Restoring Dignity to the Law: ABA young lawyers division

Sunday, February 13, 2011

ABA Young Lawyers Division Adopts Tranparency Resolution

The ABA's Young Lawyers Division on Saturday voted to press for greater transparency for would-be lawyers considering law school, giving them a greater understanding of the risks of assuming the sometimes staggering debt required to obtain a J.D.
The division's assembly adopted a multi-point policy resolution, dubbed "Truth in Law School Education," urging law schools to improve post-graduate employment information provided to prospective students and to ensure that information is prominently featured in communications. The division is next expected to bring the resolution, which has had the support of ABA President Stephen N. Zack, to the ABA's policymaking House of Delegates at its annual meeting in August.

To remedy to current problem, the resolution calls for the following changes:

that all ABA approved schools gives full employment information, including distinguishing between law/non-law and temporary/permanent.
that all applicants to law school should have easy access to this data (either sent with enrollment information or "conspicuous notice" of where to find it.
that ABA-approved schools should be more transparent with regard to graduate salaries and costs of attendance.
that these should be integrated into the standards of approval for law schools.

The accompanying report also has some golden information regarding the Class of 2009's salary data (e.g., 69% of the academic jobs that are created by the schools are temporary, the percentage of solo practitioners among recent graduates rose 51% from 2008 to 2009).

Nice work, Jacqueline Epstein and whoever else put hard work into this. Hopefully the full ABA actually takes action on your resolution.

About RDTTL

I am a current law student who dreads the end of the conveyor belt and wishes to see positive change in the legal community.

To me, a dignified profession is one that is respected, one whose members serve as ambassadors for its social value, one that lets its practitioners lead healthy, productive, and active civic lives, and one where the members of the profession take active steps to protect the profession's honor.

It is self-evident that the legal profession has problems on that front (or all of those fronts, if you want to break it down). Lawyers are twice as likely to kill themselves as the average person. They are significantly more likely to become depressed or alcoholic. Along with other factors, an oversupply of labor has led to smaller salaries for most - putting the ability to have families or manage debt at risk - while making attorney work an impossibility for others. Last year roughly 1/3 of recent juris doctor recipients did not have jobs. Legal process outsourcing makes it far less likely that they'll ever get them.

These issues existed before the recession and extend beyond its effects. This blog explores these issues and seeks to provide helpful information and commentary, especially with regards to legal education, the reform of which I believe would aid many the other issues that prevent the law from being a fully-dignified profession.

I have chosen to use pseudonymous speech for roughly the same reasons outlined by zerohedge, even though I don't think the risk of retaliation is that high in my case (of all the professors I've had, I can only think of one who would "retaliate").

If you wish to contact me, please leave a comment. In the interest of simplifying my life, I am cutting my email addresses down, including the one that used to appear here, which has become unmanageable due to spam.