Litigation-Free Recession?

It seems that law school is not the recession-proof profession that budding barristers thought it was.  Indeed, they may become barristas first.

“According to the National Association for Law Placement, only about 64 percent of 2010 law graduates had jobs requiring a law license nine months after graduation,” Katherine Mangan reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education on October 21, 2011. “For graduates with full-time jobs, the median salary fell 13 percent, to $63,000, from the previous year.”

“Over all, the legal field had a net loss of 50,100 jobs—about 4.3 percent—from January 2008 to last month, according to an analysis of data from the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics by the blog LawShucks.”

Some potential applicants are beginning to notice. “Applications increased in 200 and 2010 as college graduates sought to ride out the recession and improve their job prospects,” Mangan relates. “That trend came to a halt this year, when applications dropped 11 percent.”

“In an informal poll taken by the Law School Admission Counsel, 45 percent of the 143 law schools that responded said they had fallen short of their enrollment targets this fall.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

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