Fact or Fiction? New stats: lawyer jobs exceed graduates Forum

[penncon]

Forgive me if someone posted this beforehand but in this morning's ABA Journal Weekly Newsletter, a new article was highlighted entitled, "Are 2016 law grads in luck? New stats say lawyer jobs will exceed graduates that year"

http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/ ... d=141119AT

Excerpts as follows:

The bureau’s new method of calculating workers leaving an occupation who need to be replaced no longer relies on the assumption that workers enter at a young age, work in their field until they are old, and then retire, according to Loyola at Los Angeles law professor Theodore Soto, writing at TaxProf Blog. Workers no longer follow a traditional career path, and the old method failed to capture many people leaving law jobs, the bureau concluded.

Now the Bureau of Labor Statistics will directly measure workers who leave occupations, based on survey results. The bureau made the change after testing both measures of job openings against historical data, including data for lawyers.

The new method projects 41,460 lawyer openings a year, according to Soto.

“Based on 2012 and 2013 matriculation rates and historical drop-out rates,” Soto writes, “we should expect 40,082 ABA-accredited law school graduates in 2015 and 35,954 in 2016. If the new BLS projections are accurate, we should see demand and supply in relative equilibrium in 2015 and a significant excess of demand over supply beginning in 2016.”

What are your thoughts on this? Is this just another attempt to keep law school applicants?

To counter, here is a post written by Law School Tuition Bubble that counters the BLS's new statistics:

http://lawschooltuitionbubble.wordpress ... ol-bubble/

[fats provolone]

1000 extra jobs? should only take a century or two to get through the backlog

[Mr. Elshal]

They're not saying the numbers are getting better, they're just saying that they're counting them more accurately now. I can't imagine that the problem with legal employment was that BLS was understating job openings. Sure, there will be some relief as the number of graduates decreases, but the BLS is not saying these years have more jobs than prior years, just that even in prior years they understated, so going forward they will adjust for that. It won't create more jobs in real life, just on paper.

[fats provolone]

i guess the takeaway here is that there is no legal jobs crisis and people are just lazy

thanks BLS

[eriedoctrine]

Shitlaw that pays 30k are indeed plentiful, which are half these openings.