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Anti-Law School Blogs Multiplying

More and more people are beginning to realize that the high cost of a law degree these days is frequently a very bad investment.  Law is a great field and can be very lucrative for many, but thanks to a combination of two factors (recession and more law school graduates than available law jobs) many recent law school graduates are finding that not only are jobs few and far between, but too often the pay is not great.  Everybody who is considering going to law school should read an informative white paper just produced by the American Bar Association called “Value Proposition of Attending Law School.”  This article begins:

“Choosing to attend law school is a big decision that prospective law students should not take lightly. Although many factors may influence one’s decisions about whether and where to attend law school, a proper understanding of the economic cost of a legal education is vital for making an educated decision. Far too many law students expect that earning a law degree will solve their financial problems for life. In reality, however, attending law school can become a financial burden for law students who fail to consider carefully the financial implications of their decision. . . . most of the rest of the graduates, about 42%, started with an annual salary of less than $65,000.”

Here are some blogs that tell prospective law school students about the reality of law school and legal employment.

  • Big Debt, Small Law – Dirt poor lawyers in a filthy rich town.  “We prefer not be crammed elbow to elbow in document review gulags for less money than an ex-con gets paid to stamp holes in sheet metal. We prefer not to run around toilet courts and haggle over $500 whiplash cases for 45 K a year and no health benefits. Our sole purpose is to dissuade, deter and prevent more hapless lemmings from repeating the mistake of law school. Law has no rewards. Instead of pots of gold, you’ll find only piles of sh*t.”
  • Exposing the Law School Scam – “This blog is written by a coalition of lawyers dedicated to exposing the ‘law school scam.’ In particular, we are interested in exposing the dramatic oversupply of lawyers, and how that oversupply has been caused by bogus employment and income/salary statistics used by most law schools to induce applicants to apply to law school. Also, we are concerned with how the legal establishment is complicit in this ‘law school scam’.”
  • The Jobless Juris Doctor – “A blog to vent about the evils of the legal profession, the law school scam, and being jobless with a JD.”
  • JD Underdog – “Be careful with law school, you might just graduate! – JD Underdog graduated from law school in 2005. He worked the doc review circuit before finally landing a permanent job that he could have gotten with a college degree. His mission is to humor you, but warn you of the dangers of going to law school with the deck so heavily stacked.”
  • Temporary Attorney: The Sweatshop Edition – “Temp Life at Some of America’s Most Notorious Legal Sweatshops.”
  • But I Did Everything Right! – “Everyday is a cloudy day in the life of a disenchanted lawyer.”
  • Esq. Never –  “One law school graduate’s attempt to find a fulfilling career in spite of his legal education.”
  • Waitress, JD – “Random musings of an underemployed law school grad looking for her place in or out of the law and in the world.”
  • Third Tier Reality – “My goal is to inform potential law school students and applicants of the ugly realities of attending law school.  Do not attend unless: (1) you get into a top 8 law school; (2) you get a full-tuition scholarship to attend; (3) you have employment as an attorney secured through a relative or close friend; or (4) you are fully aware beforehand that your huge investment in time, energy, and money does not, in any way, guarantee a job as an attorney or in the legal industry.”
  • Law School Must be Debunked
  • Toiletlaw

Makes me wonder when the class action lawyers will start filing lawsuits against law schools and law professors as co-conspirators.  I believe it is morally wrong for a school to collect $90,000, $120,000 or more in tuition without first giving prospective students adequate warnings about the legal job market, especially the actual experience of the school’s recent grads.  My advice to law schools

[which of course won’t pay any attention to me] to lessen the potential damage is to:

  1. Warn incoming students in writing about the economic realities of incurring big debts.
  2. Compile detailed salary and job information for all recent graduates.  This could be done many different ways.  One way is by the law schools entering into written contracts with all incoming students requiring the students to give annual job and salary information to the law schools and imposing liquidated damages if the students/future graduates fail to supply the information.  Alternatively, the schools should pay money to the graduates each year for at least five years in exchange for job and salary information.
  3. Give every prospective and current student detailed information about jobs and salaries of all people who graduated within the last five years.

Pursuing a Tax LLM Degree: Why and When?

Three tax law professors have co-authored an article called “Pursuing a Tax LLM Degree: Why and When?”  The abstract says:

This Article and a related article, Pursuing a Tax LLM Degree: Where?, provide information and advice about Tax LLM programs to American law students and JD graduates who are thinking about pursuing a Tax LLM degree. This Article (1) discusses the costs and benefits of pursuing a Tax LLM degree, (2) explains the circumstances in which prospective Tax LLM students may be able to expand their (more…)

More On Law School as a Bad Investment

Here are some posts and articles that shed more light on the problem of law schools producing more graduates than available lawyer jobs and the current state of legal education.

Is American legal education economically viable and socially defensible? Can most US law schools expect to go from strength to strength? Or is university legal education, especially on non-elite campuses, more like the American motor industry before the fall? Are institutional complacency and greed liable to kill off a good thing?  Legal education, like higher education generally in the United States, has become sharply more expensive in the past three decades. Tuition can approach or even exceed $40,000 per year; many law students take on substantial loans; and it is common to graduate with debt of $100,000 and more.

While law school tuition has risen at twice the rate of inflation and more in recent decades, senior faculty teach less than ever – three courses a year is the norm at many law schools – and senior faculty salaries have risen far ahead of the inflation rate. . . .Today’s model of legal education – now the norm at most US law schools – might continue to be viable economically at elite law schools. The question is whether it can persist at middle and lesser-ranked law schools, and whether it should. There are apt to be pressures for substantial reform of American legal education in the foreseeable future – whether through legislation, antitrust litigation, or simply by market forces. Depending on the direction that reform might take, the benefits as well as the costs of today’s academic model might be lost. It would not be the first time that monopoly or greed have led to a breakdown and to the development of new and at least in some ways worse institutions.

  • “Shame” by Professor Paul Campos of the University of Colorado Law School whose abstract states:

Here are some observations drawn from nearly seventeen years spent as a legal academic, using a particular device: the depiction of several fictional yet all-too-familiar legal academic characters. With one exception these characters are imaginary – yet their name is legion. The characters are The Drone, The Bully, The Hack, and The Fraud.  What can be done about them – or about us? Answering this question at all satisfactorily requires confronting more than the personal flaws of particular individuals: it necessitates grappling with the structural failures of the contemporary law school. It’s true that some of what is wrong with legal education is no different than what’s wrong with higher education in general. But in legal academia, the especially problematic relationship between the requirements of professional training and of pursuing knowledge create special problems for the integrity of the discipline.  All the “characters” I describe – and the institutional structures that make them possible – pose serious ethical and economic problems for the contemporary law school. They undermine intellectual standards and interfere with professional training. As to solutions, a first step would surely involve legal academics facing up to various uncomfortable truths about the way we live now.

Law Professor Hitler Learns He Has to Teach Classes on Fridays

Are law professors over-paid and under-worked?  The National Jurist published an article called “Law school faculties 40% larger than 10 years ago,” which summarizes the results of a study that found the following astounding facts:

  • “the typical teaching load has dropped from five courses a few generations ago to three courses today”
  • “Professors are spending less time in the classroom”
  • “the number of deans, librarians and other full-time administrators who teach more than tripled”
  • “there are twice as many law professors per student today as there were 30 years ago”

After reading the National Jurist article, you will understand why Law Professor Adolf Hitler became so upset when he learned that he must teach a law school class on Fridays.

Northwestern to Help Foreign Students Take NY Bar Exam so NY Can Have More Unemployed Lawyers

The United States economy is down.  Law schools are producing more law school graduates than available new legal jobs.  Lawyers like most other segments of the American business world are being laid off and experiencing declining revenue.  One backward thinking school has a novel solution to the “we have too many lawyers” problem – produce more lawyers!  Northwestern University School of Law is teaming with the College of Law in England to create a program for the College of Law students to get a masters degree from Northwestern University, which would then make the graduates eligible to take the New York bar exam.  After 22 weeks of study, the College of Law grads will get a J.D. from Northwestern, something that takes traditional Northwestern students three academic years to obtain.  This is more proof that higher education is always about the money at the expense of the students.

Judith W. Wegner, the Burton Craige Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School wrote an article called “More Complicated than We Think: A Response to Rethinking Legal Education in Hard Times: The Recession, Practical Legal Education and the New Job Market.”  The article contains these statements:

“For example, the National Law Journal’s most recent survey of the “NLJ 250” large firms concluded that 13.3 percent of large firm attorneys working in New York City lost their jobs this year [2009]”

“The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics recently reported that, when seasonally adjusted, the number of jobs in legal services fell from 1,157,700 in November 2008 to a projected 1,115,900 for November 2009 (a decline of 9.6 percent over the prior year”

“The American Bar Association reports that for students graduating in 2008, the average debt load for those attending private schools was $91,506, while those attending public law schools on average accumulated $59,324 in debt.”

See “The Year in Law Firm Layoffs – 2009,” which said “2009 will go down as the worst year ever for law-firm layoffs. More people were laid off by more firms than had been reported for all previous years combined.”  See also Above the Law’s “The College of Law — London, Makes Move in U.S. Market.”

Copyright 2009-2015 Richard Keyt
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