What makes the LA (corporate) market so bad? Help! Forum

[Anonymous User]

I have always heard that LA has a poor legal market. Is it because there aren't many jobs, because the work is not good, or some other reason?

The situation: rising 3L at H/Y/S looking to find a post law school job in LA. I am currently splitting the summer between a V20 in the Bay Area and an in-house gig at a major company. For family reasons it turns out I am heading to LA after graduation. Considering requesting to transfer offices at my current firm, am also applying to Gibson and a few others, and am interested in transactional work. I am anxious about the LA market after hearing such bad things. What exactly is bad about it? How easy is it to transfer to the Bay or to other markets like Houston from LA?

[lvm82]

From what I observed, there are several law schools in California that are turning out more graduates than the job market demands for. With LA being a highly populated city, I would assume it would even more the case. Don't know much about the market for Transactional Law, but another thing I'm observing, not only in California but Texas as well is that there are small businesses and non-profit organizations being established by both paralegals and non-paralegals that are preparing documents and doing some legal consulting for the public whether it's illegal or not. And they seem not to care for using attorneys unless absolutely needed. Most of these paralegal practices are in the family law field, immigration, civil law, social security, real estate and some criminal. You have several non-attorney's opening up these businesses because they learned how to do documents from their own legal cases they have went through. Quite a bit of them are ex-criminals. People seek these paralegals out because it's inexpensive of course or because they feel they received inadequate service from an attorney when they were hired. However the only thing the paralegals cannot do is represent the client in court.

I was even surprised that LA didn't have many jobs with the county or Legal Aid. Here in Dallas, if you can't find employment with a firm, you can always go to the County and work in the Family law courts or for the Office of the Attorney General as a District attorney or criminal courts. We also have a few Legal Aid organizations that are always hiring.

Don't know what type of law you are practicing, but you also have to be mindful that legal documents are being readily available online and in the courts. I know here in Dallas, Family Law Courts are ran like a food stamp office where if you are asking for a divorce and other civil documents they will provide you with an easy do-it-yourself-fill-in-the-blank form to fill out and/or a sample copy if that person wants to type out a professional copy on their own. I believe LA has a website where you can get access to many legal documents without having to hire an attorney as well. I say this because half of cases filed are people representing themselves.

But these are some reason the legal market went south not only in LA but other states as well. I realize these fields are out of your practice so maybe you will find work readily available in your field of practice.

[wert3813]

bump

So rather than have this post derail the thread with people attacking it, maybe we can all agree it's at a minimum irrelevant and parts of it are wrong (I doubt shadow lawyers are the reason LA's transactional practice is slow) and pretend it's just a bump to OPs original question which I am also interested in?

Is it just cause it's not NYC and while Houston and SF aren't NYC they have reasons that support a strong transactional practice (O&G and VC-startups respectively)?

[Tiago Splitter]

Plenty of LA offices have legitimate corporate practices, but they're smaller for two main reasons:

1. As of 2010 LA had about 1/3 the number of summer associate spots as NYC and it wouldn't surprise me if it's an even smaller percentage now.

2. Corporate practices derive a lot of their work from the financial sector, which is overwhelmingly located in NYC.

Overall though I doubt the number of corp people in LA is much different than in SF and I'm sure it's more than Houston.