Another example of the state of the job market Forum

[MTal]

Author: Anarchosyndicalist
Subject: Hiring for attorney position
Time: August 27, 2009 - 11:55 am

Hi all. I left this board a while ago, but I thought I'd pop in to throw this little message of encouragement your way.

My firm recently was looking to replace a paralegal, and the hiring partner figured that, given the current job market, we could get a licensed attorney for the price of a paralegal, and get the benefit of having somebody to do all the idiotic court appearances none of the actual lawyers felt like wasting time on. So we placed an ad for an attorney, with the only requirements being "licensed in New York" and "some firm experience" (we'd accept somebody with summer intern experience). The salary offered was $50K. Entry level all the way. We were totally expecting to hire some recent BLS or Fordham grad just looking for a place to start out.

Within 24 hours of putting the ad out -- one day, people -- we had received over 200 responses. For one job. At least half of them were from people with V200 firm experience. It felt like we got resumes from every single associate who used to work at Thacher Proffit before they imploded, along with about a dozen people from Latham Watkins. We had a smattering of former Proskauer, Shearmen Sterling, Hogan Hartson, and Dewey Lebouf associates. And a lot of them weren't particularly recent graduates; while the majority of applicants were 2008 or 2007 grads, we got some people applying from as early as 2001. And from basically every top school.

In the end, we went with a UVA grad who'd been laid off from Cadwalader last Christmasish because he'd failed the bar the first time, and hadn't been working since. We didn't want to hire anybody with too much experience, since somebody used to making $200K over the last couple years would likely jump ship the second a better offer came along. Also, somebody who'd spent only four months at a big firm would be used to doing grunt make-work paralegal stuff, and wouldn't complain about it.

So, just wanted to give everybody hope that a lot of times, firms will go with inexperienced attorneys over experienced ones. Buck up, everybody! Just hang in there, and things will be fine.

And no, I'm not kidding. About any of it.

Source here: --LinkRemoved--

[20160810]

I'll readily grant that there is no reason to delude oneself into thinking that the job market is anything but piss-poor right now, but the JDUers seem to believe that obtaining a JD is useless in the long run, which is just not true.

Also, edited to announce that (A.) I am bummed because I thought MTal had stopped posting and (B.) I'm moving this to the legal employment forum on the grounds that it doesn't have a whole lot to do with being a law student specifically.