that is? About 800 a month. And well I know that. In about a decade I will be eligible for that 800, too. And what a happy day that will be for me. That will be the day I leave the rat race for sure. Hopefully before then.

But I digress. My point is that here is this experienced lawyer at the height of his powers. And that 800 a month means a whole lot to him.

But the law schools say that the median pay for NEW lawyers is 60K. Hmm. Sumpin don't add up here.....
Surely an EXPERIENCED lawyer would not care about 10K a year. Right?

You have to be 'good' to succeed as a lawyer. But 'good' means that you are among the top percentiles. That means the odds are stacked against you.

2010-06-06T09:22:00.004-05:00

Here are some interesting quotes from a discussion on JDU that points out some of the issues in legal competition.

EmmanuelGoldstein (Apr 13 - 4:02 am)

the real problem here is that 1) you are not able to import your knowledge of logic and stats into the real world and 2) you are getting incomplete information and mistaking it for complete information.

Let's take a look at what you wrote:

-------------------------------

toiletexpert (Apr 13 - 3:32 am)

I talked to several lawyers who were family friends of my parents, and not a single one mentioned anything about the dark side of law. On the contrary, they were all very encouraging. I even specifically asked one whether there are too many lawyers. His response was that "it's not an issue if you're good...there are few good lawyers."

===================================

Holy shit. Your source comes right out and says that the odds are stacked against you, and you turn around and claim that is encouraging information! WTF?? Do you know what the word 'few' means? I think you do. But you are not able to successfully abstract the issues out here and use logic. 'Few' is not a good indicator that your odds of success are good. In fact, just the opposite. It means that out of 100 lawyers, FEW are good. And therefore FEW are successful.

And here is the all-important aspect of it: Good is RELATIVE. R-E-L-A-T-I-V-E.

FEW means you are gambling and the odds are stacked against you.

And you take this as ENCOURAGEMENT?????

Now, here is another part you do not understand. You do not know what GOOD means.

YOU think it means SMART. In fact, it more likely means the opposite. The FEW lawyers who make it are lucky or have help or have lots and lots of friends and a large social network.

For many lawyers, there is a filtering-out process. You have to have around for years to get the experience and connections to make it in law. Do you have the $$ to hang around? Do you have a spouse making 100K annually so that you can experiment and take the chance of failure? Hey, you must be "GOOD."

Are your parents rich? Hey, you must be "GOOD."

Legal clients come almost entirely from social connections. Are you naturally outgoing and have 100s of acquainances? Hey, you must be "GOOD."

Are you attractive and have a magnetic personality and confident demeanor? Hey, you must be "GOOD."

These are the things that make a successful lawyer, outside of those who get biglaw and build bankroll/skills/reputation/book of business there.

And here is the all-important aspect of it: Good is RELATIVE.

R-E-L-A-T-I-V-E. Why? Because of overcrowding and high social status, there is hyper-competition. So only the top of the crop gets through the filter process. That is what 'few' means.

If you do not come out of biglaw, you need to be good, relatively speaking. But "good" does not mean what you think it means.

Interesting comments on a Huff Post article about the disappearing legal career

2010-06-06T09:19:00.002-05:00

Here is the original article:
Is The Foolproof Law Degree Becoming An Endangered Species?

As usual, however, the comments are more insighful and accurate than the article:

colariz 51 minutes ago

4 Fans

I went back to school after a decade in sales/mktg/mgmt, thinking a law degree was the key to further advancement. Graduated from a tier-one school, with mixed academics (near the bottom of my class but on law review, passed the bar on 2nd try). It's now four years after graduation and two years after being admitted, and I still haven't found a full time legal job. Have managed to get by via temp work, contract work, paralegal/secretary gigs, even tried practicing out of my house - but have yet to find that elusive, promised, capital J job (with benefits?) that will allow me to repay the massive loans I'll be carrying the next 20+ years.

It's becoming clear that this was a huge mistake, taking years off from a decent career path to double down on a mortgage on my brain, right before the worst economic collapse of our lifetime. Oops! When I think back on all the advice I received whether or not to attend law school, every person who encouraged me to go ("there are so many things you can do with a law degree!"), not one of them was a lawyer. Every single lawyer I spoke to hemmed and hawed and cautioned against it, but I didn't listen - I heard what I wanted to hear.

Very typical outcome.

dogface 5 hours ago

Bottom line: half of all law graduates do not practice law. Of those who practice law, half find something else to do (read that "worthwhile") after ten years.

Suggestion to students: find something you love or like to do. Making excuses for others poor choices or incompetence or greed is not a way to live.

swester 5 hours ago

All I can say - thank goodness this story is finally hitting the mainstream media.

The law schools and their marvelous PR squads can only keep reality at bay for so long.

"Our graduates upon graduation get $160k/yr, and we have a 95% employment rate! So of course it's logical to pay us $160k for a degree!"

Oh, wait, those statistics are completely distorted and outdated? Didn't know that "employment" included unpaid internships and on-campus fabricated "jobs" to boost the bottom line? Whoops, tuition refund deadline has passed!

Another score for the law school cartel! High five!

tindo 5 hours ago

3rd year law student 2 weeks from graduation. What the author states is ABSOLUTELY true. If you arent at a top 15 ranked law school, your chances at employment are limited at best. Not to say if you are willing to travel you wont find a job. It just wont be high paying. Even Pub Defender positions are dry due to budget crunches.

The NALP reports on employment after graduation are utterly false. Most graduates finish school 120,000+ dollars in student debt, and end up working jobs that we could have gotten with our BA's. Because of the Bush Bankruptcy revisions, loan debt cannot be discharged. We'll be poor for life for getting educations.

It gets depressing seeing those who graduated before me work is administrative assistants or in bars making 10-15 bucks an hour after getting law degrees that cost 80,000 dollars in loans. Many are going back to school in utterly unrelated but hiring fields like teaching or health care. Its hard to apply anywhere with a JD, because no one wants to hire people with law degrees for none law work. The assumption is they burnt out or they are drifters who dont know what they want to do or they are overqualified.

I know someone who graduated LS, couldnt find a lawjob and ended up returning to Community college to get a Med Asst Associates. The funny thing is, that degree will get him a job for 1/10 of the price of a JD

Medical assistants, and other somewhat obscure careers at the periphery of healthcare are good bets.

TheRapture 6 hours ago

As a 2009 law school grad, I have to agree with this article. I went to a 2nd tier los angeles law school and have had a lot of difficulty finding work after passing the july 2009 bar. I have at least 10 friends who also passed and have been out of work since graduating. I also know some acquaintences who graduated from UCLA and USC law working as law clerks after passing the bar. It is a very scary field to be in right now. I really hope its just the economy but I think the ABA needs to stop accrediting all these law schools. I am one of those lucky ones who found a job, but it does not seem promising considering we are always short of work. If you want to make money, this is definitely not your field.

admrob 6 hours ago

4 Fans

As a 2007 law school graduate and late 2007 admitee, this story is 100% accurate. I want a bailout on my student loans.

Sarnath 3 hours ago

I graduated from UVA Law and passed the bar in 2009 intending to find a job as a public defender, and I've been trying to get hired ever since. Sure there's a lot of injustice around, but there are a lot of unemployed attorneys scrambling for a limited pool of paying positions for public service work.

LLShrute 4 hours ago

0 Fans

...Oh wait...for a second I thought I was a minority, or I came from a family with money and connections. Haha, my bad. I am actually just some peon white person who came from a middle class family, where my dad worked in a factory and my mom was a nurse. Somehow I managed to do well in school and I am about to graduate from a top 50 law school. Yet 87% of my graduating classmates don't have a job. What we do have though is over six figures' worth of debt coming due in a couple of months. And for those of us who wanted to go to law school for the right reasons and fight some of the injustices in this country, who will pay our bills and our school debt? Do you think living in America is free, much less the practice of law? To all the people on here who hate lawyers: good luck next time you are wrongfully sued for something you didn't do, or your child makes a mistake and gets pulled over for drunk driving and you need a lawyer to get her out of a jam, or you are miserable at work over sexual harassment, or you need to file for bankruptcy, or you need to get a divorce, etc. Good luck when you are in some of your darkest hours and need a competent attorney--we'll see how much you hate us then.

swester 5 hours ago

2 Fans

You do realize that this article is not really about lawyers, but the law schools who have greedily manipulated employment statistics to boost application and enrollment rates?

..,,

Greed!

lst01 6 hours ago

Hate to break it to you but this has been the situation for many years and it's only getting worse. Finally the media is revealing the truth: That fewer and fewer law school graduates are getting jobs out of law school. Let alone high-paying jobs. Sure, there are exceptions. If you get into Yale, for example, I'd say go. And if you have lawyers in your family that will promise you a job after graduation then that's a plus as well. But other than that...

bruinlover09 7 hours ago

A lot of people go to college because they have no idea what they should with their lives and everyone says " You should go to law school because you can do anything with a law degree." ABA could solve the gluttony of lawyers by limiting the numbers of students allowed to attend law school in the same way ADA limits the numbers of students admitted into dental school.

...

I graduated 3 years ago. I want to work in public service but everyone seems to have a budget crisis and there are few jobs available. I didn't go because I thought I would earn a ton of money but because I want a career that would make me happy. It just hasn't happened yet. Weigh your decision very carefully. I'm not sure I would do it again. I don't regret the education at all but the debt is suffocating. People that tell you that you can do anything with a law degree don't know what they're talking about. I also have a master's degree but I can't get a job in that area either because now I'm overqualified for everything EXCEPT being a lawyer, but don't have the right experience to get a job AS a lawyer.

If you decide to go forward, my advice is make damn sure you go to a top school, graduate in the top of your class. If you know what area you want to practice, take every relevant class, get involved in every extracurricular organization available, and intern somewhere in that field. The competition is fierce. Your other option is get a job somewhere that pays for your education and go part time. At least that way if you can't find a legal job right away you won't have to worry about loans.

FreedomOnionSoup 8 hours ago

46 Fans

In other "news" we're grasping at to try and fill up space in our new college section - the sky above Harvard is blue.

Law degrees haven't been foolproof for the past two decades, at the very least. It was bad news before the recession hit, it's worse now, and it's never going to improve as long as the ABA keeps designating any building with a working phone connection as an accredited law school.

LavishTantrums 9 hours ago

Got my law degree in mid-nineties. It took me five years to rise above minimum wage.

My lawyer friend in DC told me that her law degree equates to a high school degree. The bartender that night at our DC eatery was a lawyer. Night shift. I have a group of ostensibly highly-educated friends. Our collective experience has left us aghast. The years, the work, the sacrifice, the atrocious hours. And yet, society pays obscure reality TV "celebrities" $10,000 nightly to show up at clubs. The lawyer is going the way of the teacher. One belief is that the insurance companies "played" the defense bar. Insurance companies used "tort reform" movements to save themselves money. Civil lawsuits are the organized, gentlemanly way of solving disputes, and yet the defense bar ate it up, touting tort reform with religious fervor, making the plaintiff bar the scourge of everyone's existence. The defense bar saw it's own business dry up in this process. Checkmate guys. As for my child? I still hold out hopes he will avoid law to become an artist (or cowboy :-) ...

Ah, the lawyer/bartender. Somehow the law school cartel never mentions these untouchables.

Nathaniel Christian 12 hours ago

I'm a 2L at a top 20 law school, near the top of my class and on the senior editorial board of the law journal. Since last August, I have sent out 294 distinct cover letters for summer employment. I have received 2 offers, both for unpaid positions, both within the last month.

In comparison, my girlfriend who goes is getting her masters in public policy at a top 10 program applied to 2 summer jobs, both paid, and got offers to both....

highplainslawyer 9 hours ago

This is news?

I practiced for over 25 years. I was one of those greedy bastards who did not do socially useful work. I prosecuted child abuse and neglect cases. In the eyes of many, I would have been a much more useful member of society peddling AAA mortgage backed securities.

The legal market has been tight for as long as I can remember. To work for one of the big firms, you need to graduate in the top 10% of your class or go to an Ivy League school. Where does that leave the remaining 90%? Unemployed.

But then, the lucky few who work for a big name firm will stay there on the average of 18 months. Then they will join the remaining 90%.

I have been telling kids for years to avoid law school and the legal profession. For me, going to law school was the biggest mistake I have ever made.

Chicago Barrister 10 hours ago

2 Fans

The biggest problem is the fraudulent employment statistics put forth by law schools. Most top law schools are still claiming employment rates of 80-90 percent within six months of graduation, even in the current economy, with most law firms cutting attorneys left and right. Based on this information and "average" starting salaries of 90k plus, new law students are making a life changing decision and taking out massive amounts of debt.

The problem is that these employment statistics are based only on recent graduates who respond to the school's survey, (at some schools less than 20 percent of grads!) Those rare few who are employed and well paid are the most likely to respond. Those grads who are unemployed or underemployed are far less likely to respond.

The schools refuse to report accurate post-graduation employment statistics because that is a key component of school rankings, and would harm the number of applicants and dollars coming into the school. The American Bar Association refuses to address this fraud, and increases the problem by constantly approving new law schools at a time when there is already an unprecedented oversupply of new attorneys in the job market. I am stunned that a class action law suit has not been filed yet. The employment statistics law schools are claiming bear no resemblance to the realities of today's legal market and is incredibly deceptive to incoming law students who will have staggering amounts of student loans for 20-30 years.

I guess the law schools are so well connected that they are immune from auditing and prosecution. There is definitely fraud in this area.

AristotlePA 8 hours ago

The next bubble or may be the next after the next that will burst will be the overpriced education. Increased tuition just doesn't jive with stagnant incomes except for top graduates of top schools. I mean - really sought after professionals will always be alright but the current restructuring of the US and other national economies has brought a lot of downward pressure on the incomes across the board. There are two industries that are ripe for a raid in the US: medical and education. Pretty much for the same reasons. The law school business is rather shiny example of over-hyped oversupply. I've heard that there are over a million graduates of law schools, most of them passed bar exams but quite a few of them not working in the field at all.

washprogressive 10 hours ago

Unless you go to a name brand school, say one of the top 30, you're taking a huge risk. I attended the University of Detroit, graduated in the top quarter of my class, passed the bar exam first time and was in the top ten percent of passers, and finally found a job working for a sole practitioner who was ultimately disbarred and even went to jail. Needless to say, I soured on the profession and soon quit altogether. Fortunately (as far as making money goes) I married an M.D.

jasev01 11 hours ago

Thank you for someone finally recognizing this. The law school system is a scam and the sad part is there is a sucker born every second. Every person who thinks umm I'm unhappy with my 40K office job, I'll just hope in law school, then i'll be a big law like law and order and make like 100+ and be rich and famous and beautiful. Look the law school brochure says 99% of their students had jobs in 6 months and 85% of the make $90-$120K. So they jump in law school takes their money and adds to the problem more. The really in NY an ADA makes $55k the people on law and order couldn't afford the clothes they are wearing. The first thing they give you at bar orientation, was a s uic ide hotline number a drug/alcohol abuse number and tell you use them because lawyers have high rates for all of those things and other. Congrats.

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Senseid 12 hours ago

7 Fans

No kidding. A law degree is an incredible gamble. Not an investment. A gamble.

Well, anyhoo....there you have it. Vox populi. Voice of the people....

Avon Calling!

2010-06-05T20:58:00.002-05:00

One of my former law school classmates is now selling Avon Products.
I got an email that she mass mailed to all her contacts. The email linked to her online Avon "store."

She is a licensed lawyer. Nice lady. Etc. Not able to find work in the legal field.

Hmmm. That law degree really is flexible.

SMU Law is gonna pay law firms to hire their graduates

2010-05-14T17:41:00.002-05:00

SMU law is paying law firms 3500 dollars to hire SMU law school graduates.

Actually many law schools have been doing this for a while, at least it seems so.
At least SMU is being upfront about it. This sort of thing is used to temporarily boost law school grad employment figures during the time window in which law schools report. Temporary jobs that disappear very soon, etc.

Now, as a licensed atty with 2 yrs experience in texas (albeit an impoverished one), I will be applying to SMU to get some of those big bucks to help train those SMU grads.

Here at Kramerica & Associates, we have great plans for the future. In fact, I am thinking about putting in a chicken coop in the office for eggs, and the SMU grads can help out with that. And I can sure use that 3500 per SMU grad.

Elie Mystal & AboveTheLaw BitchSlap the NALP & the law school cartel

2010-05-03T22:31:00.040-05:00

Elie Mystal of Above The Law reports from the 2010 NALP Annual Education Conference.....

Why was I there?

Because you are a real journalist instead of a stenographer?

Huff Post commentators expose the law school scam

2010-04-29T18:00:00.004-05:00

The question on Huffington Post is this:
Is The Foolproof Law Degree Becoming An Endangered Species?

And in the comments we get the unvarnished truth:

colariz 51 minutes ago
4 Fans
I went back to school after a decade in sales/mktg/mgmt, thinking a law degree was the key to further advancement. Graduated from a tier-one school, with mixed academics (near the bottom of my class but on law review, passed the bar on 2nd try). It's now four years after graduation and two years after being admitted, and I still haven't found a full time legal job. Have managed to get by via temp work, contract work, paralegal/secretary gigs, even tried practicing out of my house - but have yet to find that elusive, promised, capital J job (with benefits?) that will allow me to repay the massive loans I'll be carrying the next 20+ years.

It's becoming clear that this was a huge mistake, taking years off from a decent career path to double down on a mortgage on my brain, right before the worst economic collapse of our lifetime. Oops! When I think back on all the advice I received whether or not to attend law school, every person who encouraged me to go ("there are so many things you can do with a law degree!"), not one of them was a lawyer. Every single lawyer I spoke to hemmed and hawed and cautioned against it, but I didn't listen - I heard what I wanted to hear.

The lesson? Unless you can pay cash for the degree, and/or your daddy owns a law firm and has a position waiting for you, DON'T GO.
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bashmentyard 3 hours ago
1 Fans
.....

If you made it to your third year of law school and you're not at a top tier school and no one in your family is a lawyer or has a law practice, yet you think you are going to be able to send out applications and get interviewed and employed, you already drank from the "drink me" bottle and might as well stay down that rabbit hole

lst01 3 hours ago
0 Fans
It is definitely NOT the most "flexible" professional degree. You'd be hard-pressed to find an employer that overlooks your lack of qualifications in favor of a law degree.

In fact, the reverse is true. Most employers think you're "over-qualified" and will promptly throw your resume in the trash.

dogface 5 hours ago

Bottom line: half of all law graduates do not practice law. Of those who practice law, half find something else to do (read that "worthwhile") after ten years.

Suggestion to students: find something you love or like to do. Making excuses for others poor choices or incompetence or greed is not a way to live.

swester 5 hours ago
2 Fans
All I can say - thank goodness this story is finally hitting the mainstream media.

The law schools and their marvelous PR squads can only keep reality at bay for so long.

"Our graduates upon graduation get $160k/yr, and we have a 95% employment rate! So of course it's logical to pay us $160k for a degree!"

Oh, wait, those statistics are completely distorted and outdated? Didn't know that "employment" included unpaid internships and on-campus fabricated "jobs" to boost the bottom line? Whoops, tuition refund deadline has passed!

tindo 5 hours ago
3 Fans
3rd year law student 2 weeks from graduation. What the author states is ABSOLUTELY true. If you arent at a top 15 ranked law school, your chances at employment are limited at best. Not to say if you are willing to travel you wont find a job. It just wont be high paying. Even Pub Defender positions are dry due to budget crunches.

The NALP reports on employment after graduation are utterly false. Most graduates finish school 120,000+ dollars in student debt, and end up working jobs that we could have gotten with our BA's. Because of the Bush Bankruptcy revisions, loan debt cannot be discharged. We'll be poor for life for getting educations.

It gets depressing seeing those who graduated before me work is administrative assistants or in bars making 10-15 bucks an hour after getting law degrees that cost 80,000 dollars in loans. Many are going back to school in utterly unrelated but hiring fields like teaching or health care. Its hard to apply anywhere with a JD, because no one wants to hire people with law degrees for none law work. The assumption is they burnt out or they are drifters who dont know what they want to do or they are overqualified.

I know someone who graduated LS, couldnt find a lawjob and ended up returning to Community college to get a Med Asst Associates. The funny thing is, that degree will get him a job for 1/10 of the price of a JD

KYlawyer 6 hours ago
292 Fans
For those who are thinking of a career in law I have one word, run. The profession is overcrowded and likely to get worse. They won't tell you but many laws schools make a profit on every law student. They charge graduate tuition but it doesn't cost nearly as much, no labs or expensive equipment, to train a lawyer as it does a doctor. So they take as many law students as they can cram into the class.

Salaries aren't what they once were and unless you come from a top law school and finish in the top 5% you aren't going to go to big firm. If you want to make partner you had better be able to make rain and even then you aren't secure. There are a lot of partners that wind up on the streets these days. Small firms don't that pay well and solo practice is a joke these days.

You will work ungodly hours, and sacrifice your family life, (I am 2x divorced), all to face the stress of constantly fighting with other lawyers, judges, your own clients and facing the increasing prospect of malpractice liability and bar complaints from unsatisfied and often unreasonable clients.

Job satisfaction is extremely low. You spend most all of your time pouring over documents or on other boring routine things. About 85% of lawyers, if you push them, will tell you they wish they had done something else.
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TheRapture 6 hours ago
10 Fans
As a 2009 law school grad, I have to agree with this article. I went to a 2nd tier los angeles law school and have had a lot of difficulty finding work after passing the july 2009 bar. I have at least 10 friends who also passed and have been out of work since graduating. I also know some acquaintences who graduated from UCLA and USC law working as law clerks after passing the bar. It is a very scary field to be in right now. I really hope its just the economy but I think the ABA needs to stop accrediting all these law schools. I am one of those lucky ones who found a job, but it does not seem promising considering we are always short of work. If you want to make money, this is definitely not your field.

admrob 6 hours ago
4 Fans
As a 2007 law school graduate and late 2007 admitee, this story is 100% accurate. I want a bailout on my student loans.

Sarnath 3 hours ago
0 Fans
I graduated from UVA Law and passed the bar in 2009 intending to find a job as a public defender, and I've been trying to get hired ever since. Sure there's a lot of injustice around, but there are a lot of unemployed attorneys scrambling for a limited pool of paying positions for public service work.

LLShrute 4 hours ago
0 Fans
...Oh wait...for a second I thought I was a minority, or I came from a family with money and connections. Haha, my bad. I am actually just some peon white person who came from a middle class family, where my dad worked in a factory and my mom was a nurse. Somehow I managed to do well in school and I am about to graduate from a top 50 law school.

Yet 87% of my graduating classmates don't have a job.

What we do have though is over six figures' worth of debt coming due in a couple of months. And for those of us who wanted to go to law school for the right reasons and fight some of the injustices in this country, who will pay our bills and our school debt? Do you think living in America is free, much less the practice of law? To all the people on here who hate lawyers: good luck next time you are wrongfully sued for something you didn't do, or your child makes a mistake and gets pulled over for drunk driving and you need a lawyer to get her out of a jam, or you are miserable at work over sexual harassment, or you need to file for bankruptcy, or you need to get a divorce, etc. Good luck when you are in some of your darkest hours and need a competent attorney--we'll see how much you hate us then.

swester 5 hours ago
2 Fans
...

You're spending $160,000 + interest and 3 years just to fight and claw against your fellow J.D.s in an oversaturated market for jobs reviewing discovery documents at $25/hr. Tell me, who are the lemmings again?

Nice try accusing everyone else of being the "stupid" ones. That's the sort of outstanding argumentation skills they taught you at your third tier toilet?

swester 5 hours ago
2 Fans
You do realize that this article is not really about lawyers, but the law schools who have greedily manipulated employment statistics to boost application and enrollment rates?

I bet when you went to Law school it didn't cost you $160,000 + interest. Oh, and you probably got a JOB when you graduated. Lawyers are a necessity for a free society, without a doubt. But the fact of the matter is that there is an extreme oversaturation in the market, thanks primarily to the schools pumping out graduates left and right, the vast majority from extremely lousy institutions.

Barbie and Ken forever 7 hours ago
53 Fans
Oh just great. I'm going to school right now to go to law school. I hope this is just one article. If not, I'm going to hate myself. This really sucks if it's true

lst01 6 hours ago
0 Fans
Hate to break it to you but this has been the situation for many years and it's only getting worse. Finally the media is revealing the truth: That fewer and fewer law school graduates are getting jobs out of law school. Let alone high-paying jobs. Sure, there are exceptions. If you get into Yale, for example, I'd say go. And if you have lawyers in your family that will promise you a job after graduation then that's a plus as well. But other than that...

bruinlover09 7 hours ago
12 Fans
A lot of people go to college because they have no idea what they should with their lives and everyone says " You should go to law school because you can do anything with a law degree." ABA could solve the gluttony of lawyers by limiting the numbers of students allowed to attend law school in the same way ADA limits the numbers of students admitted into dental school.

lst01 4 hours ago
0 Fans
But that would mean less cushy professor jobs for the elite that make up the ABA's leadership.

So don't count on that happening anytime soon.
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bruinlover09 4 hours ago
12 Fans
You forgot the LSAT preparation scam

I graduated 3 years ago. I want to work in public service but everyone seems to have a budget crisis and there are few jobs available. I didn't go because I thought I would earn a ton of money but because I want a career that would make me happy. It just hasn't happened yet. Weigh your decision very carefully. I'm not sure I would do it again. I don't regret the education at all but the debt is suffocating. People that tell you that you can do anything with a law degree don't know what they're talking about. I also have a master's degree but I can't get a job in that area either because now I'm overqualified for everything EXCEPT being a lawyer, but don't have the right experience to get a job AS a lawyer.

If you decide to go forward, my advice is make damn sure you go to a top school, graduate in the top of your class. If you know what area you want to practice, take every relevant class, get involved in every extracurricular organization available, and intern somewhere in that field. The competition is fierce. Your other option is get a job somewhere that pays for your education and go part time. At least that way if you can't find a legal job right away you won't have to worry about loans.

Good luck.

jasev01 6 hours ago
32 Fans
"now I'm overqualified for everything EXCEPT being a lawyer, but don't have the right experience to get a job AS a lawyer. "exactly correct story of law school

KYlawyer 5 hours ago
292 Fans
Unfortunately, it doesn't get any better. After 15 years I was burnt out and decided I had to do something else. After trying for a year to make a career change, it soon became apparent that no one would hire me to do anything else for just the reasons you cited.

jackstpaul 6 hours ago
19 Fans
You're asking whether or not to give up your goals "based on one news article." My recommendation is that you take a course in research methodology to understand that "one source" (and how good is it?) isn't enough to decide anything, let alone the course of your life and career, before you contemplate making any major decision about anything.
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DANi617 8 hours ago
14 Fans
This would have been nice to know BEFORE I suffered through 1L!!

FreedomOnionSoup 8 hours ago
46 Fans
In other "news" we're grasping at to try and fill up space in our new college section - the sky above Harvard is blue.

Law degrees haven't been foolproof for the past two decades, at the very least. It was bad news before the recession hit, it's worse now, and it's never going to improve as long as the ABA keeps designating any building with a working phone connection as an accredited law school.
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LavishTantrums 9 hours ago
10 Fans
Got my law degree in mid-nineties. It took me five years to rise above minimum wage. Beyond that time, I became successful in a hurry, going from legal temp to partner in relatively few years. My lawyer friend in DC told me that her law degree equates to a high school degree. The bartender that night at our DC eatery was a lawyer. Night shift. I have a group of ostensibly highly-educated friends. Our collective experience has left us aghast. The years, the work, the sacrifice, the atrocious hours. And yet, society pays obscure reality TV "celebrities" $10,000 nightly to show up at clubs. The lawyer is going the way of the teacher. One belief is that the insurance companies "played" the defense bar. Insurance companies used "tort reform" movements to save themselves money. Civil lawsuits are the organized, gentlemanly way of solving disputes, and yet the defense bar ate it up, touting tort reform with religious fervor, making the plaintiff bar the scourge of everyone's existence. The defense bar saw it's own business dry up in this process. Checkmate guys. As for my child? I still hold out hopes he will avoid law to become an artist (or cowboy :-) ...
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swester 5 hours ago
2 Fans
I'm hoping it didn't cost then as much as it does now. It's simply absurd what schools are charging now. $160k+interest!

Nathaniel Christian 12 hours ago
5 Fans
I'm a 2L at a top 20 law school, near the top of my class and on the senior editorial board of the law journal. Since last August, I have sent out 294 distinct cover letters for summer employment. I have received 2 offers, both for unpaid positions, both within the last month.

In comparison, my girlfriend who goes is getting her masters in public policy at a top 10 program applied to 2 summer jobs, both paid, and got offers to both.

The market is really tight right now, so all you can do is keep on putting resumes out there and hope that something sticks eventually. I'm not worried about my long-term prospects, as I know I'll be an asset wherever I end up, but it has certainly been difficult in the short term.

highplainslawyer 9 hours ago
6 Fans
This is news?

I practiced for over 25 years. I was one of those greedy bastards who did not do socially useful work. I prosecuted child abuse and neglect cases. In the eyes of many, I would have been a much more useful member of society peddling AAA mortgage backed securities.

The legal market has been tight for as long as I can remember. To work for one of the big firms, you need to graduate in the top 10% of your class or go to an Ivy League school. Where does that leave the remaining 90%? Unemployed.

But then, the lucky few who work for a big name firm will stay there on the average of 18 months. Then they will join the remaining 90%.

I have been telling kids for years to avoid law school and the legal profession. For me, going to law school was the biggest mistake I have ever made.

jasev01 6 hours ago
32 Fans
"For me, going to law school was the biggest mistake I have ever made. " I have said the same thing every day
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KYlawyer 5 hours ago
292 Fans
Unfortunately, I too wish I had dropped out 1st semester of 1L.

KillerKeith 9 hours ago
1 Fans
This article is a little ridiculous. I've been covering the legal landscape for the last five years. This has been a trend for the last two to three years. This isn't new news. It used to be that law firms controlled the legal market, gouging their clients for as much money as they could get. Now their clients are using their clout to consolidate their outside providers, use technology to automate some of the low-level legal processes, outsource legal work to India on the cheap and insource legal work by bolstering their in-house legal departments. Law firms, for the most part, are done with their hiring frenzies for good.

If you are contemplating law school, here's what you can do to secure yourself a legal job post-JD. Be an engineer or a scientist. Intellectual property law, pharma law and legal technology. This is where the legal job market is, especially for new graduates. If you can bring some sort of special knowledge, like your chemical engineering background, to the table, then you are golden. If, instead, you're hoping to be on the litigation staff, get ready to wait indefinitely for a job.

Chicago Barrister 10 hours ago
2 Fans
The biggest problem is the fraudulent employment statistics put forth by law schools. Most top law schools are still claiming employment rates of 80-90 percent within six months of graduation, even in the current economy, with most law firms cutting attorneys left and right. Based on this information and "average" starting salaries of 90k plus, new law students are making a life changing decision and taking out massive amounts of debt.

The problem is that these employment statistics are based only on recent graduates who respond to the school's survey, (at some schools less than 20 percent of grads!) Those rare few who are employed and well paid are the most likely to respond. Those grads who are unemployed or underemployed are far less likely to respond.

The schools refuse to report accurate post-graduation employment statistics because that is a key component of school rankings, and would harm the number of applicants and dollars coming into the school. The American Bar Association refuses to address this fraud, and increases the problem by constantly approving new law schools at a time when there is already an unprecedented oversupply of new attorneys in the job market. I am stunned that a class action law suit has not been filed yet. The employment statistics law schools are claiming bear no resemblance to the realities of today's legal market and is incredibly deceptive to incoming law students who will have staggering amounts of student loans for 20-30 years.

AristotlePA 8 hours ago
21 Fans
The next bubble or may be the next after the next that will burst will be the overpriced education. Increased tuition just doesn't jive with stagnant incomes except for top graduates of top schools. I mean - really sought after professionals will always be alright but the current restructuring of the US and other national economies has brought a lot of downward pressure on the incomes across the board. There are two industries that are ripe for a raid in the US: medical and education. Pretty much for the same reasons. The law school business is rather shiny example of over-hyped oversupply. I've heard that there are over a million graduates of law schools, most of them passed bar exams but quite a few of them not working in the field at all.

ashwinray 10 hours ago
0 Fans
The only reason I went to law school was bc I had an engineering degree. I went to a 50-100 ranked school, graduated top 25% and was managing editor of law journal. The market is ok for patents and intellectual property law. It's actually growing. Short term is tough but long term prospects are good. I don't know about other practice areas..but IP seems to be ok.

washprogressive 10 hours ago
2 Fans
Unless you go to a name brand school, say one of the top 30, you're taking a huge risk. I attended the University of Detroit, graduated in the top quarter of my class, passed the bar exam first time and was in the top ten percent of passers, and finally found a job working for a sole practitioner who was ultimately disbarred and even went to jail. Needless to say, I soured on the profession and soon quit altogether. Fortunately (as far as making money goes) I married an M.D.

hrc04 10 hours ago
96 Fans
I could have written this story when I graduated in 2006.

jasev01 11 hours ago
32 Fans
Thank you for someone finally recognizing this. The law school system is a scam and the sad part is there is a sucker born every second. Every person who thinks umm I'm unhappy with my 40K office job, I'll just hope in law school, then i'll be a big law like law and order and make like 100+ and be rich and famous and beautiful. Look the law school brochure says 99% of their students had jobs in 6 months and 85% of the make $90-$120K. So they jump in law school takes their money and adds to the problem more. The really in NY an ADA makes $55k the people on law and order couldn't afford the clothes they are wearing. The first thing they give you at bar orientation, was a s uic ide hotline number a drug/alcohol abuse number and tell you use them because lawyers have high rates for all of those things and other. Congrats.

jasev01 10 hours ago
32 Fans
I should also throw in that $55k comes with $150K in debt and a new 60+ hr work week. So you probably make on average less than or equal to $20/hr.

lst01 5 hours ago
0 Fans
60 hour work week? More like zero hours for the increasingly large number of law school graduates who can't get a job.

AristotlePA 11 hours ago
21 Fans
If one has independent means to study just for the sake of studying it a law degree is great addition. But as a pure investment - you better be from the top 5 law schools from their 10 th highest percentile upon graduation. Big law firms always will hire top graduates. the bottom 98% will have a law degree from ABC school located who knows where...unless your school is a household name the investment is likely too risky.
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Gebbeth 11 hours ago
23 Fans
There are a lot of reasons why law is such an uncertain career. They are all connected to each other in one way or another. First off, the cost of education in general and law in particular has grown exponentially. This means that even if someone is interested in public interest law, they can't afford to work in these professions and hope to pay off the debt. Therefore, talented lawyers go into high-paying law firm jobs and big law firms.

It used to be that these law firm jobs were relatively secure. If you could get in, you were in, and you had a support group of partners and senior associates that would train and mentor you to partnership. You also had a cadre of loyal clients who by and large stayed with one firm. Now, a lot of these firms have consolidated, and that creates pressure to generate more and more revenue to take care of overhead in an increasingly consolidated client group. It's murder trying to get a high paying client. So in bad times, the best way to control cost is to fire attorneys.

Billing requirements have also grown, from 1600 hours per year many years ago to something like +2000 per year. That's a crushing burden especially if there is no business around. All this at higher billing rates to justify increased pay and partner payouts and increasing overhead costs.

If you ask me, the current legal/law firm system is extremely broken.

BrwnSknGurl4 11 hours ago
22 Fans
This article is 1000% true! Law firms will never over-hire like it did for the past two decades. Unless you plan to attend a Top 25 law school and still graduate in the top 20% of your class -- forget it! Take the GMAT and get an MBA...it will serve you better anyway!

healthanalyst 11 hours ago
4 Fans
Law school exist solely to keep the law faculty employed.

Consider this, look at the number of lawyers in the US. Count the number of graduates.

There is a trade deficit with China.......

Hmm. Maybe we could ship some to places like Somalia, Iran, North Korea. Really screw them up.

Senseid 12 hours ago
7 Fans
No kidding. A law degree is an incredible gamble. Not an investment. A gamble.

lst01 6 hours ago
0 Fans
Actually, public interest jobs are incredibly difficult to get as well. There are recent grads who have offered to work for free and are turned away.
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Nathaniel Christian 12 hours ago
5 Fans
I'm a 2L at a top 20 law school, near the top of my class and on the senior editorial board of the law journal. Since last August, I have sent out 294 distinct cover letters for summer employment. I have received 2 offers, both for unpaid positions, both within the last month.

In comparison, my girlfriend who goes is getting her masters in public policy at a top 10 program applied to 2 summer jobs, both paid, and got offers to both.

The market is really tight right now, so all you can do is keep on putting resumes out there and hope that something sticks eventually. I'm not worried about my long-term prospects, as I know I'll be an asset wherever I end up, but it has certainly been difficult in the short term.

laocoon 12 hours ago
50 Fans
it hasnt been foolproof for decades. unless you have a ready made job waiting at daddy's firm or just plain love the law itself, it is not the route to take for most.

kidfromkor 12 hours ago
0 Fans
Current 1L student at a law school ranked in the 20's by the recent US New... thing. Never mind an "actual" job after the 3rd year, 1L summer jobs are tough to get. Even the non-paying ones are scarce, and 1Ls flock to them as soon as they are up on the career service job bank. I myself am waiting for reply from a out-of-state law firm that sent me an e-mail telling me they were "impressed with my resume" and apparently got past the first hurdle. That was almost a month and a half ago. There are many students here who got jobs because fair number of them have parents and relatives who are lawyers and they've got networks. Take away those numbers, it's really tough to get a job. period. Personally don't see the situation getting any better in two years.

ssrelso 11 hours ago
0 Fans
And the CEO's of said failing businesses will hire a bunch of unexperienced newly-minted law grads instead of practitioners with decades of work history... why?

There is a huge catch-22 out there: law grads can't get jobs without experience, and can't get experience without a job. Hanging out a shingle is nearly impossible b/c you come out of school $150-200k in the hole and very experienced solos are offering loss-leading services just to keep clients coming in the door. Unless you went to a very, very good school and crushed the academic curve, woe be unto you. I have met more than one Harvard Law '09 grad without a job at area bar association meetings. For my part, I "only" went to a top lib arts school and a Tier 2 law school, so I find myself not getting responses from retail jobs. I wish I was kidding. Law school is the worst decision I have ever made. I'm not thirty, but the debt/interest I am buried under as a result of going to law school will probably prevent me from ever being financially able to raise a family or own a home. Mind you, student loans are the one type of debt not dischargeable in bankruptcy. I have heard rumors of similarly situated grads looking to go ex-pat in any role, since creditors cannot pursue internationally, nor will the government, since not paying your student loans does not amount to a crime.

lst01 6 hours ago
0 Fans
You're not alone. If we could just get the law school cartel to stop falsifying their employment stats then maybe fewer kids would sign over their lives to crushing student loan debt.

ScamBloggers and the Law School Bubble get major media coverage

2010-04-27T05:54:00.016-05:00

From the Chicago Tribune:

Law school tuition hikes spark talk of bubble

One aspect the media has failed to pick up on is the fact that a large percentage of law school grads come from lower ranked schools. Maybe more than half. And a considerable percentage of the grads from those schools don't really care about finding a job after graduation, or at least it does not weigh heavily on their minds.

This is because so many of the grads from these schools are either the children of successful lawyers who will hire their own children, or they come from fairly wealthy, upper class families who will support those grads for years after graduation or even employ them in the family business. The real victims of the law school scam are the students from lower ranked schools (tiers 2-4) whose families are not wealthy enough to support them and who cannot offer them employment.

The disconnect between the reality of the lawyer job market and the cost of law school and the increasing number of applicants can be laid at the feet of the massive amounts of propaganda and advertising the law school industry generates. If you calculate the annual revenue taken in by the law school industry, you will see that it comes to over 3 billion dollars (almost 140,000 students in law school each year, each paying $20K in tuition per year (average total law school tuition is $60K), and then throw in books, bar exam prep fees, etc).

That $3 billion dollars buys a lot of propaganda. The law schools collaborate with other organizations that they control, such as the ABA and the NALP, in order to generate a blizzard of favorable media coverage using highly manipulated and even falsified employment statistics to create a statistical illusion in order to induce an ever-increasing tide of new victims.

This statistical illusion is created via several unethical or perhaps even illegal tactics employed by the law school industry in order to hide the fact that the success of law school grads is one-sided: in boom times, the upper third of all grads did very well (grads from first tier schools, generally), and about 1/3 of grads either got decent jobs at decent salaries (district attorney jobs etc) or they are taken into the family business or law practice, or their upper class families support their new solo law practice for years.

But about 1/3 of all grads struck out, even after they passed the bar. Nothing there for them. Oh, maybe they struggled along with some temporary legal work for a year or 3 before "transitioning" into a non-legal career. And that was how it was in boom times. Of course the recent upheaval in legal hiring has meant that well over half of all law school grads are out in the cold. And the situation may never improve drastically--the large law firms used their influence to obtain approval from the ABA to outsource law jobs overseas. Those jobs are never coming back.

It will be interesting to see what chicanery the industry will employ in order to hide the new reality of the legal employment landscape.

My goals with respect to this blog

2010-04-23T00:36:00.007-05:00

One of the founders of the Law School Transparency site stopped by to comment on my immediately previous post, which dealt with that site. Below are some excerpts from his comment on my post, and I thought I would comment on his comment because I think it would illustrate some of my goals here and perhaps illuminate some of the problems this movement faces.

Observationalist said...

Just read this post about our transparency project... thanks for getting the word out.

No problem. I wish you luck in your venture. However, you and I come from different worlds and our goals are really not the same. See below.

The problem with trying to expose what I consider to be the dark underbelly of legal hiring is that you're going to scare way too many employers away from hiring at lower-ranked schools.

That would be a good thing, as it would close those schools. That is one of my goals.

Oh also, your idea to pull from the bar admission lists and research independently of the law schools is great.

Well, you are really going to have to do that because the school surveys are tainted. The surveys are self-reported. In the scientific community, self reported surveys are notorious for inaccuracy when they deal with information that is closely tied to one's self esteem or personal worth. Picture a grad fresh out of law school who has attended a law school and worked hard and then cannot get a good job, and who is then asked by the people at the school he attended about how he has done. He is going to lie about his success. Either that or he is not going to answer the survey. The worst situation is when the new grad tries to go solo, spending the last of his/her money. Go into any courtroom and talk to some of these lawyers. Find out their past history. The ones who graduated from third tier schools and who did not get a job right out of law school, they tell you that either they were supported by a spouse at first or by their parents or that they had a side job for years while they built their practice. One lawyer called this post-law-school period a "filtering out process" for the students from lower ranked schools who did not get jobs. Every experienced lawyer who works in the so called shitlaw practice areas knows this. But the law school stats do not show this, yet they purport to tell the truth. It's an open secret. A dirty secret, too, because the law school machine really exploits those students who get taken in by these fake stats and depends upon idea that these stats represent reality. But they don't. Trust me.

As for the matter of the survey, do you understand that this post law school employment survey represents something very important to these grads, on a personal level? Something tied to their sense of self worth. And telling the truth about this when you have worked hard for years and then come up empty, that is something that is pretty hard for these people to do at this point in their lives.

That is why in order to get the truth in this area, you are going to have to go at it when it is cold, a couple of years down the road, when people have moved on to something else. Then they can talk about their failure.

As for your problem with my idea about rich kids and offspring of lawyers and asking them about family based employment, I think your response to this illustrates your lack of understanding of the real problem here, and maybe this speaks to the difference in our own separate situations.

Look, you are a 3L at Vanderbilt, which if I recall correctly, is a first tier school. That's super for you. But you need to understand something. These lower tier schools are different. A large percent of the grads there are from rich families and also offspring of successful lawyers. I would say that perhaps one-third of all the students at my own third tier school were in this category. Employment for these people was NOT a concern for them.

And what happens when the schools sends out the surveys. This one-third of the grads returns the survey, and the one-third who actually got lawyer jobs does the same, all pleased as punch, as the old saying goes.

But what about the one-third who spent 3 years going to school and one year doing the bar and looking for a job, yet came up empty? Do you think they are going to report the truth? And if they do report the truth, do you think the schools are going to put that survey in? No school personnel have ever faced any consequences for false reporting. And their jobs and pay are based on the results of these surveys. Some of these law school deans make MILLIONS. No school has ever been audited with respect to their employment stats. However, the one independent report I have seen on law school graduate employment showed considerably lower employment figures than what the schools reported. See my prior blog posts on this independent research.

Anyway, it is clear to me that this entire situation is one that is ripe for corruption.

And who is getting hurt here? There are about 50,000 new law school students every year. My research shows that about 1/3 of those people are basically victims of the law school scam. They wind up elsewhere, teaching or selling insurance or whatever. These are the people I am trying to rescue. And I want to punish the perpetrators, of course.

I wasted five years of my life and my life savings because I was taken in by these fake employment stats. And all this is more than likely a criminal conspiracy.

I want to see these lower tier schools closed. I want to see some of these law school people do the perp walk. That is my goal. Your goal is different. Fine.

Nice article on the Law School Transparency project on Above The Law

2010-04-22T04:18:00.003-05:00

Above The Law has a good article covering the Law School Transparency Project.

Yeah, we have seen many posts online from people who say they were never surveyed by their schools for employment status, and yet the schools report extremely high reporting rates claimed by almost all schools. Do the schools lie? I am pretty sure they do.

As for getting hold of law school grad employment stats (because we know at least the lower half of all law schools are not going to divulge this info--why should they kill their golden goose?), here is an idea: use public info to obtain names of lawyers or law school grads who passed the bar, and then ask them about their employment history. For example, go to the Texas State bar website and search for recent grads of a certain law school. That site (and I am sure other state bar assn sites are the same) allows you to search for lawyers using various criteria. And a contact method is usually available. Contact the lawyer and ask them about their employment history. Once you have a good data set, you can randomize, etc, select a subset, etc., and so you have some decent employment stats.

If a school claimed that 90 percent of their 2008 grads were employed 9 months out with a average salary of 70K, and your stats show otherwise (as I am sure they will), then you have something.

You are going to have to get the data yourself. The lower ranked schools will simply not do it.

And one more thing: a very substantial portion of my own TTT law school student body were not having to go onto the lawyer job market--either their parents had a law firm or their families were rich and had a business and a job waiting for them. So you would also have to ask TTT grads whether their employment was based on a family connection. If you ask this sort of question and discard these grads from your data, you would really have something if you could get enough responses.

Wall St Journal Law Blog asks if there exists a legal education bubble today

2010-04-19T19:23:00.003-05:00

Is there a legal education bubble about to crash, similar to the subprime mortgage situation circa 2006?

As we here on this blog have been saying for a year or so, YES.

If only the best lawyers are in demand, then by definition, law school is not a good bet.

2010-04-18T12:05:00.004-05:00

This type of comment is typical of the law school shills:

Matt Frye said...

Good lawyers will always be in demand.

"Good lawyers" are by definition not in the majority. "GOOD" is relative. Because you see, lawyers compete against each other. The skill level is what is important because you are competing. Thus, suppose in the year 1980, a skill level that we might call N is acceptable to make you "in demand". But then if others escalate their level of skill, N no longer makes you in demand.

How does one obtain skill? By getting a job out of law school. Getting training. Associating with skilled lawyers.

Therefore if you cannot get a job and get good training you will almost certainly not be among the more skilled lawyers. So therefore your chances of success are poor.

Therefore if you do not get into a top school, or if you do not graduate in the top 10 percent of your lower ranked or medium ranked law school, or if your parents are not lawyers, you will almost certainly fail. Why? Because you cannot obtain the skill set that will make you in demand.

If you want to gamble, take your life savings to Vegas. At least there you will not lose years of your life chasing an almost unattainable dream. Chasing the lawyer dream is a fool's errand, like trying to be in the NBA. Many try and the vast majority fail.

When I went to law school I thought (based on reading the media stories and the NALP and ABA websites) that law school was a GOOD BET. But if only the very best are in demand, then it is by DEFINITION not a good bet to go to law school.

The law school industry propaganda does not tell you this. They lie.

Eminem says what I want to say to the Law School Cartel

2010-04-13T20:54:00.003-05:00

http://www.youtube.com/v/6qG1sZhO74A

More happy shiny Horatio Alger Bullshit from the corporate media

2010-04-09T07:08:00.048-05:00

Let's see now....

Trouble with the Law: Laid-Off Attorneys Pursue New Paths

Pursue new paths. Gee, now that sounds like a euphemism to me....

To sum it all up, the guy working at the Radio Shack written up in this article has been portrayed here as someone seeking a new path, but in reality, he was defrauded by the Pace Law criminal mob, an organized crime outfit that defrauds young people. Part of the law school cartel.

This law school cartel buys off the media with advertisements. The media is part of this organized crime outfit, too. As long as the law school cartel buys off the media with advertising dollars, the media will not come down on them. It's a protection racket. The law school cartel is free to fleece the youngsters as long as they keep paying protection money for ads to the mainstream media.

If Pace and the rest of the law schools were not buying ads, the reporter here would not have given this story the Horatio Alger angle, and instead would have painted Pace Law, et al., as what they are--fraudsters.

Others are starting to notice that the media writes stories about the products that are advertised in the media

2010-04-07T06:41:00.002-05:00

This blogger has noticed that the Ipad is getting a huge free media blitz, and not so coincidentally, Apple is buying lots of paid media spots. Same principle applies to how the media writes so many favorable stories about higher education and law school when law schools and colleges purchase many paid advertisements.

I am glad I am not the only one that has noticed this. Every time I point out this connection between free publicity and paid advertising, I get called a conspiracy theorist by idiots like LawyerATL on JDU. Well, whatever, but I like having company in my conspiracy theories (which are not conspiracies, but just acknowledging and noticing that powerful people and entities also act in their own best interests, just like normal people. )

Wherein I rebut the comments of some WSJ Law Blog poster; or, Supply and Demand, it never sleeps

2010-04-01T08:26:00.006-05:00

Some warrior-lawyer on WSJ Law Blog gets his pro-law school comments promoted there.

I posted my reply on the WSJ site (copied below):

exposing the law school scam blogger wrote:

Supply and demand is like rust and compound interest–it never sleeps. It grinds away inexorably. And you ignore it at your peril. See my “exposing the law school scam” blog for more explanation on this.

Also, Real Deal wrote: “If you are talented and very enthusiastic, its is very probable that someone at the place you are working or someone at another place will realize your talent and soon offer you a full time job.”

And what if you are not “talented and very enthusiastic”? Relatively speaking, that is.
All such human characteristics run on a bell curve. 50 percent are above the bell curve. Now can you tell me what percent are BELOW the bell curve? Here’s a hint: 50 pct.

Now, Real Deal here wants us all to believe that we are all in that upper 50 pct. I got news fer ya, Sunshine. Half of us ain’t. And the real problem with the law school thing is that because the law school industry has been so successful in promoting law as a path to riches for the most talented among us, law has attracted the most intelligent, the most ambitious, the greediest, the most status-hungry, the most driven people in america. And even if you are singularly intelligent and ambitious and driven when compared to the average person, you can easily come up short in the legal field. 7 years down the drain and 100K in sunk cost debt.

So go fill those coffee mugs. Stoop and bow and boot-lick. While away the days of your lives chasing that dream of social status. And when after 20 years you have waited out everyone else, then you can stroll down those corridors of power, proud in your custom suit.....but what about those in the bottom half of the bell curve, those who gambled all those years, all that debt, all that opportunity cost, etc.

Supply and demand, it never sleeps.

$100K plumber salaries while lawyers make $12-15 an hour

2010-04-01T06:31:00.007-05:00

While lawyers bemoan all the 10-15 dollars an hour lawyer job ads, the trades are going strong. Wanna make 6 figures and never spend a day in college or accrue any debt? Become a plumber.

Check out this ad:

PLUMBER - Licensed Service Plumbers Needed! (DENVER )

How much does an entry level plumber earn?

Check out this ad:

HVAC, Drain & Plumbing Technicians (No Experience Necessary) (Denver Area)

The really nice thing about trades is that you can take a 5 year sabbatical and come right back to a job, whilst if you try that as a lawyer, you are out of the "profession" forever.

law school employment statistics

2010-03-30T21:09:00.004-05:00

http://lawschoolemploymentstatistics.blogspot.com/

Room And Board for Lawyers In Need....

2010-03-29T20:54:00.008-05:00

A craigslist ad in Chicago is looking for lawyers and it tells a lot about the current situation for lawyers, and you don't need to read too deep between the lines, either (Emphasis mine):

Attorney position

Date: 2010-03-29, 4:20PM CDT

...

Attorney position available for ambitious attorney. We can provide room and board in downtown Barrington for lawyers in need. Pay will be modest while we build up our new practice group....the work will mostly consist of consumer related transactional and consumer litigation, court appearances, and possibly family law. ....Unfortunately, due to the large number of unemployed lawyers, we need responses by email and we probably will not respond to most applicants.

Thanks tons, ABA, NALP, and law schools, for ruining it for us by lying and cheating and scamming so you can make more money and flood the employment markets with tens of thousands of excess lawyers. Thanks, you bastards! Thanks for this Dickensian nightmare you have lured me into.....

"Advertisement Disguised As News Story" Has Interesting Photo Of "NonTrad" Law School Student

2010-03-28T05:27:00.015-05:00

This "Law school advertisement disguised as a news story" has an interesting photo. Note the male student seated in front paying close attention to the professor. Ah, an older law student. A "nontrad," according to the online law school nomenclature--an older, nontraditional law school student. And quite possibly a "gunner," as well, judging from his position at the front of the classroom. Reminds me of myself, actually. Older student, determined to do well. Top of the class. Gonna make something of myself. All for naught. Because I believed the fake stats of the law schools. One of my former law school classmates ran into another of our law school classmates. She was working the counter at a Borders book store. As for myself, I am working a menial phone job. And guess who is sitting down the aisle from me where I work? Another graduate from my law school, from 2 years before me. The workplaces of the menial laborer are littered with JDs. But these news stories about law schools rarely mention them.

As a solo who could not get a job even though I was near the top of my class (law firms rarely hire older grads), I had to go solo. Leased an office with expensive sign advertising near a busy intersection of a large metro area. And what sort of business did I get from that? Precisely zilch. The problem is that retainer-paying legal clients are obtained via referrals for the vast majority of cases, and not from advertising, not unless you have megabucks to spend.

The salary and employment figures put out by the law schools are a lie. They lie to draw in more students, including nontrad students. More students, more money in their pocket. The higher education salary and employment figures are completely unregulated and un-audited. A mass of corruption. The government has never audited them or punished anyone for the fraud that is perpetrated via these job and salary stats.

A very suspicious report of full employment for law school students at UC Irvine

2010-03-25T21:10:00.004-05:00

A highly dubious report of full summer employment for the "first students at the new law school at the University of California at Irvine". Supposedly they "will all be employed this summer, half of them with nonprofit groups."

I would suspect an outright lie. But with so few students in that class and with 100 percent "employment," I would guess that any student in that class who is not employed would speak out.

I know that in almost all other law schools the figures are bogus. These law school deans make millions and the law school employment figures have never been audited and no law school personnel anywhere have ever been punished for what most lawyers now know are fraudulent employment data.

I would like to see who owns or supports these nonprofits that hired these students. I would not be surprised at all to see funding coming from people or institutions connected to this law school or to some huge bank fat on law student loan profits. I would bet that the law school or someone connected to it paid someone else some big money make sure these students get their dead-end, no-salary "jobs" that the school puts out to an amazingly gullible media.

And just read that stupid little article. Could that reporter possibly be any more in "stenographer" mode than she already is? That ABA Journal reporter eats up those lies like a hungry dog chowing down on the sunday BBQ dinner while the family is inside.

Job ads for plumbers offer $50 just to go interview, whereas job ads for lawyers want you to work for free!

2010-03-25T08:26:00.010-05:00

http://houston.craigslist.org/trp/1659567422.html

JM Plumber ($50 cash to interview) (Greater Houston area)
Date: 2010-03-24, 8:02AM CDT
.....

WE WILL PAY YOU $50 CASH ON THE SPOT TO INTERVIEW WITH US
$50 CASH for applicants meeting the following requirements:
Current Texas Journeyman/Tradesman License
Valid Driving License with good record
Good Background
Must be able to pass drug screen

....

Supply and demand, folks. It never sleeps. Like rust and compound interest.

Go where the demand is. Lawyering is not where the demand is.

The legal profession is a buggywhipped profession in some respects. Tort reform. Lying law schools with fraudulent, inflated stats that draw in more and more applicants. Outsourcing. The internet/information explosion. etc etc. All these things and more have drastically changed the supply and demand equation for the legal profession.

Yes, if you are young and attractive and went to a high ranked school or went to a 1st tier school with great grades, fine. But for more than half of all law school grads, the law school ordeal is a waste of time. And that is not going to go away. No magic economic recovery is going to make it like it was years ago. That is ancient history.

Don't waste your life on this fraud. Listen to my words and the words of my fellow scambloggers (see the list to the right). We are trying to help you, to keep you from making the same mistake we did.

Wherein an older law school graduate admits the truth

2010-03-19T02:57:00.003-05:00

The Nontradlaw forum is a forum controlled by several rabidly pro-law school older law student wannabees. They have it set in their heads that law school is the right thing to do.

However, from time to time, one of them breaks ranks. If you read that post, you can see that in this case, we have a tale of how the nontrads in her law school were doing after law school. And it turns out that only one of them was making a living at practicing law.

all of them...were still working the same jobs they had in school and practicing law, if at all, on the side!

Same thing goes for the nontrads in my law school class. I know of only one older graduate from my TTT law school class of 08 who is making a living as a lawyer right now. And she is way out in Utah and working as a contract atty in family law. And I would say that close to 10 percent of my TTT law school class were 35 years or older. And there were quite a number who were 40 or close to it.

We older nontrads are actually the ones who were most hurt by the fake law school employment numbers put out by the industry. I basically lost the last of my youth on a wild goose chase designed by the industry to get my tuition dollars.

The nontrad 0Ls on that forum will learn. The hard way....

The Switch!

2010-03-14T20:02:00.006-05:00

Today we went over to the Top Law Schools forum and secretly replaced their regular brand of "pro-law school" forum posts with our own special brand of dark, sparkling "law school scambusting" forum posts. Can these lemmings on Top Law Schools forum tell the difference? Let's go there now and find out!

P.S. In case you missed the reference above, it refers to this old commercial.

The 10 dollar an hour lawyer

2010-03-11T09:03:00.001-06:00

10 big ones an hour for a licensed lawyer. In Chicago, no less.

The law school dream is the opium of the pink collar masses yearning to be free of poverty.

2010-03-09T08:01:00.014-06:00

From the University News site, an interesting and relevant column:

Thinking about law school?

By Evan Helmuth

Everyone in my generation... has been socialized to think of ...a J.D...as being both prestigious and valuable.

I was in a low level civil courtroom the other day, waiting my turn to appear before the court on some debt collection matter (for which my fee for appearing was a huge 75 dollars). While I waited, the judge was handling truancy cases. There was a long line of juvenile delinquents (some as young as 11 years old) standing in front of the judge, and he was accepting plea bargains from each of them. To each one the judge gave advice to "stay in school" and asked each them in turn what college they were planning to attend. Almost all of them looked at the judge in a somewhat puzzled manner, as it was plain that these kids had no intention of attending school a day longer than was legally necessary.

As I shook my head sadly at how deeply the "education is good" mantra has penetrated into our society, I recalled what I had overheard a couple weeks ago while sitting in my room at home waiting in vain for telephone calls from anyone who might have seen my "lawyer signs" (which are located at a busy intersection in this large metro area and which cost me 300 dollars a month and have returned nothing in the last several months): a carpenter and his helper were working on the trim of the building next door. They were just outside my window and the boss was talking to his helper about his little carpentry business. The boss was worried about taxes. Turns out that he had netted over $170,000 last year doing trim carpentry. Taxes were eating him alive. Nice problem to have. I have a solution: go to law school. Your income will drop precipitously. No more tax problem.

Reality sometimes has a rude way of intruding on our notions...

Yeah, it do, hoss. It sure do.

At this point law school is a lot like a pyramid scheme....

It sure is. And we here on the Web are going to fight to get out the word.

I was taking a test for some low level, minimum wage job the other day. About 10 of us taking the test. Only one going to be hired, apparently. The person who was giving the test asked me afterward about law school. Seemed she was going to school nights getting her undergrad degree and was thinking about going to law school later. I quickly advised her not to and told her briefly about the situation. She shook her head in dismay and said I was "destroying" her dream.

The law school dream is the opium of the pink collar masses yearning to be free of poverty. Sad....

But, hey, kids, learn how to do trim carpentry and make a small fortune. No need to waste much time in school, either. Go truant and learn to be a carpenter. You could probably buy and sell that judge....

Another Journalist-Stenographer Makes a Lame Attempt to Tell the Truth About Legal Hiring

2010-03-06T07:02:00.007-06:00

Some Journalist Stenographer wrote this headline like he/she is pretending to be a real journalist:

10 Reasons It's Really Depressing To Be In Law School Right Now

42% of graduates earned $65,000 or less, according to NALP.

You really mean "The same year, 42% of graduates earned $65,000 or less, according to THE LAW SCHOOLS"? Because the salary figures given out by the NALP are actually those given to the NALP by the law schools themselves. The people who work for the law schools depend on the tuition from the students to pay their high salaries.

So, if the median salary for law school grads that goes out to the public via the media is low, then fewer students apply and then the people who run the law schools make less money. The law schools inflate grad salaries in order to lure in more applicants.

So there is a lot of self interest in play here. The law schools lie about how much their students make so they themselves can make more money. And then they feed those false, inflated salary and employment numbers to the NALP to hide the true source of the numbers--the law schools themselves.

This is a whitewash of false stats. Why do you so called journalists never question this aspect of these stats?

only 36% of class of 2011 students interviewed ended up with summer offers for 2010

Well, on the face of it, that doesn't sound too bad, but what percent of the class was granted an interview in the first place? That is the real question here. In the italicized part of the quote above is where the NALP employs some sleight of hand. On first reading, it sounds like 36 percent got jobs, down from 60 percent in 2007, but the tricky phrasing of the quote requires careful parsing. The fact is that only a small percentage of all law students ever got these choice interviews with these big law firms that do the vast majority of on campus interviews. So it wasn't 36 percent of all law schools students who wound up getting jobs--it was 36 percent of some fraction of the entire law school student body. And of course the NALP and the law schools are keeping mum on that figure. Because to tell the truth would mean fewer law school applicants. Which would mean some of the law school staffers would lose their jobs or get a cut in pay. Self interest, "journalist."

just 69% of summer associates from the class of 2010 received job offers, compared to 90% in 2009

Again, the NALP here is hiding the fact that only a small percent of all law school students ever get to be "summer associates." Less than half, certainly.

About 3% of the 300 employers surveyed recruited any 3L students, culminating in a total of just 21 offers.

Finally, we get some solid numbers. 21. That is a real number. Next time you talk to the NALP (aka the mouthpiece for the law schools), don't settle for mere percentages--get the actual numbers.

So, this article did make an attempt to tell the truth about the legal profession, but it failed because this journalist wrote the article in Stenographer Mode.

A perspective from a middle aged lawyer

2010-03-02T16:44:00.000-06:00

On the Wall St Journal law blog I found this interesting comment:

45 year old lawyer wrote:

As a 45 year old lawyer, I feel sorry for the younger generation. Why? First, there are few jobs. Second, if you do get a job, office politics is hell because work is scarce and layoffs are frequent to those who cannot generate clients. Third, there are too many lawyers to make an honest go of it in solo practice.

Yeah, there are some of my classmates who have made it solo right out of law school, but they are outside the big cities. Otherwise, their practices are supported by a family member or a side job.

Fourth, clients are unforgiving and assume you make a ton of money when you can barely afford gas and groceries, and they either don’t pay your bill or haggle you down all the time.

This is a side effect of the tort "reform" propaganda campaign waged against lawyers throughout the 90s.

Fifth, all the easy work (and fees) has been automated and people get it for free (or nearly free) and all you are left with is the hard cases which wear you down into an alcoholic or worse.

The internet and the "information revolution" has stripped a lot of power from lawyers.

Sixth, people hate lawyers in general, making it nearly impossible to get a job outside of law once you are a lawyer.

Again, tort reform.

Seventh, cost of law school is a crime compared to worthlessness of a law degree these days. About the only thing I can say positive is that if you can get a government job (or a government client) you can milk that for a while, at least until the USA completely breaks down financially, morally and constitutionally. My whole career, I’ve always felt as if I was running one step ahead of the tsunami coming behind me. I think the younger kids are in the tsunami, drowning. I can’t remember the last time I met someone under 30 who was employed. They all live at home with their parents. I always tell them if they are lucky, they might find work as a cog in some public sector union and join in taxing, regulating and putting everyone else in jail.

Same advice I give--get into a small or midsized town and use your family and friend connections to somehow get some job with some local government.
WTC 911 and its aftereffects solidified a trend--to some extent Americans now work to supply the government workers with income.

More numerical proof of the oversupply of lawyers.

2010-02-23T13:43:00.017-06:00

This Kiplingers article on Yahoo Finance shows that the normal retirement age for boomers will be 66 (for those born between 1943 and 1954; older for those born later). We will assume that lawyers retire at about the same age as the average American.

So, if we want to find out how many lawyers are retiring each year, we can do that by finding out how long the average lawyer's career is. From the ABA website we know that the average law school grad is 27. And we can presume from the data above that the average lawyer will retire at age 66 or more likely a little bit older. So the average lawyer career is therefore 40 years, approximately. So if the average lawyer works 40 years, then what percent of them retire each year? Well, if 100 percent retire by the end of 40 years, on average, the 40 divided into 100 is 2.5, and so therefore 2.5 percent of all lawyers will retire each year, on average.

So if 2.5 percent of all lawyers retire each year, on average, then how many slots does that leave for new lawyers to fill for the retiring lawyers annually? Well, the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that there are about 760,000 people who fill out "lawyer" as their occupation on tax returns. So, 2.5 percent of that is about 19,000 lawyers retiring each year. That is how many slots come open annually for new lawyers to fill for retiring lawyers.

But what about new growth of slots for lawyers? The same stats on www.bls.gov showed that between the years of 2004 and 2008 (boom years for lawyer hiring), the profession added jobs at a rate of 0.8 percent per year (that was below the rate of growth of the general population (of over 1%). So lawyering is a shrinking profession, relative to population growth, even in boom years).

So how many new lawyer jobs (in a good year) are added by that 0.8% annual growth? Well, 1 percent of 760000 is 7600. So 0.8 percent is about 6000, give or take. So, there were 6000 new lawyer jobs available each year due to growth in the field between the years of 2004 through 2008, at least according to the federal government.

So add that 6000 to the 19000 from the retiring replacement figures, and we can see that during the boom hiring years of 04 to 08 there was room for 25000 new lawyers each year. That 25,000 includes both retirement slots (from solo lawyers retiring, to partners retiring, to employed lawyers retiring--all retirements of lawyers, in other words. 25,000 slots for law school graduates come open each year. Total.

Problem is that about 45000 new lawyers graduate from law school each year.

Uh oh.

Those law school deans and career service officers did not tell you that, did they? The law school brochures did not mention that, huh?

What is 45,000 minus 25,000? My figures show 20,000.

Of all the hundreds of news media articles that you have read about law school, did you ever read even one article that said that 20,000 grads of the 45,000 new law school graduates each year have nowhere to go in the legal profession--even in the biggest lawyer hiring boom in years? That's right. 4 of every 9 law school graduates have no place in the legal profession. There are the numbers right in front of your face.

44 percent of all law school grads are out in the cold. Each year, the cold equations deem that 44 percent of all law schools graduates must look outside the field of law if they want to make a living. Now, as a law school grad with no job, you can tell your law school that you are working as a solo lawyer, but the fact is that you cannot make a living at it. Unless you call 5000 dollars a year or something like that a "living." Which is what happens to a lot of law school grads. They work at Starbucks and then set up a "Joe Blow, Esq." website on the side. Then the career services office googles their name and finds the site, and puts "Joe Blow" down as employed on their employment survey for grads. Never mind that Joe is only making 10K a year tops off his JD degree. The law schools usually report as his salary the "average" solo salary for "real" lawyers.

What a noble profession this is....

Still, the numbers remain: 44 percent of all law school grads must strike out, just going by the numbers.

Why don't you ever read that in the law school brochures or in the hundreds of news media articles on law school? Why doesn't the ABA have a note on this on its website?

Why isn't the legal establishment telling these 22 year old kids that they are going into 100,000 dollars worth of debt and spending 3 years of their lives on a gamble that has a 44 percent chance of failure? And that 44 percent was in the good years of 2004 to 2008. The chances for failure in the coming years are almost certainly over 50 percent for all law school applicants.

The law school industry takes in about 3 billion dollars a year in tuition. The ABA has about 1000 employees. Yet they are not telling you these facts. This starving solo lawyer is telling you this on his blog. I guess they just don't have the resources I do. Or maybe they have something to hide?

Below is a screenshot of the yahoo finance article I quoted, and you can find links and screenshots of the ABA and BLS data I cited above if you look for it in my earlier posts on this very same blog (see here and also here).

What to do about the widespread falsification of law school employment and salary statistics?

2010-02-19T13:22:00.000-06:00

Some say we need to require law schools to give out more comprehensive employment and salary statistics.

However, in the current situation, it does not really matter what stats the schools report. Basic human nature tells us that they are falsified, that and anecdotal reports. There is tons of money at stake for the people involved in collecting and reporting the stats. Some of these deans make MILLIONS. Look at all the lawyers who cheat their clients just for a few thousand, and that even though the bar disbars hundreds every year for that.

Plus there has never even been any attempt by any authority to validate or audit the stats, much less punish anyone for bad stats.

Common sense tells us then that stat cheating is widespread. So merely requiring the schools to report stats more thoroughly is useless. Auditing and punishment is required.

2 years experience in civil litigation gets you 10 big yankee dollars an hour in San Diego

2010-02-13T15:14:00.005-06:00

A great job!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 2010-02-12, 5:11PM PST

Reply to: job-yz8sj-1598503040@craigslist.org [Errors when replying to ads?]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Looking for 0-2 year attorney for ENTRY LEVEL POSITION in busy downtown civil litigation firm that practices exclusively personal injury.

.....

The starting salary is $10/hour to start, full time.

10 dollars an hour is a totally reasonable pay for a low cost area like San Diego CA, where apartments can be had cheap. In other, even lower cost areas like Mississipi, pay for a lawyer with one year experience is probably more like 5 dollars an hour. Thankfully, the federal government has exempted attorneys from minimum wage laws so that we can take pay below the minimum wage.

Of course, we cannot afford to pay our student loans with that sort of pay, but it is totally worth it to be able to work as a lawyer for just a short time. The social status you gain is enormous. I would gladly pay 10 dollars an hour just to work as a lawyer!

Many lawyers work other, non-legal jobs full time and work as a solo lawyer part time, even though working as a solo lawyer usually does not pay any income. In fact it is usually an net drain of resources. But the social prestige of saying you work as a lawyer is surely worth it. We work in such a noble profession that sacrificing everything is surely worth it.

The invisible hand of the free market has spoken: trial lawyers are worth 15 dollars an hour in New York City

2010-02-09T19:19:00.002-06:00

A recent Craigslist ad (job ads are not free, by the way):

Per Diem Attorney - Criminal and PI
Date: 2010-02-09, 12:42PM EST
Reply to: job-7fwsu-1593131983@craigslist.org

Our firm has several positions open for per diem attorneys with experience in the following areas:

(1) Personal Injury - complete representation (initial contact through trial) $15/per hour

(2) Criminal Defense- court appearances, motions, trials $15/per hour

Experience in litigation is required, but that 15 buckaroos an hour will sure come in handy. The NY city area is a low cost of living area, so that is a decent wage for an experienced lawyer.

The ABA slashed dues for lawyers (and of course tries to pass it off as doing something noble)

2010-02-09T10:29:00.000-06:00

They are cutting dues all right. But are you letting lawyer members VOTE on the policies and actions of the ABA? No? Still being run by "committee"? Surprise, surprise.

The comments below the story, as usual, get to the truth of the matter:

2.
Tom the Temp
Feb 9, 2010 9:36 AM CST
Wow, it’s like the Sunday slashed half-price supersale. 29%? That is pretty pathetic.

The ABA clearly doesn’t represent the interests of the everyday working class American lawyer. They continue to accredit fly by the night “schools” that need not demonstrate any adequate outputs, they allow these same schools to scam the public with distorted post-graduate career marketing materials, they approve the outsourcing of American jobs overseas (despite the fact that many of these same foreign bars refuse to allow American lawyers to practice in their countries), and they are always wasting their time and committee resources with pseudo-liberal policy discussions that have nothing to do with the actual practice of law.

I always urge my lawyer friends to cancel their memberships at all costs.
3.

Ditto.

David Gotzh
Feb 9, 2010 9:37 AM CST
The 392,000 number is misleading; remember law students and first years are free, and make up the bulk of that number. I suspect the number of dues paying members is a small fraction of that. The ABA is doing the right thing, the service they provide exceeded it’s market value. Now they are adjusting.

Not only does the ABA not provide value for ordinary lawyers, but it actively works against their interests.

4.
unperson
Feb 9, 2010 9:44 AM CST

now they try to make it look like they are all so noble. But we forced them to do it.

Right. Typical hypocritical, careerist philosophy being used by the ABA leaders.

What does a college degree, a law degree and 1 year of experience as a lawyer get you?

2010-02-06T11:13:00.003-06:00

This craigslist ad shows us what a JD is worth:

.... law firm looking for an aggressive associate to handle collection cases, 1+ yrs experience, litigation exposure preferred.

OK, sounds good. They are looking for an experienced litigator. Sounds like a good job. But how much does it pay?

Location: Worcester, MA
Compensation: 25K-33K DOE

OK, 25K is pretty good for an experienced lawyer, seeing as how Massachusetts is a low cost area to live.

See, all those years of schooling, all that student loan debt really does pay off!

ABA President Carolyn Lamm tosses up some nonsensical quibbles in an attempt to thwart the law school scambusting movement

2010-01-28T10:23:00.008-06:00

The president of the ABA, Carolyn Lamm, has written a (flaccid) rebuttal to Mark Greenbaum's brilliant disemboweling of the law school industry in the LA Times.

My reply to Ms Lamm:

No, you are the one who is incorrect. And you avoid the real issues and instead construct strawmen to attack.

A mere HANDFUL of law schools have said that they would or even MIGHT reduce class sizes slightly. Is your misinterpretation of this deliberate?

The "flood" is relative to the work available for these grads. Your own stats show that over 1.1 million americans have JD degrees. Yet the federal govt BLS site shows that only about 750K show any income from using that degree as lawyer. Looks like about one third of all law degree holders over the last 30 years or so are not able to use that degree.

That is the 'flood'--relative to the DEMAND.
The law school industry, which seems to control the ABA, pumps out far too many new lawyers relative to demand for them. And of course the law school industry players make huge salaries victimizing these young kids, saddling them with 100K dollars or more in debt. And how do they lure them into that debt trap, Ms Lamm? With lies. Lies that the ABA ignores.

Here are some comments from an article from Above The Law rebutting Ms Lamm's arguments:

However, there are other reasons to tighten accreditation: quality of lawyer output, correcting information asymmetry among consumers (because law schools arguably misrepresent their job placement rates) and ending diploma mill antics (like accrediting Kaplan's online law school). Such tightened standards would rid the market of exploitative schools and to ensure better lawyers.

So long as there is no conspiracy or agreement among voting members of the ABA, tightening accreditation will not run afoul of antitrust laws, since collusion is a prerequisite for Sherman Act liability. Additionally, not accrediting another law school has merit to correct marketplace abuses.

Moreover, the DOE also explicitly states that it's designated accreditation bodies should take into consideration "job placement rates" 34 C.F.R. § 602.16; a suggestion that the ABA should seriously take to heart.

.....

Oh, and one last thing - the old DOJ lawsuit against the ABA was for artificially inflating law professor salaries. Back then, a law school needed to pay X dollars to tenure track professors to get accreditation. It had nothing to do with how law schools take 160k from kids with 140 LSATs and lets them be (unemployed) lawyers.

Seems like the ABA shifted loyalties at that point in time, too. Why?

If the ABA took an honest and serious approach to disciplining and embarrassing schools that inflate their employment statistics, many potential 1L's wouldn't cross the bridge in the first place.

If students could make a truly informed decision, many would walk away and the problem would correct itself.

What is it that economists say about free markets...they function when everyone has equal information(I'm no economist, only a 1L!!)?

I want the ABA to regulate that information, instead of turning a blind eye.

Is the ABA getting money from the law schools, and how much?

Posted by guest | Permalink
Wednesday, January 27, 2010 7:40 PM

Maybe if the ABA won't do it, we should lobby the Department of Ed to find us a new law school accreditation body.

The DOE may well be our White Knight.

Posted by guest | Permalink
Wednesday, January 27, 2010 7:56 PM

We're too busy pushing illegal alien amnesty, freedoms for terrorists, and the end of certain Amendments to deal with law schools.

Thx.

-- the ABA

Every other word from the ABA is "diversity." We get it, ABA. Now STFU and do something about the law school industry.

Posted by guest | Permalink
Wednesday, January 27, 2010 8:02 PM

Wow. The ABA is screwed. Lamm can't figure out that there are too many lawyers when lawyers are getting laid off left and right and new grads can't find jobs.

Hey, Carolyn, a glut is defined at too many lawyers chasing too few jobs. Perhaps you should take a Econ 101 instead of wasting time sending letters to the editor.

She made a strawman and destroyed it.

Posted by guest | Permalink
Wednesday, January 27, 2010 8:06 PM

I think everyone misses the point here. The reason that there there are all these people entering law school and causing oversupply is because there is bad information out...mainly law schools representing that people can get jobs out of law school. The ABA should not restrict supply of lawyers, but correct information about the marketplace by advising potential students about the state of the marketplace and doing all of the employment stats, instead of leaving it up to law schools so they can lie and play games. That's what the ABA should do, but I doubt they will. There is just too much money in law schools...

We need to see some perp walked deans for this fraud.

37
Posted by guest | Permalink
Wednesday, January 27, 2010 8:42 PM

The logical flaw in Lamm's argument is so obvious I can't believe Elie didn't point it out. She argues that we should focus on the number of new graduates, not the number of new schools, but she only provides percentages in claiming that the number of new students has not significantly increased. She compares a 7% increase in schools to a 2% increase in students, as if that actually means that there have been less new students than new schools.

Percentage vs absolute numbers logical flaws are actually pretty common on the LSAT...

She had only quibbles and misrepresentations.

40
Posted by guest | Permalink
Wednesday, January 27, 2010 8:45 PM

The anti-trust excuse is laughably nonsensical. Yes, clearly, refusing to accredit any schools would constitute a conspiracy to restrict the number of lawyers.

And it's so reassuring to know that the ABA is "looking at" the outrageously misleading employment data schools put out, and is "concerned" about the insane, out-of-control cost of attending law school. Knowing that they might be thinking about maybe doing something useful, sometime, is very comforting.

Maybe sometime next decade the ABA can see to our demands, eh?

52
Posted by guest | Permalink
Wednesday, January 27, 2010 9:13 PM

...
The ABA has been the whipping boy for political grandstanding over the last decade or so each time it has tried to tighten accreditation. In 1995, the DOJ sued the ABA for Sherman Act violations related to its set compensation levels for faculty and staff at law schools. Just 2 years ago, Director Spelling of the Department of Education threatened to remove the ABA as the accreditation body for law schools because of its lack for achieving racial equality in the legal field/law school class composition. These racial charges were again brought up in the wake of ABA Interpretation 301-6 last year, where the ABA attempted to impose a minimum bar passage rate, which would disparately impact the most diverse law schools.

Long story short, the ABA has tried to tighten accreditation, but failed because of the pet political cause of the time. However, the ABA needs to suck it up: it will advocate for terrorists, and illegal immigrants, but not its own profession.

The Sherman Act requires acts of collusion. The last ABA/DOJ showdown alleged that the law professors on the ABA accreditation committee colluded to set professor compensation and that was why the ABA was liable.

Worst case scenario: Allied Tube is construed extremely broadly and we cannot have the ABA outright limit the number of law schools or lawyers.
Not being able to travel one route does not mean there is no road to a better legal profession or fairer market for legal education services.

The ABA can mandate disclosure of law school employment statistics, limit the number of students that law schools can fail out after the first year, or reduce the length of law school, among many other options.

None of these alternative safeguards trigger racial or antitrust concerns. ..... There is absolutely no reason why we should have an ABA accredited online law school - it makes a mockery of our profession to have mail order degrees.

We need new leadership that is willing to take a stand for the noble goals that our profession once stood for.

Good interpretation.

79
Posted by guest | Permalink
Wednesday, January 27, 2010 11:29 PM

Lamm acts like the only thing the ABA can do is arbitrarily contract law schools to control the size of the market.

There are many reforms that would serve educational purposes, but would also necessarily result in closing some of these wastebasket schools.

Yes.

Posted by guest | Permalink
Wednesday, January 27, 2010 11:35 PM

Dear ABA,

Unfortunately, I attend a TTTT law school. I was roped in on a scholarship. At the time, the employment figures looked reasonable. I worked my ass off and finished #1 in my class after 1L year. Although I landed a number of interviews / callbacks, I did not receive a single offer for a summer associate position. In fact, only 1 or 2 students out of 300 did! Yet the employment stats on U.S. News reflects a different reality. The stats on my school's website, are also flagrantly misleading. My school charges just under $40,000 / year. If I can't get a job, WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO THE REST OF THESE KIDS?!?! Your organization is an embarassment.

--DO SOMETHING--

And complicit in the law school stats fraud, perhaps?

Posted by guest | Permalink
Thursday, January 28, 2010 10:19 AM

I never followed the ABA's stance on the accreditation and number of law schools closely until I read this article and the previous one about Greenbaum's op-ed piece. As an ABA member, it's disappointing to see Lamm make so many self-serving platitudes that (1) do not reflect reality of the legal market, and (2) do not address the legitimate concerns raised by Greenbaum.

Posters have raised two overriding concerns: (1) the vast over-supply of lawyers and JDs relative to the number of legal jobs that exist; and (2) the false and misleading statistical information regarding post-graduation employment prospects to prospective law students. Although the two are related, it is important to keep them separate.

There is no doubt that competition in the legal market is a good thing. If the number of lawyers are regulated in a manner that makes it excessively small, then the consequent lack of real competition will result in more poor service and less competent lawyers. However, the over-supply of lawyers in the U.S. market today is so large that a significant reduction in the number of lawyers will not result in less competition. Also, the salary disparities between the higher-paying jobs and the lower-paying jobs are so great that there will be plenty of competition among a large number of lawyers who strive for the higher-paying jobs.

As for the notion that any bright person who aspires to be a lawyer should be able to go to law school and become a lawyer, that sounds nice in theory, but it does not work in practice without major casualties. First, some of the people in the bottom and even mid-tier law schools simply do not belong in the profession. I am not an elitist or think I am so much smarter than others. I am neither of those, but frankly speaking, I have met some people, usually from law schools that are ranked very low, that simply do not have the basic intelligence to be even a mediocre lawyer. No one in their right mind would ever hire them unless perhaps they had connections, so they have no business going to law school. Most of them also do not pass the bar examination despite multiple attempts. There is absolutely no public benefit in them becoming lawyers. Now, as someone noted, if law school was inexpensive, then that would be a different matter. With tuition being well over $100K, however, law schools that permit and encuorage these unqualified people to take on huge debts for a tiny chance to be gainfully employed as a lawyer (but probably still earning less than average salary), is simply immoral and irresponsible. And when law schools provide bogus and misleading statistics, it is outright fraud. On this point, Lamm's comment that this issue is still "under review" is competely baffling ("the Section is in fact looking at ways it might revise its annual questionnaire to law schools to elicit additional information. While there is no evidence that we have seen that schools are inaccurate in their reports, we may not be asking all the right questions, and that is under review"). This problem has been known by virtually all law students since at least the mid-nineties, yet the ABA somehow still knows nothing about it? Anyway, eliminating the least-qualified from entering law schools would not reduce competition because most of them don't even have a chance to enter the market, and the over supply of lawyers is so large that there would still be too many lawyers. But at least this would reduce the number of victims of law schools and the U.S. News and World Report.

Second, if the ABA is truly concerned about maintaining access to becoming a lawyer, then it should re-introduce LLBs and stop requiring the study of law to be limited exclusively to graduate schools. In most countries, four years of undergraduate study of law and passage of a bar exam are sufficient, and there are many lawyers who become a lawyer at the age of 22 or 23. By contrast, in the U.S., one has to pay 4 years of undergraduate tuition, 3 years of law school tuition, and the opportunity cost of foregone income associated with those years. In other words, the current system is already set up so that people of low income face major financial hurdles in becoming a lawyer.

So let's regulate law schools properly, and eliminate some of the lowest-ranked diploma mills.

Does the ABA have a conflict of interest because so many of its committee members are connected to the law school industry? What about monies paid to the ABA?

Even the elite law schools are faking their employment stats

2010-01-26T13:07:00.004-06:00

Temp Atty blog has a post featuring an email from a Georgetown Law School staffer that shows that even the elite schools faking their employment stats by temporarily hiring jobless recent law school grads and then counting them as employed for their reports which go to the NALP and out to the media, etc. These fake stats are what all the law schools use to lure in the naive and innocent youngsters that serve as student loan cannon fodder for this 3 billion dollar a year law school industry.

Here are some of the comments from under the article:

Anonymous said...

Nice to see them stashing grads at the 9 month mark. How much you wanna bet they are classified as "full time" and legal field employees?
12:54 PM
Anonymous said...

They will placed in the "academia" category.
12:56 PM
Anonymous said...

Yeah my LS had a couple of former grads working in the front office as tour guides for visiting prospective students. It was a good rotating position to pad those stats. Of course, when I reported myself as "unemployed," they just lied and listed me as employed. Gotta love it.
1:03 PM
Anonymous said...

And yet, the ABA refuses to regulate this cesspool of fraud.
1:05 PM
Esq. Never said...

Ah, glad they're on the ball for the 9 month NALP survey. "Why, of course, we have 100% employment at 9 months out...10 months, not so much."
1:13 PM
Anonymous said...

They will dump these administrative temps once they get their employment numbers in.

And you can only imagine what sort of hideous fraud the third and fourth tier law schools are up to if this is what top 14 law schools engage in. Of course all the scambusting blogs and many other lawyer comments on the Net have long said that this sort of chicanery is going on. It has long been an open secret that the media ignores because the media gets huge advertising dollars from the higher education industry.

what is the going rate for lawyers in Miami right now? $15K per year. Welcome to the minimum wage lawyer!

2010-01-26T10:09:00.006-06:00

A recent ad looking to hire a licensed lawyer:

Attorney & Secretary & File Clerk - State of Florida (Downtown W. Palm Beach )
Date: 2010-01-24, 10:34PM EST
Reply to: job-j5gqy-1569020234@craigslist.org [Errors when replying to ads?]

State of Florida - Office of Criminal Conflict and Civil Regional Counsel has three positions for immediate hiring.

Attorney
This position has a full benefit package with an annual salary of $15,080.00. The position has opened with the possibility to hire someone who may be looking for the benefits portion more than the salary. The State of Florida offers 100% paid health insurance for yourself and your immediate family, six weeks paid vacation per year, paid state holidays, paid sick leave, deferred compensation, tuition free college, Florida Retirement System plus more. Applicants must be a member of the Florida Bar.

With vacation that comes to about 8 yankee dollars per hour. Now you see what all that studying and $100K in student loans gets you. The invisible hand of the market has spoken. Supply and demand reign supreme.

Would I take this job? Heck, yeah! It's as much as I make in my solo practice. Plus bennies! Not that I would get this job if I applied. I have little legal experience even though I have been working as a solo for over a year. I am sure this job will go to an experienced lawyer or to one from an elite school. I would predict they receive well in excess of 1000 applications for this job.

Tip o' the hat to the autoadmit thread on this.

Classic lawyer job advertisment covered by Temporary Attorney blog

2010-01-26T08:18:00.004-06:00

Some new jersey law firm posted an advertisement looking for a lawyer with a car to run around to court appearances etc, all for 30K salary. Temp Atty comments here are too precious for words.

The law school scammers are invading JDunderground.com

2010-01-26T08:10:00.003-06:00

But scambusters are there fighting back.

Some excerpts from recent scambusting posts on JDunderground.com:

more nonsense from vence. Schmoozing does not create legal work. With thousands of lawyers being laid off, why would schmoozing by some new and out of work lawyer create more legal work? It would not.

.....

The facts are fairly simple. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, part of the federal government, show that the general population grew at about 1.1 percent annually between 2004 and 2008. That same site shows that the number of people who made a living in the legal profession grew at 0.8 percent annually in those same years. And those were very good years for legal hiring, RELATIVELY speaking. See bls.gov for these stats.

Yet, relative to population growth, the legal profession SHRANK in the years 04 to 08. GOOD years, relatively speaking. Again, see bls.gov.

Yet this profession grew at a rate that was 3/11 less than the growth in the general population. The legal profession grew 27 percent less than the general population in the years 04 to 08. These facts have been posted on the lawschoolscam.blogspot.com site for some time now.

Since the start of 2009, there has been a holocaust in legal employment. THose are simple facts. Thus, the legal profession is shrinking. Never mind growing at a rate less than the growth rate of the general population. It is flat-out shrinking now.

And no matter how law school scammers spin and obfuscate and deny and scream about conspiracy theorists, these facts remain. And no amount of networking or schmoozing is going to create more jobs in a radically shrinking profession. Yes, the jobs may well go to those who network and schmooze the most aggressively. But why chase a false, media-propaganda-induced dream in a shrinking buggy whip profession in the first place? Why not enjoy life instead? Avoid debt and enjoy life.
.....

Here is another fact for you: the ABA itself, a highly biased site, one that supports the law school scam, admits that there are over 1.1 million people with JDs. Yet the BLS shows only about 750K workers were earning a living as a lawyer in 2008. So, only about two thirds of all those who go to law school ever make it into a lawyer job. And that is over the past 35 years. The growth years. Now that we are into the shrinkage years, the odds are much more stacked against new lawyers.

Review of the new TV show "The Deep End" mentions the legal job market

2010-01-21T03:55:00.010-06:00

The Washington Post's snarky review of the new lawyer show THE DEEP END starts out like this:

Oh, good gravy, more lawyers. Haven't they heard? There's no jobs out of law school anymore!

Well, now that you mention it, yeah, we HAD heard something like that.
Good to see this info going mainstream.

out of work lawyers and law students send in 400,000 applications for 1200 clerkships

2010-01-19T17:51:00.005-06:00

The ABA Journal tries to put the blame for out of work lawyers on the economy and thereby avoid blame for the ABA looking the other way while the law schools put out bogus stats and committed fraud.

Law firms had a 21 percent drop in sales in 2009

2010-01-19T17:00:00.003-06:00

The report...says that in 2009... Law firms ...saw their sales drop 21 percen....

And yet the law school deans continue to pump out gushy propaganda about the value of a law school "education."

Couldn't have anything to do with the huge salaries they pull down, could it?

The NY Times glorifies another Golden Child Newbie Lawyer

2010-01-19T11:43:00.006-06:00

The NY Times is busy glorifying another deferred Big Law newbie grad of a first tier law school. La di dah, the rarefied life of the Golden Children of the profession. Lookee, lookee at how noble they is!

And of course the Times is getting its ass handed to it in the comments section:

oh, my goodness, we are so very very upper class here, my dear.

So. out of ALL the new lawyers who have recently graduated, the NY Times just happened to select on that comes from a top law school. There are about 200 law schools, and fordham, which is where our selected young lawyer, Chris Reid, went to school, is ranked 30th. And so Mr Reid did OK at that school and was able to get on with Ropes and Gray, a large law firm.

Large law firms hire perhaps 15 percent, at most, of all law school grads.

And this new york times article just HAPPENED to pick one of those 15 percent.

What a coinky dink!

And here he is, in all his upper class nobility, showing the world what a noble burden he bears.

Why not tell the tale of some graduate from a third tier school, who graduated from the middle of his class, who of course never even got a whiff of one of those large firm jobs. A new lawyer who is having to work at a fast food franchise and who cannot make his payments on his $100K of student loans. Of but of course those payments can be deferred (with interest accumulating of course). There is the type of “deferral” that MOST law school grads are more familiar with.

But I guess telling the tale of the AVERAGE law school grad would give to realistic a picture to prospective law school students, and then who would sign up for those student loans that pay for the advertisements in the NY Times?
— Jill
7.
January 19, 2010
9:45 am
Link

I second Jill. Also, NYT, there are many of us public-interest lawyers out there who opted to do this work, and werren’t “forced” by big law to give back. How about highlighting how I haven’t seen a raise in years and how my law school loan payments account for a third of my take-home pay.
— Jessica
8.
January 19, 2010
10:05 am
9.
January 19, 2010
10:08 am
Link

Well- don’t forget we can thank the ABA for recent law school graduates working in a fast food franchise to pay off school loans. The ABA gave the legal opionion that it was ethical and OK to ship attorney contract work overseas. India is thanking us for our lack of labor protections.

Doing attorney contract work helped pay the bills when you graduated law school without an offer. LISTEN UP YOUNG PEOPLE : Don’t go to Law School. It’s a drowing profession.
— midtown
10.
January 19, 2010
10:15 am

THe Bureau of Labor Statistics clearly show that even in the boom years of 2004-08, the legal profession grew only 0.8% annually even while the general population grew at 1.1% annually. It is a profession shrinking relative to population growth, even before the legal holocaust in hiring that happened in 2009.

Not all NY lawyers work for firms. Instead of repeatedly focusing on deferred firm attorneys, why not focus on all the law students and recent graduates who went into law school wanting to do public interest work, but have been pushed out of it by deferred associates? These are the people who actually want to do public interest work, but cannot find any paid work because the deferred associates (whose firms are basically paying the organization to take them on for a year) have taken their spots. Moreover, these lawyers generally have the same debt and better public interest qualifications as their corporate brethren, but are being screwed out out of jobs by firms like Ropes & Gray who are forcing young associates (who, it must be said, specifically chose NOT to do public interest work) to do legal aid type work so as to avoid the bad press for their firms that would go along with firing their associates. In short, these deferral programs are not a wholly good thing; while they keep the young associates’ skills from deteriorating while their firm cannot afford to pay them their full salaries, they also are severely harming the careers of truly public interest-minded lawyers who now cannot find the jobs because the market is over-saturated with deferred associates who cost the organization little to nothing.
— Jackie
11.
January 19, 2010
10:26 am

The media worships grads of elite schools. May have something to do with the huge amount of tuition that these schools charge, and the fact that the media is funded by advertising bought by some of these entities that profit from the higher education industry.

Hi MM,

A lot of young lawyers who went to elite law schools — much “better” than Fordham, even! — are still having troubles finding legal work in the recession. I think that some of the commenters’ criticism of the NYT (or at least mine), is not that it is too upper class, but that in the series of articles it has published about the problems of the legal profession, it has chosen only to focus on Big Law attorneys while there are also many other lawyers struggling, probably more so.
— Jackie
12.
January 19, 2010
10:40 am
Link

You have to wonder why the media loves them elite school grads. Of course whatever the reason, it gives prospective law school applicants the wrong idea about the profession.

For all prospective Law School students: If you don’t get into a top 10 U.S. Law School, apply to Law programs abroad. It’s far cheaper than studying in the U.S. Tens of thousands of foreign attorneys are practicing law in the U.S. with little or no debt because they studied in their home country first. U.S. Law students are at a huge economic dis-advantage against foreign attorneys.
Get your legal education abroad.
If you’re in middle or high school, pick a country and get fluent in that language….FAST.
— James

Overseas is where the opportunity is. Our "leaders" over here have sold us out.

Trophy Children with a non-earning JD and how many lawyers are good at keeping up appearances

2010-01-17T11:45:00.003-06:00

Over at The Legal Dollar Blog is a post about the idea of whether going solo is viable.

And there are a couple of interesting comments below the story

"Law is 4 Losers" takes on the "Solo Practice Cheerleaders"

2010-01-16T04:41:00.010-06:00

There are these websites that try to sell new lawyers the info they supposedly need to set up their own solo lawyer shop.
Over on one of the solo practice cheerleaders sites scambusting blogger L4L is telling the truth about solo practice (see the panel on the right side of this blog for a link to L4L's blog Big Debt Small Law).
Here are some excerpts from that thread:

....it might surprise you to know that I operated a solo practice for about 14 months. I worked 80 hour weeks in doc review for almost a year to save up 10 K of seed money. I rented a nice little space in a suburban NJ office condo for only $150 a month, hung my degrees on the wall, bought about $250 of used office furniture at an auction, and was up and running as they say.

You really made a great deal on that office!

I stretched my ad dollars as much as possible. I spent $10 a week on a church bulletin, $30 a month to be in 5 condominium newsletters (to try and get RE closings when people sold and also wills/trusts for young couples having kids), and my one “big” ad, a $250 a month half-page display ad in a penny saver magazine with about 35 K circulation. I even did one of those paper “placemat ads” that was in 15 local diners/bars (it cost $250 for a run of 100 K placemats, and I thought it might be just the sort of “guerilla” marketing that might work for blue collar personal injury or DWI clients.)

Nope. Not a single case in the 6 months the placements were out there. I also spent $1200/ year on a malpractice policy. And of course those good old NJ bar dues and CLE rip-off fees.

what I have found is that ads do not generally work because the market is so saturated. Signs don't work, either. The ones at the top end of the advertising schemes do make a living.

What works is client referrals. But it takes years to get that many clients.

I also joined the local bar association and tried to get court-appointed work, but it’s a real “old boys club” and they never sent me a single case (still haven’t 2 years later and I’m still on the list LOL). The local bar here is another “old boys” club and the only people my age were the younger halves of father-son team who obviously were in a much different position than me.
.....

I have found the same thing. The counties here set the appointed work experience requirements high so that newbies cannot get in unless they are former district attys (in crim defense law, and in family law, they have to have a lot of experience, too).

Everything in law is a clique. THe only people making a living at it have been in practice a million years, or they got hired on at a firm or as a district atty.

Needless to say, after 12 months of these drips n’ drabs and my hard-earned seed money exhausted, I closed up shop. Rather than rent storage space for my furniture, I just threw everything (including my framed law and college degrees) into the parking lot’s dumpster and walked away for good. The experience left me personally, spiritually, and financially crushed.

So many other solo lawyers have gone down that same path. But at least you are telling your story.

The whole endeavor just seemed so foolish and naïve in retrospect, like a child’s pipedreams. I sat on the curb and smoked a cigarette after I loaded the dumpster and really felt like committing suicide. Remember, this is the town I grew up in, and my high school friends all laughed hysterically at how little $$$ I made and my cheesy placemat ads etc. They still kid me and call me an “ambulance chaser.” Hell, I’d laugh at me too. It’s beyond embarrassing. Most of them drive trucks and already own homes and have families, while I have nothing but loan debt and failure.

Yes, people I know from my youth who went on to do things like drive trucks are in general doing better than those who went to college, as long as those blue collar workers are away from the general American-Mexico border states where labor is super cheap.

In a few short weeks I was back on the 6 am bus into NYC to start another sentence in the doc review gulag for $30 an hour and no benefits. When the bus passed by my old office, I felt like throwing up.

Brilliant post, L4L. Brilliant. I feel your pain, bud. But keep fighting back against the law school machine. We are making progress. Maintain an even strain. You are helping people avoid these law school debt traps.

My blog serves only to apprise people of the enormous risks involved so they don’t end up like me (a fate I truly wouldn’t wish on anyone). I really believe that its better most people give up on law altogether and get into a career that actually has a stable future. Law is just too many people fighting over too few scraps. I’m most happy about the people who avoided law school altogether thanks to my blog, and only hope that more people don’t make my same mistakes.

L4L

Solo practice cheerleaders are like the merchants who moved in to sell the gold rush goldminers food and other goods. Outside of a few goldminers who got lucky, the only ones in the goldfields that were making a decent living were the merchants.

I could say more about the solo practice cheerleaders, but I will refrain. These people are also lawyers who are just trying to eat. Good luck to them.

Our real enemy is the law schools themselves, and their lobbying/front/PR organizations.

"you can do anything with a law degree" says telemarketer

2010-01-13T17:41:00.001-06:00

Marvelous post on JDUnderground really needs no embellishment.

aknas (Jan 13 - 4:41 pm)

So, my high school sends me a postcard about updating my address for a high school alum directory. I call the 1-800 number and talk to a Texas telemarketer. I tell her I moved and give her my new address. Then she verifies my employer. I tell her that I'm unemployed. Then she verifies my UG college. Then she verifies my law school. Then she verifies that I got a J.D. Then she comments that with a J.D., I should be able to get a new job easily, because "you can easily get any new job with a law degree."

Then she tells me that not only can I use the directory to find old friends, I can use it for "networking." Then she tells me I can purchase a book or CD (which ever I prefer,) in only two easy payments.

The commentator "stealmind" has the perfect reply:

stealmind (Jan 13 - 6:14 pm)
chances are, she also has a jd,

10 Yankee Dollars per hour for graduates of law school

2010-01-13T15:40:00.004-06:00

Who said law school doesn't pay off??

Another ad for law school grads shows us what the market rate is for law school graduates (the real market, I mean, not fraudulent lies of the law schools):

Law grad
Date: 2010-01-13, 1:45PM EST
Reply to: job-ewmab-1550932461@craigslist.org [Errors when replying to ads?]

Seeking experience? Small general practice office is seeking law grad to help with casework. 10 per hour, or more based on experience and admission to bar

And don't forget, kids, like the ad says, they will pay MORE than 10 once you get experience and are licensed. Maybe $12? Hey, the sky is the limit....

The free market has spoken!

Tip o' the hat to yankees4life on jdu for the heads up on this ad....

More grads of top law schools begging for work on Craiglist. The free market has spoken. Supply and demand reigneth supreme....

2010-01-13T14:08:00.009-06:00

yet another experienced, Ivy league lawyer is posting an ad on craigslist scrounging for any scraps of legal work.

Graduate of top-5 law school with big firm and federal government experience seeking employment, preferably full-time but also will consider contract, per diem and part-time work. I have experience in litigation, arbitration, regulatory and administrative matters, among other areas. Will provide resume upon request. I look forward to your inquiries.

Compensation: Flexible

"Compensation: Flexible," huh? That phrase might well serve as the motto for law school grads into the foreseeable future. How long before we see third tier grads offering to do janitorial work on the side at law firms in order to get their foot in the door? Supply and demand, folks. It don't ever go away, my friends. What caused the oversupply of lawyers? You know the answer, dontcha? Law schools making up lies about how well their graduates do.

Bend over, sweetie. Show us your...."flexibility.".....

Tip o' the hat to Elie at Above The Law for his post on this.

What does 15 years of trial experience get you as a lawyer in Dallas, Texas?

2010-01-13T11:59:00.012-06:00

This monster.com ad shows us how overcrowded the legal market is:

Miller, Curtis & Weisbrod is hiring an attorney for our Dallas office, to work on nationwide pharmaceutical litigation. The lawyer will work on a variety of different dangerous drug cases around the country. The ideal candidate will have 5-15 years of plaintiffs experience in pharmaceutical and mass tort litigation, but other experience will be considered. Candidates need to have experience in taking and defending depositions, attending hearings and strong preference for trial experience.

Salary
USD 40,000.00/year

Wow! And that advertisment was placed by a 9 lawyer firm in a large metropolitan area, not some two-bit solo in a small town looking to pay bottom dollar. If 40K is what you get from a big firm with 15 years civil litigation trial experience, imagine the pittance you would get from the small time firms and solos.

15 years as a garbageman gets you more than that. Go work at walmart 15 years and you wind up as an assistant manager at least. Be making more than 40K and you never had to spend 3 years of your life in law school and go into debt 100K dollars.

Supply and demand, folks. The law schools have been lying about how much money their grads make, been doing it for years. So now those bogus stats have lured so many kids into the law schools that the oversupply of lawyers has driven wages down to the level of retail store workers.

Tip o' the hat to the JDU post by legalese retard.

"Do Older Law Grads Face Placement Woes? Yale Students Unconcerned" Do people have problems paying their bills? Millionaires Unconcerned....

2010-01-12T08:35:00.006-06:00

From the ABA Journal, this gem of a headline: Do Older Law Grads Face Placement Woes? Yale Students Unconcerned

So I guess the message to all those 30 and 40 something "non traditional" aspiring law students is to "go right ahead!" Yalies who spent 2 years working before going to Yale Law are having no problem getting jobs. So therefore a 40 year old who applies to a third tier school, paying for it with 100K dollars in loans will similarly have no problem at all.

Next week, the ABA Journal will run the following story:
Are Americans able to pay their bills in this recession? American millionaires are unconcerned about paying their bills.

And if the stores run out of bread, well, then the poor can just eat cake, instead....

People, this just shows how "in the bag" the ABA and the legal profession media is for the law school industry.

The blog "visualizelaw" uses phony NALP stats

2010-01-11T12:20:00.001-06:00

Above The Law has a post with a chart purporting to show that a large percentage of 2008 law school grads got jobs. Pure bullshit of course because the stats used are the fake stats put out by the law schools and fed to the NALP. The law school admins make huge salaries, even multi-millions, and have been inflating the employment and salary stats of their grads for years now.

Of course the comments below the article tell the real story:

28
Posted by guest | Permalink
Monday, January 11, 2010 10:54 AM

I doubt the accuracy of this chart. I don't belief that 10% of 2008 law school graduates are earning over $160K, never mind 10% of all people who applied to law school and were potential members of the 2008 class.
This graph sounds like made up crap.

29
Posted by guest | Permalink
Monday, January 11, 2010 10:57 AM

There is absolutely no f**king way this chart is remotely accurate. At the vast majority of unwashed ABA law schools only 1-5 law students will get a $160k job, not to mention unaccredited schools, etc. There's no way that over 10% of all people who APPLIED to law school got a biglaw job. I call BS.

51
Posted by guest | Permalink
Monday, January 11, 2010 11:25 AM

Excuse me, but that chart is ridiculous. You can't factor in people who didn't get into ,or graduate, from law school into a class they never entered. Duh? In addition I have three friends, all from top law schools who were indeed fired from their big law jobs within three months. The rationale for these firings? It seemed to be the guys who moved to New York to take these jobs from other places, like Florida, and the midwest. Meaning they didn't have undergraduate, or familial roots in this city. A year later they still don't have jobs in law.

53
Posted by guest | Permalink
Monday, January 11, 2010 11:29 AM

35,

that's because the chart is made using absolutely beyond useless NALP Data.

http://www.nalp.org/08saldistribution

If that chart is to be believed (and it's not), firms that collectively make up only about 10% of ALL Licensed Lawyers, (IE Biglaw Firms that pay $160k) somehow hired almost 25% of all new graduates, in 2008, a year when many of them were starting to be cautious about hiring.

Even if EVERY single graduate of the T14 earned 160k, that'd be somewhere less than 12% of starting law students. (and realistically it's not, people below 50% even in the T14 have had a rough time getting those jobs, particularly in this market)

Quite simply, the only way to explain that chart is a massive sampling error. Most Firms outside of big law (and many schools outside of the T14) simply don't work under the NALP rules, and much of that goes unreported.

68
Posted by guest | Permalink
Monday, January 11, 2010 12:42 PM

This chart really doesn't reflect reality... I mean, when attorneys are out there like this guy, looking for work at $75 - $100 a DAY, I don't think that you can reasonably expect that people who don't get Biglaw jobs are somehow magically finding non-existent $80K / year entry level positions:

http://newyork.craigslist.org/lgi/lgl/1542128292.html

ABA Journal willingly spreads the recent Law School industry article that was in the NY Times

2010-01-11T11:52:00.001-06:00

The "Young people are all going to law school to beat the recession" propaganda article has been reposted by the ABA Journal.

Of course as usual, the commentators below the article are wise to what is happening:

LS

Jan 11, 2010 10:04 AM CST

Once again I marvel at the information disparity between prospectives and law students & lawyers. Is it really that prospectives are so uninformed and naive, or are they collectively delusional (as Steve suggests)?
7.

Right. The question is why this is still happening. OF course a lot of students who are in lower ranked law schools have relatives who are already successful lawyers. Those students have a job waiting for them. In my low ranked law school, I would estimate that 25 percent of the students there were in this category. The law schools track these students after graduation and make sure to include them in the employment survey results because it boosts their figures.

But the majority of law school students are going to be victime, those outside the top 10 to 20 percent.

This comment speaks to their fate:

8.

DesperateDelusionalDefrauded

Jan 11, 2010 11:42 AM CST

yes, the kids are still being lure into debt slavery for JDs that are nearly worthless for over 30 percent of all law school grads. Why?

1) Desperation: They owe student loan payments for undergrad, and going to grad school will defer them. They also need more student loans to live off because they cannot get a job

2) Delusional: they think that law school pretty much guarantees a living. Wrong. There are huge excesses of unemployed and underemployed lawyers.

3) Defrauded: the law schools and the NALP and the media are putting out false employment and salary data to lure in the students.

The Law School Industry Lobby Reacts To The LA Times "Lawyer Oversupply" Editorial By Buying A Propaganda Article in the New York Times

2010-01-10T03:16:00.009-06:00

Gotta give the law school industry credit. No flies on them. No later than 2 days after the LA Times article that slammed the law school scam, the law school industry has fought back with a pro-law school article in the NY Times. Basically the article touts law school by using peer pressure tactics targeting desperate young people. The gist of the article is basically this: "Everyone else is going to ride out the recession in law school. You should, too!" There is nary a mention in this article of the huge percentage of new lawyers that have not been able to make a living in the legal field in recent years. And no mention of the fraudulent statistics used by the law schools. This NY Times piece is all sunshine and apple pie.

The NY Times is going broke, and so they need money. I would guess that the law school industry lobbyists paid a pretty price for this advertisement disguised as a news story.

Elie Mystal on Above The Law covers the Greenbaum LA Times opinion piece

2010-01-08T16:19:00.001-06:00

Above The Law blog has this well written comment by Elie Mystal on Mr Greenbaum's LA Times editorial on the oversupply of law schools and new lawyers.

There were several insightful comments, excerpted below:

Posted by guest | Permalink
Friday, January 8, 2010 4:44 PM

Look, it's not complicated. People keep asking "why are so many students agreeing to pay over a hundred thousand dollars for a degree that will get them a $35K job"?

IT'S FRAUD. F-R-A-U-D, FRAUD.

Don't tell me for one second that the career offices and deans of these TTTs don't know that the statistics they're publishing are horribly misleading.

We don't need the ABA to regulate law schools, shut schools down or stop others from opening. All the government needs to do is perp walk a handful of law school deans with the most fanciful statistics and the market will correct itself.

They won't, because the government has increasingly become a kleptocracy over the last 20 years (at any increasing rate) and law school deans are part of that kleptocracy, but that's all that needs to be done.

Perp Walk will solve the problem, all right. All we can do is keep asking for it.

As to the question of whether restriction of new law schools or grads would be an anti-trust violation, we have this comment:

by guest | Permalink
Friday, January 8, 2010 12:58 PM

It's not an anti-trust violation because every other professional organization does the same thing, as do lawyers themselves already, through requirements for bar admission. Anyone who thinks the bar exam is anything other than an entrance barrier needs to get their head checked. You make up some BS rationale like the AMA does for not accrediting schools, or like the ABA already has for denying accreditation to certain schools, and you just apply it more strictly. God I get sick of people acting like the real world functions like a 1L conlaw debate.

Aint that the truth. THe real world just seems to never make an appearance in these little sophomoric "discussions" online.

Posted by guest | Permalink
Friday, January 8, 2010 1:18 PM

Jesus f'ing Christ I hate being this guy, but...

All the people talking about antitrust violations have obviously never heard of the Clayton Antitrust Act. 15 USC 17. "The labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce."

Goddamn it I hate people who cite statutes in comments to a message board, but arguing that limiting the supply of lawyers would be an antitrust violation is just stupid.-

Right. Labor is exempt. We sell our labor. Therefore an organization to protect our wages is exempt. The ABA (American BigLaw Association) is obviously not on our side, but we can form a new org.

Posted by guest | Permalink
Friday, January 8, 2010 1:18 PM

How come if a used car salesman makes fraudulent misrepresentations about a car I purchase I get my money back, but if a law school makes fraudulent misrepresentations about my employment prospects I cannot get my tuition back?

The school may argue that students are paying for an "education" and not for a job, but who really receives anything resembling an education in law school? I paid Bar Bri to teach me the law. I have no idea what I paid my law school for.

I have been taught how to troubleshoot electronics as a teenager, how to operate a nuclear power plant, how to write computer programs, and I have taught many students how to diagram sentences.

The law school curriculum is not designed to teach you how to be a lawyer. It is designed to maximize profit.

Posted by guest | Permalink
Friday, January 8, 2010 1:20 PM

The problem is those "stupid people" who go to law school are being lied to. Capitalism is only efficient when there is informational transparency. When prospective students are being blatantly lied to by law schools, how are they supposed to rationally analyze their decisions? In virtually no market beside education is this amount of disinformation tolerated without government action. I need a four page insert on the nutritional qualities of my Frosted Flakes but law schools can completely fabricate employment statistics and scam students out of 120K? That makes no sense whatsoever.

Yeppers. But if we make enough noise for long enough, we will get results.

Posted by guest | Permalink
Friday, January 8, 2010 1:29 PM

6 - Legal fees are not astronomical. They're certainly not out of the range of normal people, since normal people aren't hiring Skadden to do their wills or get a zoning variance to build a fence around their back yard.

There are attorneys on Craigslist offering to do uncontested divorces for $400, real estate closings for $200, and draft wills for $50. Those aren't "astronomical" legal fees "out of the range of most Americans." In small firms that cater to the simple needs of regular people, there is generally no such thing as billable hours -- everything is flat fee. And those flat fees are generally low enough that most people can afford them, but not really high enough to sustain the attorneys that collect them.

In the low levels of litigation, like insurance defense, the actual fees earned can sometimes be as little as $20.00 an hour, depending on the flat fee arrangement and the amount of time spent. If you honestly think it's still 1970 and legal fees are so high that normal people can't hire lawyers, you haven't checked Craigslist in a while.

There are lawyers in my large metro area advertising flat fee felony defense for 400 dollars, trial and all.
That amounts to maybe 10 bucks an hour.

Friday, January 8, 2010 1:55 PM

89 - The statute doesn't say "labor union," it says "labor... organization." There's absolutely nothing stopping the ABA from deciding to act as a labor organization (which isn't the same thing as a union) rather than as... whatever the hell it thinks it is right now. Just because lawyers aren't covered by the NLRA doesn't mean that they can't have labor organizations protect their economic interests.

- 34

Yes!

Posted by guest | Permalink
Friday, January 8, 2010 3:54 PM

I've said it before and I'll say it again. You have more protection when deciding whether or not to buy a $3 share of Citibank common stock than you do than you do in deciding whether or not to spend $135K on a law school education.

Why the decision to attend a law school is not given the same level of protection and the same accuracy of disclosure is not required is a complete and total mystery to me

Because college students are young and exploitable.
They don't complain.

Here is my solution: the rationale to use is that because of the increasing complexity of the legal system and the laws, in order to avoid harming the public via inexperienced new lawyers who could not get a job and had to go solo, it is imperative, in order to protect the public, that new lawyers be able to get jobs. In order to accomplish that goal, the number of new lawyers has to decrease. It is an issue of public protection--protecting the public from malpractice.

Additionally, there is the issue of youthful law school applicants being lied to and being saddled with huge debt. Many who take the LSAT are only 20 years old. Here, there is the issue of protecting the young.