At one point in time, law was lucrative, and there were not enough lawyers. Schools responded by growing in size and in tuition. Students could justify the loans because there was a high chance that the "investment" would pay off.
Fast forward a few decades and law as an industry is contracting. Since the profession is not as lucrative, if you follow the chain, then schools should have contracted in response, minting fewer lawyers. But they can't easily adjust when they've built a bureaucracy and dramatically increased the number of tenured faculty. That lead to them misleading applicants by not having transparency with their true employment numbers. For a while, students were duped. But at this point, the cat is largely out of the bag. Applicants numbers are down, and the demise of debt-burdened law grads have hit national headlines numerous times over the last 5 or so years. So now, in uncoordinated fashion, schools must adjust and finally down size. Too bad students were caught in the crossfire for many years before the flares went up.
What's different now is not the market. Folks at Valparaiso were never getting recruited into high-paying jobs. What's different now is the extreme amounts of debt. And that phenomenon that's not confined to law. The whole education sector is overblown by irrational pro-education rhetoric and free flowing federal money.
It's worth mentioning that you'd have been downvoted into oblivion for mentioning this on a social network just several years ago. This was also true offline, people didn't want to hear it.
All figures have been adjusted to constant 2016 dollars:
1956: $4,178
1974: $11,232
1985: $16,803
1995: $26,480
2005: $35,550
2015: $45,123
Actually what is inflationary is the activities of the middle/upper-middle class (college, housing, stocks, etc), which are of course underrepresented in the CPI indices. The combination of the never ending debt bubble and quantitative easing has created a very localised inflation.
Of course, the top private undergrad institutions give much more in the way of financial aid than their legal graduate school counterparts.
However, pricing power appears limited, creating a ceiling on wage increases. To this point, Vault100 firms have recently trickled out pay increases to $180K/year for incoming associates. Clients have laughed and said, "Good for your employees, but you're not passing those costs onto us!" [0]
In biglaw, i have friends who easily work 2500-3000 hours a year to make their billable hours requirement. So these salaries are not exact as great as one would think anyway
I'm on a roll today
Obviously not for your big Oracle vs. Google lawsuits or where the entire company is riding on it, but for anything less than that. For example, every public company gets sued by opportunists every time there's a merger or acquisition, or every patent troll expects nobody to fight their case because it's so expensive. There's lots of little things that come up where you just need someone to do the paperwork.
It seems like you could hire a couple broke lawyers to fight patent trolls, and the cost wouldn't run into millions when your attorney books a ton of hours.
I've considered using paralegals to write up paperwork to be reviewed by an actual lawyer. But it seems like there should be a 'cheap broke lawyer' option in between the two, who would probably do a fine job.
The cheaper fields of law pretty much do that. Personal injury, traffic and dui, immigration, insurance defense etc. will take broke lawyers and pay them shit. They bill out at ~200 dollars an hour, but don't collect anywhere near 40 hours a week. The associates are getting paid in the 50k a year range.
There are good reasons most companies don't try to do litigation in house. Litigation comes and goes and isn't steady. I'm defending a medium sized company on a patent case. But they have a patent case maybe 2-3 times a decade. During certain parts of the case we'll need 2-3 associates working full time. But a year ago they had no need for even one patent litigator.
Plus certain parts of the case are hard to handle with in house lawyers. They might be forbidden to see certain confidential documents.
Another big difference is that law is specialized. A guy who does DUI defense doesn't have the slightest idea how to do a patent troll case. And a patent lawyer can't do a DUI case. Once you gain that experience you aren't a broke lawyer anymore.
so basically you're saying they are broke because their education isn't actually adequate for the sort of work they would be undertaking.
That's approximately like saying you could hire a couple of broke developers to build a software package upon which much of your company's success will depend. Both the 10X-productivity phenomenon [0] and the FizzBuzz Problem [1] can show up in law just as much as in software development.
[0] E.g., http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/179616/a-good...
[1] E.g., https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
(But do think you're right that they're not the bargain they already to be.)
The law market is a quickly-narrowing pyramid for the top jobs. If you're a top 10% (ish) grad from a top 20 school, you can get a high-paying job with one of the big firms. For 10 or so years you work super long hours for maybe 120-150k. Then after about a decade, maybe 5% of those get offered partner. Everyone else gets sent out; best case in that situation is getting an in-house counsel job at about half the pay you had before. Or you could be a public defender, for probably less money than a teacher makes.
Source: my dad works at a top 25 law school and my brother works at a firm in DC (there's probably some attenuation here)
In house counsel salaries are way less than those at a top law firm and you don't have to pay the difference between the firm's billings and what an associate--who's actually do the work-- gets paid.
Just to expand: in house counsel gets a salary and doesn't have to do the business-building that a partner at a law firm has to.
Also for tech companies, in house counsel can get stock options. In the 2000 boom this caused mass defections of gold-digging lawyers from traditional law firms, which screwed them up too (boo hoo).
Not that very many startups need any in house lawyers!
One paragraph in the article gets at what's been happening: "With big-firm jobs drying up, however, many of these graduates began competing for lower-paying spots at midsize firms, which also downsized, and certain government jobs they wouldn’t have sought in an earlier era."
I don't quite think of it as the American economy actually needing fewer lawyers than it used to. Rather, for a period of maybe a couple of decades (I think beginning with the 1980s business boom, so roughly 1985-2005) the biggest law firms enjoyed unusual success with the business model I refer to above. I think we're seeing a kind of correction where the legal profession is starting to look more like it was before the 1980s.
In some ways I think there may be more interesting opportunities for lawyers now. I see a lot of lawyers with a few years' experience establishing solo or boutique-firm practices in specialized areas that I don't think would have been as viable a couple of decades ago. Someone commented that you should only go to law school if you go to 'Harvard or Yale', but I am not sure that is what I'd take from recent developments. However, if your goal is to get a job in a big elite firm after graduating from law school, opportunities for those who didn't go to one of the top national schools (not limited to Harvard and Yale of course) are no doubt more reduced than 10 or 20 years ago.
OCR got good enough fast enough that within a single generation, this sub-industry went from needing a mass of associate lawyers to a sliver of a fraction of that. Data transmission and global supply chain got good enough fast enough that those pages that fell below a configured confidence scoring on the OCR were sent to offshore teams for a fraction of the cost of the remaining American associate lawyers, for manual clarification.
This scenario will play out and repeat itself in many industries. A stunning amount of white collar middle class work today across an astonishing array of industries relies upon fairly basic reading, writing and reasoning skillsets, increasingly more coming within striking range of software advances with each passing decade.
I don't think blue collar work is particularly safe from automation, either. We're likely not too far from a lawn maintenance robot that autonomously and continuously maintains every aspect of a simple grass lawn (mowing, edging, ant hill removal, insect control, fertilization, weed removal, soil aeration). From there, we only have decades before more general-case, sophisticated, consumer-grade, reliable set-and-forget lawn maintenance robots arrive on the scene.
I suspect we won't see industries entirely shrivel, I think what is happening is a lot of industries are relying upon relatively routine and repetitive work to support a plurality or even the bulk of their sustaining revenue, while expert-level work boosts their margins. Automation seems to be revealing cost structures of the routine, repetitive work, and re-pricing the expert-level work. The experts will still be paid a lot, possibly even much more than they are now per unit sale (whether per hour, client, incident, etc.), but the volume of their work will decline, while the lower-skill work is decimated to working wage levels.
OCR also just made the industry bigger. Because you could just ask for any email the company had that had specific key words. Sounds more efficient right? Wrong. The number of false positives is insane. Before OCR, judges would never make you read through every email in a company.
Machine learning (called predictive coding in the legal industry) is taking some jobs. But I've heard you need half a million documents to train the program. But you still need someone to do a second level review. It's incredibly useful but only on huge projects.
The bigger reason for job losses is that contractors now operate overseas. Indian document reviewers are cheap.
I bet the discovery industry is still probably 5x bigger than it was in 1980.
There are other fun advancements in the horizon: When computers start to gain some understanding of documents, they can read them for us, saving even more time. Eventually helping a non-lawyer understand a contract, and even provide basic advice, all automatically, becomes possible.
There are other factors to the decline of our need of lawyers, but they are cyclical, and will perk up again. The technology changes are here to stay though.
That's not how it is anymore. There's no free pass to success, no check all these boxes and then you've made it. You gotta use your brain early on, figure it out for yourself, because ultimately you're going to be the one having to live with the consequences of how you've spent your youth.
I think there are actually good opportunities in vocational schools. Marketable skills that you can use to find a good job. Law, liberal arts and communication degrees maybe not as marketable.
To be fair, the other pillar of "expensive degree leading to lucrative, high prestige career", medicine, is still doing well. As the population ages, there will be an even higher need for medical professionals. Of course, part of this seems to be a result of residency programs being restricted in the number of seats available.
Family practice/internal medicine is arguably one of the most important roles, but many new doctors specialize so that they can better "cash in" on their M.D. degree. It's much cheaper to be proactive than reactive, but medicine doesn't think that way.
Another problem is that Medicine spends a ton of money trying to keep old people alive for a few more days.
For example, my grandfather was somehow talked into have his pacemaker replaced a few months before his 101st birthday. There were complications, infections, etc, and my aunt had to fight to get him on hospice care. Replacing this pacemaker was a mean thing to do to an old man who'd spent years hoping to die in his sleep. It would have been kinder to have never given him the pacemaker in the first place. He would've passed away 10 years earlier, but those last 10 years were of little value to him.
Obamacare has only made "paying the bill" for medicine even more problematic.
There never was such a time.
(Hint: Good law schools don't care about GPA. Do well on the LSAT and all is forgiven.)
Want to get a job? Law is all about selling knowledge. You have to show that you actually know something beyond the bar. Sit down and become an expert on something. Publish a few papers. Get your name out. That's what worked for me. Becoming a recognized expert in a very narrow law+technology field opened doors that were firmly shut to bare-bones law grads.
And.. learn to speak properly. Too many law schools are letting grads slide through with poor grammar. It might sound trivial but is really important when you are claiming to actually know something.
Want to get a job as a lawyer, start with a compsci, biotech or engineering-related degree. But having some professional life experience also counts. Nobody wants to get legal advice from someone who doesn't have any realworld experience.
WSGR takes a mix of top 5 law school grads as well as Santa Clara law school grads. The latter is seen as having a better local network through their family and upbringing (and have a better retention track record compared to their higher academically ranked counterparts), and are seen as effective future rainmakers even if their legal abilities are inferior to their peers.
Disclaimer: SCU law grad
I wonder if there are any stats on the wages of law professors? Seems they would trend down? Do recent grads teach first year law classes?
And most newly minted law professors have real research doctorates in addition to J.D.s or top tire law degrees or both. They have much better outside academia options than social science or arts academics and their salaries reflect that.
No. Not at any reputable school. Getting a job as a law prof usually requires a degree above the normal law degree. And you better have gone to a top-tier law school. It's a real commitment.
At least at the relatively elite law schools, law professors do tend to be hired not too many years out of law school, often following a prestigious federal judicial clerkship and perhaps a couple of years of a stint at a top law firm. (That's probably mostly because those are the relevant biographical characteristics of those doing the hiring.) It is relatively uncommon to hire very experienced professionals (apart from adjunct positions). As you move to less elite tiers of law schools you see more ordinary faculty drawn from experienced professionals not necessarily having the cookie-cutter star credentials new hires at the elite schools have.
First year classes may be taught by either very experienced law professors or fairly junior ones.
"“People are not being helped by going to these schools,” Kyle McEntee, executive director of the advocacy group Law School Transparency, said of Valparaiso and other low-tier law schools. “The debt is really high, bar passage rates are horrendous, employment is horrendous.”"
Less than 2/3 of Valparaiso's students can pass the bar. Even if everything else is good, why would anyone recruit there?
What exactly took him so long ? Wasn't it mostly a copy paste from somewhere else with some adaptations ?
Because those loans can't be discharged in bankruptcy, it's less risky to make student loans. Therefore, lenders don't have the same incentive as before to underwrite their loans. That is, it isn't quite as important to make sure their borrowers have a decent shot at repaying the money.
So, it's easier to get a student loan. And, it's easier to borrow more money. So, it's easier for educational institutions to increase tuition and fees, and still fill up their classes. This turns into a vicious cycle increasing tuition and student debt.
I don't want to pick on Valpo. I don't know anything about their law school.
If the lenders were taking a close look at the Massachusetts College of Law (MCL, local to me, and struggling a bit) and asking whether their grads were getting decent jobs, they might make it harder to borrow so much money. That would put downward pressure on MCL's tuition and fees. But the lenders are not doing that.
But why should the lenders bother? It's a hassle to underwrite an educational institution. Student borrowers can't declare bankruptcy and get out from under those loans, even if the education bought with that money turns out to be worthless to them. So the lenders risk little.
It's time to repeal that part of the bankruptcy "reform."
Until then people who sign student loan papers should realize they are literally signing away their lives. Student lenders are clever and dangerous predators, and student borrowers are their lawful prey.
But the students' incentive to make sure they can pay back the money is much higher.
If you're looking to underwriters to keep debt levels reasonable, you are looking in the wrong place. In any industry (school, real estate, etc.), their max is far higher than you should actually take.
For example (all italics are mine):
"The question many have asked is why is law school so expensive .... [O]ther than books and space to sit in lectures and small sessions, what is there? Medical schools need labs, cadavers, hospitals, and other expensive equipment. Physicists need telescopes, rockets into space and expensive equipped labs. ... But law school? Every time I hear that graduates are hundreds of thousands in debt, I wonder where the money went." --- from "Dale," http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expen...
"The schools have little in expenses ... physical plant, library and professors. Students buy the only 'equipment': texts and laptops." --- from "Billy Bobby," http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expen...
"As to the commenter who asked why law school is so expensive, try taking a look at the professor and dean salaries. [1] I was shocked when I learned what some of the professors and deans made at the third tier law school I attended. And, in my view, the school routinely admitted students who had no business being there, likely to pay the bloated salaries of the professors and deans." --- from "JJ," http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expen...
"But in the mid- to late 1980s, he said, the school put an increasing emphasis on legal scholarship .... Across the country, many law schools were undergoing a similar evolution. It’s no coincidence that the average law school faculty began to grow quickly around this time: Each professor was teaching fewer courses to make time for research. ... Every law school seemed to want to emulate Harvard and Yale." --- from the article itself, not the comments
"I heard a lawyer say recently that in law school there were many students for whom the 'choice' to do law was more the result of a process of elimination. They are not able or interested in stem fields, but want the prestige and income of a white collar profession which the soft sciences don't necessarily provide, i.e. Sociology, social work, psychology. ... [T]his is why the field is saturated." ---from "Johanna," http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expen...
"Make no mistake, the American Bar Association created this mess. The ABA has certified too many law schools and has placed ridiculous standards on these school thus driving up tuition to back-braking [sic] levels. Now law schools are admitting unqualified students to keep their numbers up. It is scary to observe many of these recent graduates. They are poorly read, lack critical thinking skills and are loosely educated." --- from "Peter," http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expen...
"There are crushing unmet legal needs in communities across the country. Survivors of gender based violence lack representation. Police violence is uninvestgated. Predatory lenders prey on retirees." --- from "monte," http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expen...
"There is a genuine need for lawyers in this society. First, let's all get beyond the popular fantasy that they should all be upper middle-class. Yes, a minority can become well-paid attorneys. For the reset [sic], lower tuition, train them at public universities, and shut down the lawyer -mill expensive private places. Teach most to expect social worker-type salaries and conditions. Allow some loan forgiveness for those who work with the indigent. If nothing else, such an approach to legal training would attract people who would otherwise go into social work." --- from "Oceanviewer," http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expen...
[0] Adjunct law professors are paid a pittance, so we're not part of the problem of escalating law-school costs --- we all have day jobs as lawyers or judges, and teach because we enjoy it and find it rewarding.
[1] I looked up the faculty salaries at my alma mater law school, at UT Austin, as reported by the Texas Tribune. Supposedly, the dean makes $466K; 64 full professors get a median salary $212K; one assistant professor gets $172K; one associate professor gets $122K; 18 lecturers get a median salary of $91K. https://salaries.texastribune.org/university-of-texas-at-aus...
I know parents who have worked every hour God gives so their son or daughter can be a lawyer - they see it as a route for their kids into the middle class. It's a shame, I feel the legal education system is benefiting from their ignorance of how bad it is out there for graduating lawyers.
My guess is that police, doctors, nurses, lawyers and crime scene forensics are over subscribed to because of television serials.
If television didn't exist then those jobs would have higher rates of pay or at least less competition per job opening.
I think the intersection between jobs which are not easy to outsource + not easy to televise is an interesting one.
It reminds me of Warren Buffet's ideas about growth and value corporations. Growth jobs are obviously photogenic but may not pay as much in the long term as 'value' jobs.
In fact bootcamps seem to already been in full bubble even though they're only a few years old. You see so many hiring their own grads or using faux graduate-employment metrics, which unfortunately the 3rd and 4th tier law schools are doing too.
The article notes that the person passed the bar on his first try. Indiana and Illinois (the two states grads from Valparaiso usually take the bar in) are 80.93% and 89.38% for first-time takers. So, noting that you passed the bart the first time doesn't seem to say much given the high pass rates in those states.
Honestly, is the story more that they picked a case from a school that just has mediocre students? What is the comparison between students who go here for law school and students that go to undergrad institutions with 900 SAT scores?
Are people who are well below median in tech really doing that well? For example, a friend of mine went to a top-50 school and has a BS in Computer Science. They can't find employment as a SWE because they're not that good (they got through the courses with a combination of a lot of TA help and sheer force of will). They're working for a tech company in a combination of a support and project management position. And that's someone who was smart enough to get into a top-50 ranked undergrad institution. Are people who are mediocre and attend an undergrad institution whose median SAT score is in the 900s getting jobs as SWEs with a BSCS? Are they taking adjacent positions where a BSCS might be seen as an "advantage", but not totally related to the work? Are they taking IT-related jobs?
It just seems like the story here is that people who are below median don't magically become 75th-90th percentile by a certificate or degree - and that mediocre law schools have been promising that dream to people. In the tech area, we have these bootcamp schools, but at least they're not charging students a couple hundred thousand. Like, if you spend $15k on a bootcamp and come out with a $60k salary, that might seem low compared to the dream of six-figures at Google, but you aren't saddled with a lot of debt. http://report.turing.io/ - Turing has reported that the average salary is $74k for their graduates which is respectable, but if they were taking $200k from students and 3 years of missed wages and 25% of students were earning under $60k, I think it would be the same situation - they'd be saddled with debt and even if they're earning more than they used to be, they're not earning a lot compared to the debt. But Turing isn't taking that amount of time or money and so if a student comes out with a somewhat mediocre salary by CS standards, they didn't waste a lot of time/money and might be earning a reasonable bit more than before.
And the thing is that places like Turing probably get people who might have done an undergrad at a good school, just not in CS. These are smart people who just lack a specific skill rather than below average people who also lack a specific skill. I mean, give me someone who studied at Boston College and I'm getting someone smart who just might not know any programming. Bootcamps might be getting a lot of those people - smart people who just don't know programming. Now, that doesn't mean that any smart person can make a great SWE, but it's a much better starting place than someone who is below average.
A better story would have been trying to figure out how much value add schools provide. Are elite institutions taking people who would otherwise be successful and marking them as such? Are mediocre institutions not improving outcomes for their students? To what extent do degrees actually improve student outcomes? People who go to schools and graduate schools have historically been privileged people - those who are smart enough to get in and those who are rich enough that they can afford it. Today, loans, a delay in marriage and child-having age, a proliferation of schools, etc. mean that way more people can go to post-secondary institutions. I don't know how much schools improve human capital, but that's definitely a story. Maybe elite schools do improve human capital a lot because really smart people can use education a lot. Maybe mediocre schools do well for some students and not others. These are important questions. These are questions unanswered by a NYTimes article pretending a mediocre law school with mediocre students means that no one is hiring lawyers.