Journalist of the Day: Brad Kane

Today I want to feature two articles from the Hartford (CT) Business Journal, both written by Brad Kane.

First, we have Lawyers' Debt Hits All-Time High:

Today’s law school graduate has more debt than ever before, and is facing a market where getting a job is an extensive, grueling process. First-year lawyers are leaning on clerkships and part-time legal work, forced to abandon — or at least delay — their dream jobs to make their monthly debt payments.
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The large debt is what sets this recession apart from all others, said James Leipold, executive director for the National Association for Law Placement.

That quote isn't completely correct, and I wish he had focused on someone broke and unemployed rather than the cute blonde who landed a job two weeks after the bar exam by "networking," but at least people might start to understand that the law school bubble is different if mainstream journalism keeps repeating these types of articles.

With that need for repetition in mind, Brad is the journalist of the day for publishing a second article on the profession as a whole on the same day, which I haven't seen posted anywhere else:

The message from Connecticut’s attorneys is clear: Unless you love the law, you’ll hate being a lawyer.

That’s the message more lawyers are telling their children.

And that’s a concern for an industry that finds itself in turmoil. The price of admission is up and interest in being a lawyer is down. The passion that once marked the profession is fading in the face of business pressures as law firms race to be the biggest and most comprehensive, judging lawyers’ value on the revenue they generate.

This is obvious to many of us who have already paid the for the boat show ticket, but ordinary people (and businessmen, like the readership of this newspaper) cannot hear it too many times: law is not what's on TV, and it's not what it was even 30 years ago.

And in this article, we get an actual anecdote of failure:

Avon native Daniel Lindenberg graduated in 2009 from Albany Law School in New York. . . .

Over the next 15 months, Lindenberg interviewed for 80 jobs. With $200,000 in deferred law school debt looming, the riches weren’t flowing. He moved back into his parents’ house. Connecticut bar exams, he started his job search.

Over the next 15 months, Lindenberg interviewed for 80 jobs. With $200,000 in deferred law school debt looming, the riches weren’t flowing. He moved back into his parents’ house.

He finally got a full-time job in January. The article talks about cutting costs, disbanding summer programs, and generally how the shift from profession-first to a business-first has fallen disproportionately on new lawyers.

All true, and I wish every newspaper in the country ran a story like this so the masses could see the major problems in the legal field.