JD Unemployment Reaches New High (15%) Forum

[BiglawAssociate]

I don't think I said subway since subway is gross...Job is decent right now and want to save up some more money so still grinding. Want to do a business though (but need to narrow down to what). And need to get more capital (thinking of bugging family for $$$)

[starry eyed]

I don't think I said subway since subway is gross...Job is decent right now and want to save up some more money so still grinding. Want to do a business though (but need to narrow down to what). And need to get more capital (thinking of bugging family for $$$)

my uncle opened a restaurant after leaving brown and wood in bellport (long island)

and he had to borrow money from family too- i can see how y'all might get along lol

[BiglawAssociate]

I don't think I said subway since subway is gross...Job is decent right now and want to save up some more money so still grinding. Want to do a business though (but need to narrow down to what). And need to get more capital (thinking of bugging family for $$$)

my uncle opened a restaurant after leaving brown and wood in bellport.

is it still around? restaurant sounds like fun but super risky

my uncle had a bbq place. on some days they'd clear 10k a day...

[starry eyed]

I don't think I said subway since subway is gross...Job is decent right now and want to save up some more money so still grinding. Want to do a business though (but need to narrow down to what). And need to get more capital (thinking of bugging family for $$$)

my uncle opened a restaurant after leaving brown and wood in bellport.

is it still around? restaurant sounds like fun but super risky

my uncle had a bbq place. on some days they'd clear 10k a day...

i'll pm you

[JCougar]

You'd be surprised at how often the topic of "suicide" comes up in the doc review dungeons. Tens of thousands (across the country) of chronically under-employed but somewhat brilliant people, put in a situation as pointless and hopeless as doc review. You are literally hired to do bullshit that someone with a grammar school degree could do, all to pad the pockets of multi-millionaire Biglaw partners. You see, the "client" firms bill your hours out at around $200/hour, but you will only see a tenth of that, if you are lucky--and at such sporradic intervals that you'll be lucky to pay rent, much less ever pay more than a fraction of accumulating interest on your loans. The work is so menial and trivial that the only way it could have possibly been invented is that there are hours to be billed and profits to be made in what normally should have been dead time. I could literally have a 90% labotomy and still do doc review. And I'm apparently stupid to begin with.

I don't mean to be dark, but today I read on the wall of the bathroom stall, "with each passing day, suicide becomes more attractive." A different girl came up to me in the break room and expressed her regret at not having worn a tie or a belt to work that day, because she wanted to hang herself.

You see, the legal market for those who miss out on Biglaw or Government (which, even with the decreased class sizes these days, is still 85% of law grads) is one disappointing misery after another. I can only hope these comments from my colleagues are representative of a dark sense of humor--the greed of the shysters that run this industry aren't worth your life being extinguished out of neverending agony. No, there is "worth" in this life measured in more than money--but it mostly exists outside this wretched industry.

It's agonizing to see 0Ls, 1Ls, and 2Ls on this site excited to "just be a lawyer." But let me tell you about a lot of these full-time, JD-required jobs that are not Biglaw or Government. Associates out there are disposable. They last only a few years, and then if you can't bring in business on your own, you get too expensive to pay. Smaller firms are looking for for lackeys to bill hours/file on cases that should never have been filed. As one local attorney recently put it to me, "You might not like working here, because we have to separate the chaff from the wheat, and all we deal with is the chaff." These cases have zero merit, but they are filed anyway because even frivolous lawsuits can extract a nuisance settlement on the plaintiff side or a couple dozen hours billed to the client on the defense side. A lot of them involve just copying and pasting the same nonsense over and over again and hoping you get a defendant willing to settle for a couple thousand dollars. The funny thing is these BS cases get kicked around procedurally for years before you even reach the summary judgment stage. In fact, the story is exactly the same even for Biglaw, it's just that you get paid 4 times more, and if you can manage to last 5 years, you might just make it back to 0 as far as net financial equity goes. But only 50% of Biglaw associates even manage to do this.

It's shocking how many older lawyers are actually working doc review--how many partially-failed family law people can't get enough clients and are doing this in order to keep the lights on at their own firm. How many insurance defense burnouts there are--talk about a real dead-end area of practice. 95% of people I've talked to from ID law have horror stories that rival federal prison. A lot have developed permanent physical or psychological disabilities due to the stress and poor treatment they have received. People in their 50s and 60s with more debt today than when they graduated law school. Lots of disposable tort associates who tried to haggle $3000 per frivolous case out of an insurance company for 8 years before being thrown on the streets and denied partnership. Simply getting your "foot in the door" in this profession is not a precursor to you eventually "moving on up" to a better job somewhere. An associate position is very often just the beginning of an endless, 30-year ride of terror, agony, and regret--constantly pretending to yourself and your family that you made something of yourself because you're a "lawyer," when everyone pretty much knows you amounted to nothing.

You see, a lot of doc reviewers still hold out hope that someone will recognize their "sharp legal wit," and try to make this evident by asking a lot of questions to the project manager or the client firm. But there's no better way to get yourself canned from a doc review project than by asking the client firm an actual question. Biglaw attorneys are sick of the hundreds of thousands of desperate law grads trying to network with them and prove their competence through various desperate attempts, so the last thing they need is a doc reviewer asking them some stupid question that was posed just to make the doc reviewer seem smart and inquisitive.

The real dirty little secret of the legal industry is that the job of a law associate (Biglaw or shitlaw) could generally be done by a semi-intelligent ape. No "T14" degree is actually needed--except to bill out the illusion of your prestige at a higher rate. The profile of the successful associate is someone who will just shut up and take the lifestyle abuse for as long as they don't demand too much pay. Since the job actually requires next to zero skill, there's no reason to keep you on for more than a few years, when you can be replaced by an over-degreed but under-educated fresh fish desperate to work for any salary offered. Law grads these days beg to work for $35K, as long as it's real legal experience. They'll quit their doc review jobs to work at these firms, but 90% of the time, they're back within a matter of months, because the firm collapsed/their boss got disbarred/their boss committed suicide/their boss is in jail, etc. I know at least one example of each first hand. This profession attracts all kinds of mentally unbalanced con men and women. The ones who can maintain a veneer of professionalism while dealing with these kinds of demons are the ones who succeed. Those who don't move back into their parents basement or just join a doc review outfit, and still manage to get fired even from these gigs. The bottom line is that there's virtually no one who is actually sane--be it a lowly doc reviewer or a millionaire Biglaw partner. It's such a phony existence from top to bottom, those looking for firm ground to plant their flag of self esteem will find almost none.

[Fiddlesticks]

^ haha!

[A. Nony Mouse]

^ haha!

What do you mean by this?

[JCougar]

The c/o 2018 has less than a week left to reverse what will amount to a catastrophic and irreversible mistake for at least 80% of them. Think about it, all you're on the hook for is a measly $1000 seat deposit at this point. Don't commit the sunk cost fallacy with that...because writing off $200,000 worth of law school debt is much, much harder.

[seashell.economy]

I've been reading articles with this message for two years now, but I've kept plugging away at PT's and taking extra courses to bump up my GPA. Now that I am several months out from committing to a school, it's starting to get real.

[gnomgnomuch]

I'd have to think that it would be better economics if the government just willy-nilly started handing out $250K in small business loans each year to 40,000 people. If having a start-up economy is the key to the future of our economy, even if 75% of these businesses fail, it has to be better than backing law students' loans--most of which will never be repaid.

It might be better, but the government makes money on student loans. Current projection is $127 billion over the next ten years, 3/4 of which is expected to come from loans to graduate students.

That's a nice, passive-aggressive way to tax people and make them nuts at the same time.

Not that the political environment would allow for straightforward tax hikes on those that actually can afford it, though...

Your lefty friends over at Slate are saying that it's no biggie because most of that comes from doctors and lawyers so you've got some work to do with your own people there Cougs.

See, that's what pisses me off. If you're making 200k a year, you're "well off." I want taxes raised on the 100 million + club... and get rid of the capital gains loophole, and loopholes for all the huge corporations. The money we'd get from that would be huge. Raising taxes on the average doc/lawyer doesn't help, it hurts, because chances are they're living paycheck to paycheck. Obviously this isn't the case for everyone, but my family brings in about 140k a year, and we're literally living paycheck to paycheck. And, most of the people we know are making about the same we are, and they're all in that same predicament.

[toocloseformissiles]

Do these statistics seem more dismal because they include grads from schools that no one should really go to if not for free and with ties to the area etc? Or is the situation just dismal? Are grads from T6/T3 schools having to disproportionately rely on luck? I've seen statistics saying that ~60% of grads from top schools end up with firm jobs/clerkships at the end of law school, which doesn't seem awful. And, once someone secures a firm job, is it secure in the sense that if you are a hardworking employee that can function socially you won't be "asked to leave" and can expect professional advancement? Sorry if these questions sound juvenile or naive. I've never seen such pessimism about the field.

Edit: to be clear, even though I might sound like it, I'm not some kid who just watched Suits. I have the numbers to make my above questions worthwhile.

[toocloseformissiles]

I'd have to think that it would be better economics if the government just willy-nilly started handing out $250K in small business loans each year to 40,000 people. If having a start-up economy is the key to the future of our economy, even if 75% of these businesses fail, it has to be better than backing law students' loans--most of which will never be repaid.

It might be better, but the government makes money on student loans. Current projection is $127 billion over the next ten years, 3/4 of which is expected to come from loans to graduate students.

That's a nice, passive-aggressive way to tax people and make them nuts at the same time.

Not that the political environment would allow for straightforward tax hikes on those that actually can afford it, though...

Your lefty friends over at Slate are saying that it's no biggie because most of that comes from doctors and lawyers so you've got some work to do with your own people there Cougs.

See, that's what pisses me off. If you're making 200k a year, you're "well off." I want taxes raised on the 100 million + club... and get rid of the capital gains loophole, and loopholes for all the huge corporations. The money we'd get from that would be huge. Raising taxes on the average doc/lawyer doesn't help, it hurts, because chances are they're living paycheck to paycheck. Obviously this isn't the case for everyone, but my family brings in about 140k a year, and we're literally living paycheck to paycheck. And, most of the people we know are making about the same we are, and they're all in that same predicament.

I agree that the tax code should be simplified, but wrt capital gains, that money is already taxed once on the company's end, so the reduced tax rate makes sense imo.

[TheSpanishMain]

Do these statistics seem more dismal because they include grads from schools that no one should really go to if not for free and with ties to the area etc? Or is the situation just dismal? Are grads from T6/T3 schools having to disproportionately rely on luck? I've seen statistics saying that ~60% of grads from top schools end up with firm jobs/clerkships at the end of law school, which doesn't seem awful.

Edit: to be clear, even though I might sound like it, I'm not some kid who just watched Suits. I have the numbers to make my above questions worthwhile.

I expect JCougar is including ALL law grads in his "85% of students won't get BL or Government" calculation. So, yes, places like Cooley and Thomas Jefferson are skewing the numbers somewhat.

And, once someone secures a firm job, is it secure in the sense that if you are a hardworking employee that can function socially you won't be "asked to leave" and can expect professional advancement? Sorry if these questions sound juvenile or naive. I've never seen such pessimism about the field.

My understanding is no, you will still almost certainly be "asked to leave" even if you're a decent worker and you're not socially awkward. It's become harder and harder to make partner, and there are simply too many associates.

[180kickflip]

I'd have to think that it would be better economics if the government just willy-nilly started handing out $250K in small business loans each year to 40,000 people. If having a start-up economy is the key to the future of our economy, even if 75% of these businesses fail, it has to be better than backing law students' loans--most of which will never be repaid.

It might be better, but the government makes money on student loans. Current projection is $127 billion over the next ten years, 3/4 of which is expected to come from loans to graduate students.

That's a nice, passive-aggressive way to tax people and make them nuts at the same time.

Not that the political environment would allow for straightforward tax hikes on those that actually can afford it, though...

Your lefty friends over at Slate are saying that it's no biggie because most of that comes from doctors and lawyers so you've got some work to do with your own people there Cougs.

See, that's what pisses me off. If you're making 200k a year, you're "well off." I want taxes raised on the 100 million + club... and get rid of the capital gains loophole, and loopholes for all the huge corporations. The money we'd get from that would be huge. Raising taxes on the average doc/lawyer doesn't help, it hurts, because chances are they're living paycheck to paycheck. Obviously this isn't the case for everyone, but my family brings in about 140k a year, and we're literally living paycheck to paycheck. And, most of the people we know are making about the same we are, and they're all in that same predicament.

It would take some seriously exceptional circumstances to be living paycheck to paycheck (in the sense that phrase is normally used...to mean you can barely make ends meet) on 140k. If you just mean that your spending habits and current debt obligations nearly equal your income, that's very possible, but I just can't imagine what combination of factors could make it hard to make ends meet for someone earning 140k and being as thrifty as they possibly could. I imagine the average us family brings in around 50-60k and has a kid or two they support with that. I don't think that average family would say that a lawyer making 140k is just "well off ."

[krads153]

I'd have to think that it would be better economics if the government just willy-nilly started handing out $250K in small business loans each year to 40,000 people. If having a start-up economy is the key to the future of our economy, even if 75% of these businesses fail, it has to be better than backing law students' loans--most of which will never be repaid.

It might be better, but the government makes money on student loans. Current projection is $127 billion over the next ten years, 3/4 of which is expected to come from loans to graduate students.

That's a nice, passive-aggressive way to tax people and make them nuts at the same time.

Not that the political environment would allow for straightforward tax hikes on those that actually can afford it, though...

Your lefty friends over at Slate are saying that it's no biggie because most of that comes from doctors and lawyers so you've got some work to do with your own people there Cougs.

See, that's what pisses me off. If you're making 200k a year, you're "well off." I want taxes raised on the 100 million + club... and get rid of the capital gains loophole, and loopholes for all the huge corporations. The money we'd get from that would be huge. Raising taxes on the average doc/lawyer doesn't help, it hurts, because chances are they're living paycheck to paycheck. Obviously this isn't the case for everyone, but my family brings in about 140k a year, and we're literally living paycheck to paycheck. And, most of the people we know are making about the same we are, and they're all in that same predicament.

It would take some seriously exceptional circumstances to be living paycheck to paycheck (in the sense that phrase is normally used...to mean you can barely make ends meet) on 140k. If you just mean that your spending habits and current debt obligations nearly equal your income, that's very possible, but I just can't imagine what combination of factors could make it hard to make ends meet for someone earning 140k and being as thrifty as they possibly could. I imagine the average us family brings in around 50-60k and has a kid or two they support with that. I don't think that average family would say that a lawyer making 140k is just "well off ."

This is highly dependent on where you live. 140k in NYC is not much money.

[BruceWayne]

This is highly dependent on where you live. 140k in NYC is not much money.

As often as I point out how absurdly high the NYC COL is, I still would never say 140K "isn't much money" even in NYC. The problem is that 140K isn't the kind of money in NYC that will give you the lifestyle that most people in other parts of the country associate with it. It basically makes you very comfortable--but it doesn't make everything that isn't absurdly expensive achievable like it does in other areas. But the problem with law grads making that salary is that they don't even get what 140k would normally get you in NYC, because they have to make $3K a month in student loan payments. Now 140k a year in NYC minus taxes and minus $3K a month in student loans ISN'T much money. In fairness though if you're in a big NYC firm you should be making 160K min (not that that's much better once you get hit with taxes and that $3K a month to fedloan servicing).

[180kickflip]

This is highly dependent on where you live. 140k in NYC is not much money.

I've lived in NYC, and now I'm living in Boston with a family. 140k would be a lot of money in either place. To go through that type of $, you'd need to be putting $ into retirement/investments, living in a place that's significantly more expensive than other available options, going out to eat/drink at more expensive places than other options, using expensive childcare options, and/or driving a car that costs more than other options. I'm not saying people shouldn't do those things or that a BL associate putting in crazy hours doesn't deserve some luxuries after a long day/night at work, but if you're choosing to spend your $ in a way that it doesn't go as far as it could, then the fact that you have none left after paying your bills doesn't mean you're living paycheck to paycheck.

I'll totally agree that 140k in NYC with 3k in student loans as Bruce mentioned may not give the lifestyle most people associate with 140k income, but at the same time, I feel like that person (at least for now) could just use PAYE and probably still take home more than double what most families make.

[JCougar]

This is a fantastic op-ed by a former Kirkland & Ellis partner.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/opini ... -jobs.html

Bottom line:

Until student loans bear a rational relationship to individual law school outcomes, law schools will exploit their lack of accountability, the legal education market will remain dysfunctional, and equilibrium between supply and demand will remain elusive.

It goes to show what a corrupt and embarrassing joke the ABA's "regulation" of law schools has been. By allowing legal education to become a negative value proposition, you scare away all the smart and sane people, and then you get headlines like this:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/ ... ng-dumber-

The money quote:

“You’ve got this underclass in law schools who are really keeping the lights on but not reaping the benefit.” Moeser expects the reckoning to continue. “I would anticipate the {bar exam} scores will drop again, if I had to guess,” she says, her mouth drawing a straight line across her face. “I don’t anticipate a rebound.”

This little tidbit shows why, even without the explosion of debt, life as a lawyer is miserable for most:

Since 2008 partner earnings at firms of all sizes have decreased 9 percent in constant dollars, according to federal tax filings. Solo practitioners have been struggling for much longer. Since 1988 earnings for standalone attorneys, of which there are about 354,000 nationally, have declined 31 percent. The legal industry has shed more than 50,000 jobs in the past eight years. The decline began decades ago. Solo practitioners began floundering in the late 1980s. Their average income, adjusted for inflation, was $71,000 in 1988; it was $49,000 in 2012.

There are about 1.3 million lawyers out there, so a full 27 percent of them are solos that average $49K in salary. That doesn't even begin to explore the number of people that were forced to quit the profession for higher-paying jobs such as bartender, bricklayer, garbage man, etc. One guy on an old doc review project who finished fifth in his class at a second-tier state school recently got a $45K/year non-lawyer compliance job, and he was pretty stoked. And rightly so--not all of us get that lucky.

Corrupt con men like Michael Simkovic think the solution is to lie to people (leiterlawschool.typepad.com/leiter/2015/08/law-schools-four-billion-dollar-collective-action-problem-michael-simkovic.html) about how law is such a great and lucrative profession to attract back the high-end LSAT scorers. It can be, for a small handful of people. But far more experience it as a soul-crushing failure, and no matter how smart you are, law school is not a smart risk, even if a few succeed. The smartest people are turning away from this embarrassing mess the fastest, so you all should take heed. There needs to be a further 25% drop in law school class sizes before anyone even begins to sniff an improving labor market. National JD class sizes need to be closer to 25,000 each year--and that's not accounting for the massive glut of underemployed grads from the last 10 years. You could have a class of zero (0) for at least three years in a row, and there would still be too many JDs.

And the newest news regarding federal student loans is that defaults are up. It's not just the bottom 90% of the class that's going to suffer--soon this massive bill will be handed over to the US taxpayers, because the Department of Education will soon be confronted with the reality that you can't squeeze blood out of a turnip.

Two years after graduation, I know of no one in my class that initially missed out on an OCI job that has found something decent--and on the contrary, a handful have already been downsized from their Biglaw gigs. The 75% that don't have one of these jobs are either completely unemployed, doing doc review, or working 80 hours per week doing insurance defense/workers' comp crap making $60K and living with their parents.

The "average" lawyer salary may look high in some government reports, but that's because so many quit this profession because the pay sucks and the work is miserable.

[JCougar]

New news. U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics revises its estimate of new attorney jobs downward:

Government Cuts Projection Of 2014-2024 Lawyer Jobs By 41%: 16K Jobs For 37k Law Grads Each Year

There's only going to be 16,000 new lawyer jobs (including both new jobs and internal turnover) per year.

Law schools are still graduating something like 35,000 lawyers per year. That means for a JD to be a good idea, law schools have to cut their current class sizes over 50%.

And remember, half of those 16,000 jobs are stuff like document review, insurance defense, etc., all where you have to put up with tons of abuse and harassment for $40K per year with no real long-term career possibilities besides 5 years of being an underpaid associate.

IME, these new stats line up a lot better with the current realities of the job market. There's really close to 0 demand for new lawyers outside of a school's OCI.

Anyone telling you that now is a great time to go to law school is a con man.

[PeanutsNJam]

I think we're all aware that if you cull all schools below US News 100, the numbers will look much, much better.

[asdfdfdfadfas]

I think we're all aware that if you cull all schools below US News 100, the numbers will look much, much better.

Right, but are those jobs actually needing the skills provided in law school or could any intelligent person walk off of the street and be told how to do the job?

I am pretty sure it is the latter which would make law school an inefficient waste of people's time and just another rung in the ladder of progressive credentialism unless of course you are going for free or are the top of your class at a top school.

[A. Nony Mouse]

I think most legal jobs require some skills you get in law school.

Like, one year of law school, though. Not three years' worth.

[JCougar]

Yeah, I agree. Some level of exposure to the current curriculum is helpful, but one year is probably enough. And instead of some exam that's nothing more than a typing speed contest at the end of the semester, you should spend the semester actually drafting petitions/motions/contracts, etc. related to the subject area you're studying. That way, most students would realize how boring 90% of being a lawyer actually is before the graduate.

The second year should be like 75% internships/externships/clinics, with maybe 1-2 substantive classes in the area in which you want to specialize.

The Langellian method is nothing more than an arcane and mostly insane ritual of ivory tower masturbation invented in the 1800s. It would be the same thing as going to medical school and having to sit through 6 semesters of phrenology. The thing is, medical school has been forced to advance and evolve through science. There's no such forces pushing the legal profession forward into a more pragmatic future. That's because success as a medical doctor is actually measured through an objective outcome: your patients either live or die. Success in law is mostly due to clever rent-seeking, which has very little relation to the quality of work you do.

[asdfdfdfadfas]

I think most legal jobs require some skills you get in law school.

Like, one year of law school, though. Not three years' worth.

Right, that's my problem. I mean, I can read books on my own so I am not looking for someone to hold my hand and slow me down by providing excess busy work and tests that are fun word problem games. I don't know about other people, but I don't feel like going through 3 years of trying to dig through archaic text that is overly convoluted to be given an opportunity to possibly do document review while being left with 150K+ in debt in order to subsidize "teachers" salaries unless that opportunity leads directly to something of substance where you are using the information you are going to spend three years of your life memorizing.

Just my opinion, I know there is obviously more to it than that but that is the blunt version.

Before all the grammarians on here get up in arms, yes I know the above post is not written with the intent of winning a Pulitzer.

[asdfdfdfadfas]

Yeah, I agree. Some level of exposure to the current curriculum is helpful, but one year is probably enough. And instead of some exam that's nothing more than a typing speed contest at the end of the semester, you should spend the semester actually drafting petitions/motions/contracts, etc. related to the subject area you're studying. That way, most students would realize how boring 90% of being a lawyer actually is before the graduate.

The second year should be like 75% internships/externships/clinics, with maybe 1-2 substantive classes in the area in which you want to specialize.

The Langellian method is nothing more than an arcane and mostly insane ritual of ivory tower masturbation invented in the 1800s. It would be the same thing as going to medical school and having to sit through 6 semesters of phrenology. The thing is, medical school has been forced to advance and evolve through science. There's no such forces pushing the legal profession forward into a more pragmatic future. That's because success as a medical doctor is actually measured through an objective outcome: your patients either live or die. Success in law is mostly due to clever rent-seeking, which has very little relation to the quality of work you do.

Well if someone ever gets in office and ends the utterly ridiculous student loan program and schools see the demand for education go down, then perhaps they will be forced to compete with one another based on price and quality.