Will the U.S. Soon Face a Shortage of Lawyers?

Bear with me on this. I know it sounds crazy, especially for those in the legal industry. Over the last few years, an attitude of doom and gloom about employment for recent law school graduates has become almost axiomatic: students go to law school for the wrong reasons, law schools embellish their employment statistics, the ABA will grant full accreditation to a taco truck with a handwritten sign that says “Lawskool,” and, every year, there are more new law school graduates than there are law jobs.

There are quite a few bitter lawyers and law students out there right now, who feel that they’ve been duped. While I believe that the law school system could certainly use some reform, and that every major player, including the schools themselves, the ABA, U.S. News and World Report (which provides the only rankings for law schools to which anyone pays any attention), the student loan industry, and law firms could stand to do a better job in giving people considering law school an accurate picture of what the practice of law is like, I don’t consider myself a crusader against the “law school scam,” as it’s so often called.

Anyway, the point of all this is that it’s generally assumed that the legal market will be over-saturated forever. But, is this necessarily the case? The word about the current state of the legal job market has gotten out, and law school enrollment is down. The UK has gone through a similar drop in law school attendance, and a decrease in the number of new lawyers over the last few years. However, as the global economy gradually kicks back into gear, there seems to be a shortage of entry-level attorneys in that country.

There was a recession in the early 90s, which, as with this recession, hit the legal industry pretty hard, and enrollment in law school went down. As the economy picked up, and businesses engaged in more activity, and therefore needed more legal services, law firms found that they could not find enough new associates, and this drove salaries for new associates way up, as firms competed for talent.

As the economy in the U.S. recovers, could this come to pass here? I’m sure a lot of people who graduated law school in the last 1-3 years are hoping so, and desperately want to believe that this is how it will play out here. And maybe it will. After all, the legal industry, especially the type of work done by large corporate firms, is increasingly global. On top of that, the legal systems in the US and UK are pretty similar.

If this comes to pass in the U.S., I’m sure a lot of young lawyers will welcome the news. However, in the experience of many lawyers I know, if you have been out of law school for more than a few years without a “real” legal job, many firms see you as “damaged goods,” and will pass you up for a new graduate, or someone who worked for them over one summer in law school.

This, I think, illustrates a problem in the industry, which may, in part, be the cause of some of its other problems: snobbery.

A lot of lawyers, particularly at large law firms, seem to look down on people who didn’t go to prestigious law schools ranked in the top 14 in U.S. News and World Report. Why are the top 14 considered particularly prestigious? Why not top 15, top 10, or top 20? Apparently, since the U.S. News and World Report began ranking law schools, the same 14 schools have always ranked in the top 14. They’ve switched places within the top 14, but none have ever dropped below number 14, to be replaced by another school. However, on a few occasions, an additional school has (sort of) made it into the top 14, but only by tying with one of the more “traditional” top 14 schools.

Anyway, big law firms overwhelmingly hire from those schools, and schools ranked near them. In this market, they rarely hire from outside the top 50. This leads to elitism on the top of the legal profession, and inferiority complexes on the lower.

Why is this a problem? It’s problematic for a few reasons. First of all, it creates a bit of an “us vs. them” atmosphere between different “classes” of lawyers.

Secondly, if you watch any movie or TV show having to do with the legal system, it typically focuses on the type of work mostly done by big firms, or at least it depicts young lawyers living a lavish lifestyle that only a big firm salary could provide (not that you’d have much time to spend all that money). This leads to many young people developing an unrealistic idea of what the legal profession is like, and leads to them going to law school for the wrong reasons.

If you’re considering law school, I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but I’m going to go ahead and reiterate: don’t go for the money, or the prestige of working at a big firm. First of all, only a minority of law graduates land jobs at big firms. Second, if that’s the only reason you go to law school, chances are you’ll end up not enjoying the work, and you’ll be working longer hours than most employees. Also, if you don’t have a passion for the law, it’s unlikely that you’ll do well enough in law school to get a job at one of these big firms in the first place.

So, what can the legal industry do about this? It could start by getting over itself. Obviously, the work done by lawyers is important – perhaps more important than most people realize. But, it’s not as if they’re philosopher-kings, and it would be nice if TV and movies would stop giving that impression.