I beg to differ.
First, I'd like to hope in the wayback machine and take you to the blog Barely Legal, a pretty decent, honest blog run by two University of Illinois students in 05-07ish and no, despite the title, it's not about teen porn or statutory rape (note: with this sentence, my number of hits just skyrocketed). Anyway, I would like to point out these posts:
June 24, 2006: Don't Believe Us? Think We're Just Cynical?, where they cite a Wall Street Journal article explaining bimodal distribution, including the fact that many JDs never find gainful legal employment.
March 26, 2007: The Plural of Andecdote is Data, where they cite the hard statistics to show that there are 670,000 JDs not working as attorneys, noting "[e]ven the national bar association is telling you to be prepared to do something else with your life."
April 2, 2007: Warning Signs, where they note the high number of law students and graduates who cannot find any type of legal employment, including free internships. "[I]f no one is letting you work for free, read the writing on the wall. Even less people will be willing to pay you to work."
The financial crisis and recession did not being in earnest until mid-to-late 2007 (recession "officially" began in December 2007). Bear Stearns did not happen until March of 2008 and Lehman and the mini-stock market crash did not being until September of that year. Despite the housing bubble issues, most financial pundits were not foreseeing the steep declines as of May 2008, and most employers did not take reactionary action until mid 2008:
As you can see, initial jobless claims in early 2007 were virtually as low as they'd been since 2001. So why were these two students at a top 30 USNWR law school - and a place which my experience tells me places fairly well in Chicago - having all kinds of feedback that law graduates and law students were having a hard time finding private sector work?
Because the recession is not the real culprit, that's why.
Which brings me to today's real topic. The NALP has released some of its numbers for the Class of 2010 at 9 months. Of 41,156 law graduates who reported data, 9.4% were completely unemployed at 9 months. 2.9% decided to go back to school. Only 44.6% of graduates are employed in private practice, which makes one wonder how the schools will manage to skew those salaries up over $100k.
But this data isn't entirely helpful in isolation. Let's assume for the time being that the legal market is more or less dependent on private practice and that government positions, clerkships, and public interest positions are a constant. I composed the following chart culling data from the NALP's "summary of finding" sheets from 2001-present:
| Year | Entry-Level P.P. | Excess |
| 2001 | 17976 | 19711 |
| 2002 | 18246 | 20330 |
| 2003 | 18387 | 20487 |
| 2004 | 18407 | 21611 |
| 2005 | 19458 | 23214 |
| 2006 | 20347 | 23573 |
| 2007 | 20603 | 22915 |
| 2008 | 20511 | 23076 |
| 2009 | 20149 | 23852 |
| 2010 | 18325 | 24997 |
The second column is the total number of entry-level private practice attorney jobs assumed from the numbers. As you can see, the market itself appears to be identical in size to the private practice market that existed in 2002-2004. Demand for private practice entry-level attorneys apparently did grow in the 2000s, but only at around 10% or so.
What really happened is that law schools began pumping out graduates in a far greater excess to what the moderate increase in private practice demanded. The third column in the chart is the difference between private practice positions and the total number of law school graduates. As you can see, that number increased by almost 20% during the stretch between 2001 and 2006.
Since we think of things in percentages when it comes to employment, that excess is what makes the hiring market so awful. Sure, government and public interest hiring has slowed down, but the increased demand for those positions is largely due to private practice just not having the demand for all of them. The system simply cannot absorb an increase of 500 new attorneys every single year compared to what the economy (private sector) naturally demands by its own growth. If you want to know why every major American city has a backlog, start there. Then add in that many of these hired (especially at large firms) are spit back onto the market after 3-5 years independently of any extra-legal economic conditions. Same with doc reviewers.
The grand point here is that the recession is absolutely not the main reason the legal hiring market is dismal right now. The conditions that led to this glut of entry-level attorneys was evident in the 2001-2006 span, when law schools boosted enrollment by roughly 20%.
Heck, let's assume the recession never happened. Guess what? The excess would be still be so high as to make the entry-level market difficult. It became worse between 2001 and 2006. Why would that trend have ceased?
I'm not saying that the recession has nothing to do with the job market. Obviously, if there 21000 entry-level private practice gigs instead of 18000, the market would be better. But that doesn't change the fact that the main culprit is that ABA accredited law schools started churning out an increasingly-higher excess to the needs of private practice year-over-year before the recession even started. That's the real problem.
Already, one can see that the problem of lawyer supply is unique. There are signs that the job market is improving slightly across the board. But I can tell you from the ground level, that's not really the case for the legal sector. There may be moderate numerical improvement, but if there are 50 fish fighting for a single piece of food instead of 53, it's hardly a practical gain. This is just what happens when you regularly draw in far more input than the market can bear on the other side over a long period of time.
Don't forget tort reform.
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