Tuesday, September 25, 2007 6:57 AM
As was discussed throughout the blawgosphere yesterday, the provocative Wall Street Journal article Hard Case: Job Market Wanes for U.S. Lawyers laid out the economic realities for new law graduates.
There were any number of great posts out there yesterday. Here is a sampling (or try your own search via Blawg and others):
Law School Not A Ticket To Printing Money - Build A Solo Practice, LLC
Jobs At Biglaw Limited - So Why Is This News? - My Shingle.com
The Dark Side of the Legal Job Market - WSJ Law Blog
WSJ Story on Impoverished Law Graduates - Discourse.net
I'd like to expand on this discussion myself at some point, but for now my own initial reaction was three-fold.
First, it is imperative that law students keep a close handle on how much debt they are racking up. I mentioned this earlier this Summer, Law School Debt and Lawyer Salaries, but I obviously am not alone in recognizing the importance of this issue. It is very easy as a twenty-something with limited experience in financial matters (e.g., budgeting for that car payment, house payment or rent, etcetera) to simply take out more and more loans without a lot of foresight as to just how much money you will have to earn to pay it all back, with interest. I had even worked between undergraduate and law school and failed to truly understand this, to my later regret.
Two, I have to scratch my head and wonder how big law firms have managed to take a situation wherein there is apparently more supply than demand for freshly-minted lawyers (which basic economics tells us should lead to downward pressure on salaries), and flip it completely around such that they have had to rapidly increase starting salaries. Prices going up in the face of oversupply. Now that is interesting. Someone should write a case study on that one.
Three, I truly wish law schools as a group would take a more proactive role in not only laying out the realities (instead of averages), from top to bottom, of their graduates starting salaries, but also make it part of their ongoing mission to educate students as to the realities of how they expect to pay back the debt they are incurring in the face of those salary realities. Everyone is a grown-up; people still have to make their own choices. I wouldn't expect law schools to do more than educate. But, bring a dose of economic reality to the discussion from day one and keep it going right through graduation.
More on this hopefully soon.