In looking at some recent stories on the market for lawyers, I was reminded of a story/joke I heard somewhere along the way. Mothers were talking about their children. Two or three mothers bragged about degrees their children had earned--Bachelors, Masters, Ph.D. Another mother retorted that her child had a JOB.
The Wall Street Journal has a story, Where the Jobs Are, that discusses job-listings on SimplyHired.com. You have a better chance of getting a job as an occupational therapist than as a lawyer:
[T]he hardest-to-place industry [is] the legal field. Meanwhile, unemployed lawyers now find themselves in the country's most cutthroat race for a job, with less than one opening for every 100 working attorneys.
(Emphasis added.) That's why they call economics "the dismal science."
Listings on SimplyHired.com probably isn't the primary way that firms list job openings. But, according to the WSJ article, the Bureauof Labor Statistics reported that "the legal industry" added only 100 jobs in August--that includes all hires.
Meanwhile, Paul Campos (Colorado), aka ScamProf, has an interesting post, More fun with law school employment numbers. Campos discusses a recent article in the Ohio Lawyer that looks at employment statistics for the five public law schools in Ohio. Campos compares the statistics for the Class of 2010 of Ohio State and Toledo:
Class of 2010 |
||
---|---|---|
Ohio State | Toledo | |
Class Size | 202 | 161 |
Reporting |
179 (88.6%) |
145 (90.1%) |
Private Practice |
75 (37.0%) |
55 (34.2%) |
No Data | 03 (01.4%) | 40 (29.8%) |
Solo | 03 (01.4%) | 07 (04.3%) |
25 or less | 31 (15.4%) | 39 (24.2%) |
26 to 499 | 24 (11.9%) | 02 (01.2%) |
500 & Over | 14 (6.9%) | 0 |
Other JD Required | 31 (15.3%) | 0 |
Temp or Part-time | 04 (02.0%) | --- |
No JD Required | 55 (27.2%) | 90 (55.9%) |
"Unemployed" | 23 (11.4%) | 16 (10.0%) |
Note 1: Percentages of each class. | ||
Note 2: Campos seems to count graduates who have not reported their employment status as "unemployed." |
Two things jumped out at me. The first is the relative division of "jobs" in private practice. For Ohio State, 45.3% of graduates in private practice were sole practitioners or in firms with 25 or fewer lawyers, as opposed to 83.6% for Toledo. The second is the number of graduates reporting jobs that do not require a JD. Even for Ohio State, 27.2% graduates had non-JD jobs, as opposed to 55.9% for Toledo (note: I calculated the number for Toledo by subtracting the private practice and JD-required jobs from number of graduates that reported their employment status).
As suggested by Alan Meese (William & Mary) in ScamLaw, hiring may pick up once the economy full recovers. That assumes that the delivery of legal services are not in the middle of a structural change, as suggested by Paul Lippe (Legal Onramp) in The Rise of the Non-Firm Firms, and by Larry Ribstein (Illinois) in The Law Market and U.S. Firms (among others).
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