Law School Reality Archives - Page 14 of 37

Laws Schools May Actually Start Teaching Students How to Practice Law

Wall Street Journal: Looking to attract employers’ attention, some law schools are throwing out decades of tradition by replacing textbook courses with classes that teach more practical skills…

Average Starting Salaries For Law Grads Drops

ABA Journal: Starting pay is down for 2010 law graduates, and the drop is greatest for law firm jobs.

Median starting pay dropped by nearly 13 percent for all jobs and by 20 percent for law firm positions, according to NALP, which calls itself the association for legal professionals.

Law Job Recession Here to Stay?

ABA Journal: The legal profession is undergoing a massive structural shift—one that will leave it dramatically transformed in the coming years.

There’s no doubt that the financial crisis beginning late in 2007 was for most lawyers a game-changer, prompting drastic measures as firms laid off thousands of associates, de-equitized partners, and slashed budgets and new hires.

‘Scambloggers’ Highlighting Problems with Legal Education

ABA Journal: “Scambloggers,” a term used to describe people whose writing focuses on the allegedly misleading way that law schools market themselves to potential law students, plays an important part in the profession’s evolution, according to a recent article in the Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology.

Lucille Jewel, an associate professor at Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School, writes that scambloggers, who she characterizes in her article as a populist online community calling for reform” raise legitimate questions about the system, and they’ve reached a broad audience, thanks to the Internet.

More New Lawyers Than Jobs

ABA Journal: All but two states and the District of Columbia have an oversupply of lawyers, according to a consulting company’s calculations.

Economic Modeling Specialists Inc. compared the number of people who passed the bar exam in each state in 2009 with the estimated number of lawyer job openings in those states, according to the New York Times Economix blog. The study found that every jurisdiction except for Wisconsin, Nebraska and Washington, D.C., has an oversupply of lawyers.