Law school applications are collapsing

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2012/12/law-school-applications-are-collapsing

by blatherard • 14 years ago

55 62 14 years ago

rayiner8• 14 years ago

Surprised to see this make the front page...

The basic fact is that only half of the 45,000 or so law graduates each year will even get jobs as lawyers. I disagree with many that the ABA should clamp down on accreditation. The AMA did that in the last few decades, and while that guaranteed solid employment prospects for medical school graduates, it also led to skyrocketing salaries and medical costs. I think the medical profession has more goodwill capital to spend with the public in this regard than the legal profession, and any such move would be a very bad idea.

However, I do support measures to increase transparency and make educational loans harder to get. In-state tuition at the University of Michigan in 1990 was $6,830 per year (about $11,700 in today's dollars). It is now over $48,000/year.

Now, the teaching of law has not changed since Harvard Law School was founded in 1817. You get a bunch of students in a room. You make them read cases from a casebook. You grill them in front of the class on their comprehension of the cases. It's not a high-tech process, but it works, and can be extremely cheap. There is no reason tuitions need to be 4x higher than they were just 20 years ago. The soaring cost of legal education is really the perfect example of how incredibly dysfunctional our higher education system has become. At least with engineering or medical school tuitions you can point to the expense of lab equipment, etc. Not so with a segment of academia where students are taught the same way they have been for two centuries.

Antiks72• 14 years ago

The reason costs of tuition are going up is because of loan money which is easily available. Easy loan money always raises costs. Furthermore, you have laws on the books that guarantee those loans will be paid back.

mjn3• 14 years ago

Depends on the school. At the University of California, total cost of education (student+state portion) has declined about 25% in real terms over the past few decades, despite an increase in loan availability. Tuition is up pretty much solely due to a decline in the proportion of costs that the state pays, which is made up for by tuition hikes at a rate somewhat less than $1-for-$1.

Some numbers I compiled a while ago: http://www.kmjn.org/misc/uc_funding.txt

The situation might well be different for law schools or other university systems, which I haven't investigated in detail.

henrikschroder4• 14 years ago

> I think the medical profession has more goodwill capital to spend with the public in this regard than the legal profession, and any such move would be a very bad idea.

There's also the fact that our demand for healthcare is enormous, because we all get sick, it's a fact of life that's not gonna change very soon.

But the demand for lawyers is completely cultural. Where I am, the amount of lawyers per capita is one tenth of what it is in the US, there's no innate demand for lawyers, so if they start to price themselves too high, demand will fall as people and communities and businesses figure out ways to accomplish the same things as before, but without lawyers.

jivatmanx3• 14 years ago

You probably live in a civil law jurisdiction, rather than common law.

Juries are limited, and thus less lawyers needed overall.

w1ntermute3• 14 years ago

> There's also the fact that our demand for healthcare is enormous, because we all get sick, it's a fact of life that's not gonna change very soon.

> But the demand for lawyers is completely cultural.

I don't think this difference can be taken for granted at all. For example, the American cultural tendency to consume greasy and fattening food in high quantities while not exercising leads to higher rates of disease than in other developed nations. This in turn leads to a higher need for medical care that is purely cultural in origin.

rayiner8• 14 years ago

> But the demand for lawyers is completely cultural.

I don't think that's the case. People think that the U.S. has a lot of lawyers because we're a "litigious society" but I've never seen evidence suggesting that Americans are more likely to sue than other sorts of people.

I think the demand for lawyers is more structural than anything else, and there are a lot of dimensions to this. First, the amount of conflict rises proportionally with the number of interactions between people. This means larger societies have more (superlinearly more) conflict than smaller ones, more active economies have more conflict than less active ones, and heterogenous societies have more conflict than homogenous ones.

Second, different countries use different mechanisms to accomplish the same tasks. The U.S. is at one extreme--we use private litigation to handle things like employer/employee disputes that might in other countries be handled by a complaint to some sort of board. Litigation is, by design, the way to challenge most government action. In the regulatory regime, we skimp on government enforcement of things like financial or enviromental laws, and write in "citizen suit provisions" to allow private enforcement.

Third, the demand for lawyers depends on the structure of the economy. An economy based on financial services, which can result in expensive and complex disputes, needs many more lawyers than one based on agriculture.

Fourth, the number of lawyers in a country isn't directly proportional to the amount of conflict within the country itself. A country that hosts numerous multi-national corporations will have many lawyers working on disputes that actually arise in other countries. Moreover, a country with a sophisticated legal system will be asked to resolve disputes that only have a tenuous connection to the country. The U.S. is also a net exporter of legal services, in conjunction with its export of financial services. American firms do work for Brazilian companies doing IPOs in Brazilian markets. The reverse is never true.

An example of an (industrialized) country that has 1/10 as many lawyers per capita as the US is Finland. Can you compare the US with Finland? The US has 133 Fortune Global 500 companies, Finland has 1. The US has 9 cities as large or larger than Finland. The U.S. is extremely heterogenous. Finland is extremely homogenous. The US has to alter its laws to limit the number of foreign cases coming into New York City's courts (a city 4x as large as Finland). An American (or sometimes UK) firm is involved in some way in nearly every major IPO that happens in one of the world's large financial markets. How many Finnish firms are involved in American IPO's? Etc.

tzs• 14 years ago

> Where I am, the amount of lawyers per capita is one tenth of what it is in the US

I don't know where you are, so don't know if this applies, but I know that for some countries where lawyers per capita is much lower than the US, it is because the term "lawyer" has a different meaning. In the US, anyone licensed to practice law (with a few minor exceptions) and who does so is counted as a "lawyer". That would include the attorneys who represent the State in criminal proceedings, the attorneys who represent defendants in criminal proceedings (whether employed by the State or by the defendant), attorneys on staff at corporations who handle contracts, mergers, intellectual property, employment issues, and so on.

In many countries, I believe, "lawyer" is only used for a subset of these, such as only those who actually litigate, or only those who handle criminal cases. Some of the lists of seen of lawyers per capita fail to take this into account, and so end up skewing the numbers.

pyre• 14 years ago

  > 1990 was $6,830 per year (about $11,700 in today's
  > dollars). It is now over $48,000/year

IIRC, these 'estimates' (usually) don't just include tuition, but also things like room and board (at dorm room rates).

rayiner8• 14 years ago

This is just tuition.

jussij4• 14 years ago

> in 1990 was $6,830 per year (about $11,700 in today's dollars)

That $11,700 figure is a bit low. Take $6,830, compounded it at a very modest 3.0% and you will end up with over $13,000 after 22 years.

A more realistic rate of return would be about 5% which compounds to about $20,000 in todays terms.

jussij4• 14 years ago

Having said that, US inflation for the last two decades has been at or below 3.0%.

http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation/DecadeInflation...

anonymoushn• 14 years ago

Where do you find these risk-free instruments that yield 5%?

jivatmanx3• 14 years ago

Technology that simplifies looking up case-law, and that combs through discovery, has greatly reduced the number of lawyers needed.

It's a profession dealing with text/knowledge. Easy to digitize.

rayiner8• 14 years ago

> Technology that simplifies looking up case-law, and that combs through discovery, has greatly reduced the number of lawyers needed.

[Citation needed]

It's not really the case that demand for lawyers is lower (recession aside). It's that the growth in demand for lawyers is lower than it has been. Remember, we're dealing with derivatives here: the number of new jobs available for new graduates is the derivative of overall legal demand.

I don't think technology has had much to do with it, except within certain segments (mainly document review). As technology has evolved, expectations have risen. Yes, you can get on Lexis and quickly look up the case law on an issue, instead of heading over to the library and poring through books, but countering that is the fact that now you're expected to be on top of the absolute latest precedent. It's not enough to give the definition of some element out of a legal encyclopedia. Gotta make sure you review all the cases that touch on the topic to make sure nothing adds a wrinkle that your opponent might bring up.

Similarly with document review. Yes, predictive coding will blow through thousands of documents a second, but back in the day you could just interview some people to get the story of what happened. Now you're expected to review every e-mail everyone sent within the relevant time period. Even with technology, someone has to piece those e-mails together into a coherent narrative.

What really happened is that during the 1970's and 1980's, the corporatization and financialization of America caused demand for legal services to explode relative to GDP. We seem to have hit a plateau in that process in the late 1990's and 2000's, which has caused the growth in demand to stagnate, and indeed dip in the recent recession.

Retric3• 14 years ago

It's not just a question of changes in demand, your also replacing people that leave the profession.

EwanToo2• 14 years ago

I don't have a great citation to hand, but one of the key offerings of Autonomy is software which does exactly that - combs through discovery documents, reducing the number of lawyers needed.

http://www.autonomy.com/content/Customers/verticals/legal/in...

unavoidable• 14 years ago

Just because the text of cases and legislation is easy to digitize does not mean the profession is. Your statement could perhaps be flipped on its head: "coding is easy to analyze with computers especially given the wealth of open source materials to work with, and now has greatly reduced the number of programmers needed." I'm sure you can see the fallacy of that argument.

It is true that the _costs_ of legal research has decreased, since it is now easier and faster to find cases, but that generally does not extend to lawyers, but rather to legal assistants, librarians, paralegals, and whatnot. Law is still an extremely contextual field, and computers are very bad at dealing with realities of multiple complex interacting systems (as laws generally are). I would love to one day see computers spit out answers to legal questions, but as for today, I don't think that a computer could argue a case for me in court.

afterburner2• 14 years ago

Finally! I was wondering when it would sink in how unrewarding this path could be.

timwiseman• 14 years ago

It depends on what you mean. I am a law student now, and while my perspective may shift when I graduate, I have had some tangential involvement in projects that that help people, that is extremely rewarding.

Financially, the market as a whole looks less secure and perhaps less lucrative than it was in the past, but that matters less for people not driven mostly be finances and the compensation for some of those graduating ahead of me is not unlivable.

w1ntermute3• 14 years ago

> that matters less for people not driven mostly be finances and the compensation for some of those graduating ahead of me is not unlivable

And the precipitous drop in applicants is due to the people driven more by finances not applying because the financial advantage is no longer there. Which is fine - this is standard supply/demand behavior.

afterburner2• 14 years ago

It's the not getting a law job at all part that blows. In Ontario, it's a 4 year Bachelors plus 3 years of law school... that's a heavy price to pay, mainly in money but also in time. The job better be financially rewarding to some extent.

No I'm not talking about spiritually or intangibly rewarding. I'm talking about whether the huge investment ends up being wasteful and an unnecessary burden.

_delirium• 14 years ago

Not too surprising: university enrollments tend to crash following job-market crashes in a sector, with a lag of a few years. Look at what happened to CS enrollments after the dot-com crash, for another example [1]: by the time the lowest point was reached, they were down ~50% from the peak, and some schools saw a >75% decline in CS majors, leading the department to be eliminated at some smaller schools. (It's picked up again lately, though enrollments are still not back up to the peak years.)

[1] Chart from the CRA, though note that this is charting number of degrees awarded rather than freshman enrollment, so has about a 4-year pipeline lag. Hence, the downturn starts in 2004-05 rather than 2000-01: http://www.cra.org/govaffairs/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/0...

GnarfGnarf• 14 years ago

My Anti-virus software flagged this link as a malicious URL.

loungin• 14 years ago

It is about lawyers, guns and money. I would flag it malicious as well!

jburwell• 14 years ago

And this is a problem? Hopefully these potential law school candidates have found more productive avenues to devote their professional lives.

001sky2• 14 years ago

Now comes word that applications in this admissions cycle appear to be in something like free fall. As of December 7th, they are down 24.6% from the same time last year, while the total number of applicants has declined by 22.4% year over year. These numbers suggest that law schools will have a total of somewhere between 52,000 and 53,000 applicants to choose from in this cycle, i.e., slightly more than half as many as in 2004, when there were 188 ABA accredited law schools (there are 201 at the moment, with an emphasis on “at the moment”).

To put that number in perspective, law schools admitted 60,400 first year JD students two years ago

-- The Key Data

joonix• 14 years ago

As a recent law graduate: Finally. I had no idea what people who started in law school in 2011+ were thinking. They went to law school at a time when almost every month a major publication wrote an article about terrible job prospects and rising tuition. Law school is by and large a scam.

jseliger• 14 years ago

There's a good reason for this: law school is a terrible deal for the vast majority of applicants and potential applicants. Paul Campos's book Don't Go To Law School (Unless) (which I wrote about here: https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/dont-go-to-law-sch...) is one of the more comprehensive examples I've seen, although I'm sure the book mentioned is good too.

The really bizarre thing is that 60K people are still deluded enough to apply.

bunderbunder2• 14 years ago

For a lot of people I know who've gone to law school, I'm not sure it's entirely a delusion. I think the situation is that they find themselves a couple years out of college and still unable to put their BAs in a Humanities field (another area for which supply has greatly outpaced demand) to use. So they're already saddled with a debt they can't really service, and they've already got the B word in their heads. And along comes a really attractive proposition: If you double down on it by going back to school, you catch an immediate break because you get to immediately stop paying your student loans, and wont have to start again until after you've graduated. And sure, after that you'll have even more debt, but there's also a decent (maybe not great, but decent) chance that your new degree will let you land a sweet job that lets you pay them off much more easily and have plenty of money to spare. And even if you only land an OK job, hopefully it'll still be enough to keep your loans covered. . . and if it isn't, hey, no harm no foul. You're already thinking about the B word right now, so even if it turns out you can't handle all the new debt you've taken on it's not like you'll be any worse off than you are now.

Posed that way, I'm not sure what the students are doing is terribly irrational or delusional. What's crazy is the irrational credit system that enables/encourages this kind of thing to happen.

arjunnarayan• 14 years ago

Sidenote: The B word is irrelevant here as you can't bankrupt your way out of student debt. You're stuck with it forever.

But otherwise I find your arguments compelling, and an accurate model of how my humanities friends were thinking when they applied/got into law schools.

djt• 14 years ago

I think in America they passed a law that student loans are not relived once you declare yourself bankrupt though. From memory Bush passed it because so many students were doing it due to crazy debt

mburshteyn2• 14 years ago

Student loans don't discharge in bankruptcy. Also, the odds are not decent of landing a "sweet job that lets you pay [loans] off much more easily and have plenty of money to spare." Take a look at the bimodal distribution for starting lawyer salaries.[1] In 2011, less than 6% of graduates got jobs at large law firms paying $160k.[2] I don't know current attrition rate stats, but generally most of the entry-level class at a large firm is gone within 5-7 years.[3]

It sounds like the people you know may have gotten lucky pursuing a high-risk gamble, whether they knew it or not.

[1] http://insidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2012/10/five-stag...

[2] http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/legalwhiteboard/2012/07/a-p...

[3] http://www.law.com/jsp/llf/PubArticleLLF.jsp?id=119494824709...

geebee• 14 years ago

Thanks for the link, I think there were some good insights here.

I'm a law school dropout myself, having left after the first semester (I got an MS in Engineering instead). To me, the big problem isn't that there are all these law grads, it's that you have to go through three years of law school in order to sit for the bar exam.

While I was only there for a semester, I did pass all my courses and leave in good academic standing. I just didn't want to waste (EDIT: spend) any more time on the subject. In my opinion, it could easily be an undergraduate major, or a shorter master's degree. Unlike grad school in Sci/Eng, where there's no way to take the classes without a specialized background, law really doesn't need to be a grad degree.

For example, my graduate course in Advanced Nonlinear Optimization, were you deal with optimality in equations with multiple variables subject to multiple (nonlinear) constraints, obviously required a certain math background. You need to know calculus, and you need to be able to deal with differential equations, or at least handle first and second order partial derivatives in equations with multiple variables. You also really do need a course in linear algebra, and you probably should have at least a couple of theory courses under your belt, because you are going to need to do some proofs. So, you know, grad degree.

While torts, civil procedure, and contracts do require the ability to read some dense material,make sense of it, and write about it, there's really no "need" for an undergraduate degree in English or History. I'm also highly skeptical that three years of graduate study are at all required. I think that top students are more than capable of mastering this coursework at a far more rapid rate.

The problem to me isn't that lawyers aren't finding jobs, it's that people have to spend far too much time and go far too deeply into debt to get this credential. Feel free to keep the bar exam and make it hard. If it were an undergrad degree, and students could graduate for little or no debt, they'd be able to either 1) work for less, and get legal services to people who actually desperately need them, or 2) do what a lot of people do - go outside your field and find a job. I haven't found a lot of call for writing proofs about convex sets. It's hardly some great tragedy that I instead learned about programming and found gainful employment that way.

mburshteyn2• 14 years ago

Original article on Professor Paul Campos' blog:

http://insidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2012/12/applicati...

Law school applications are collapsing

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