All across the USA we see problems developing for law school graduates. This even includes prestigious universities like Harvard and New York Law School. In the past we saw it much easier for students to get private practice jobs. For instance, Charles Phillips is now CEO of Infor and graduated from New York Law School. He recalls not having problems at that time but for the 2015 graduates the exact opposite became reality.
What is worrying is that the law school graduates from the 2015 class actually landed the lowest number of jobs in private practice when compared with all the other classes in the past 20 years. The last year when we had such a situation developing was 1996, according to James G. Leipold. It has to be mentioned that the term private practice does include law firms of absolutely all sizes and even the solo practitioners.
Statistics show that in the year 2007 we had a little over 37,000 jobs available for law school graduates. In 2015 the number went down by close to 4,000 jobs. Such a drop may not seem like a lot but if we factor in that there are more people going for the jobs than simply the 2015 graduates, the situation goes towards a bad employment possibility scenario.
Specialists believe that one of the main reasons why the job numbers for the new lawyers went down is that there is competition with junior lawyers for the exact same jobs. Both juniors and entry-level positions offered by the larger law firms are basically offered to the same groups of people. The same can be seen with government honors programs and judicial clerkships.
The big problem is that there wont be a change in the future. This is because all law firms will be faced with smaller head counts. Law firms are nowadays incorporating new technologies and even business systems. That will help in dealing with the nontraditional legal services that are offered by third party providers. What this basically means is that technology is nowadays capable of doing some of the jobs that the fresh graduate usually did.
We are looking at smaller graduating class sizes and jobs number that is going down. Even so, the good news is that 86.7% of the law school graduates were hired. This is basically the exact same employment rate that we saw in 2014. However, if we are to compare with the 2007 class, the rate was a lot lower. Then we had an employment rate of 91.9% in 9 months after leaving law school.
In 2008 the economic meltdown created various problems for all industries around the world. This did include the law sector, although many thought that this was not going to be the case. Employment rate only started climbing in 2014 and was matched by 2015.
For the fresh graduates we saw that the larger law firms (500 or more lawyers hired) stood out as the largest of the employers. Over 1,000 jobs were added in the past 4 years by this part of the sector. Other categories of jobs did lose positions. Law job losses that appeared since 2009 were covered by the new positions but the situation is only now starting to improve. The effects of the recession did spread towards the law firms, forcing them to invest in technology as opposed to new staff members.
The 2015 graduates (51.3% of them) found jobs in the private practice sector and 30% ended up being employed in public sector companies. Only around 17% of graduates ended up finding jobs in the business sector.
